Most paintings this famous eventually leave the building they were made for, sold, seized, or donated into a museum collection somewhere far from their original commissioners. The Seven Works of Mercy never has. Pio Monte della Misericordia, the confraternity of seven young Neapolitan noblemen who founded the charity in 1601 and commissioned Caravaggio six years later, still occupies the same church, still functions as a working charitable institution, and the painting still hangs exactly where it was installed as the altarpiece in January 1607.
That continuity is unusual enough to be worth noting on its own, but it also changes how the painting is meant to be seen. It is best viewed, by the institution's own account, from the coretto, a small choir loft on the upper floor, the vantage point from which the confraternity's own members would have looked down on it during their meetings and devotions, rather than from the ground level view most visitors default to. Seeing it from where it was built to be seen reorganizes the composition, drawing the eye differently through its crowded, overlapping figures.
More than four centuries after the commission, Pio Monte della Misericordia continues both halves of its original mission at once: preserving the painting that depicts its founding purpose, and continuing to carry out the actual charitable works the painting shows, feeding, sheltering and visiting the people of Naples who need it, a living organization still measuring itself against the picture on its own wall.