One painting by an Italian follower of Bamboccio seems to gather together several issues that recur within the practice of painting from life in Italy. Perhaps the best known bambocciata of all, Michelangelo Cerquozzi's The Revolt of Masaniello represented from life the infamous uprising of the poor in the city of Naples during 1647 (Fig. 82). It has been called the first painting of contemporary history, as if it anticipated The Death of Wolfe or The Raft of the Medusa. To its contemporaries, its significance lay elsewhere, in the premise that it had the peculiar authority of images depicted dal vivo, ad vivum, made in the closest proximity to its models.

Whether or not it was actually depicted on site, the painting's composition was certainly also modelled on Callot's famous print The Fair at Impruneta, discussed in Chapter 2 (Fig. 29). Unlike Callot's peaceful image combining a secular fair with a religious procession, Cerquozzi's painting shows a market that is veering from commerce into violence. The fisherman-revolutionary, red-capped Masaniello, has mounted a donkey at the bottom center of the composition, and surges toward the people's foes, the Spanish tax collectors in the left corner, who are coming under attack from bystanders.