Page 17 - Luca Giordano - Liberation of St Peter

Neapolitan painters responded to these desolate and
tragic works, and, for the church of the Pio Monte della
Misericordia, to hang opposite the SevenWorks of Mercy,
Caracciolo painted a Liberation of St Peter (Fig. 2) to illus-
trate one of the charitable works of the confraternity, vis-
iting the imprisoned. He chose a centralised composition,
with St Peter creating a strong vertical axis, and tightly
and symmetrically encircled by soldiers and a monumental
naked prisoner in the foreground. Caracciolo stressed the
human story; he painted an intensely dramatic moment,
as Peter, his expression fearful, his gesture defensive and
wary, slips past the guards. The angel plays a secondary
role, with wings hardly visible in the shadows, and the
light muted, its supernatural radiance blending with the
shaft of light that falls from outside. Caracciolo’s St Peter
perhaps owed something to Caravaggio’s Christ, who
‘resembled a guilty man escaping from his guards’. He often
portrayed themes of salvation or angelic intervention,
but his art is black and tragic, and entirely lacks any sense
of triumph; in a haunting image of Tobias and the Angel Tobias, position that is closely related, yet less subtle in gesture and
a naked and frail youth, crouches in darkness and terror
before the angel.5
lll
T he Liberation of St Peter offered artists an opportun-
ity to display bold contrasts of light and dark, and to
portray intense human emotion, and it remained popu-
lar with Caravaggesque painters. By the end of the 1620s
the Spanish artist Giusepe de Ribera dominated Neapolit-
an art, and his works, often violent in theme, suggest the
harsh realities of the city; in his Martyrdom of St
Bartholomew (1634;Washington, National Gallery of Art),
the figures are bound tautly together, and confront ter-
ror almost impassively, ‘united by everyday miseries and
grief’.6 Nicola Spinosa has suggested that this harsh
gloom, so different from the celebratory note of Roman
baroque painting, is rooted in a type of Neapolitan religi-
osity, favoured by the Alcatrines and the Theresians,
which ‘dwelt on, and even exalted, the pain and suffering of
human existence’.7 Ribera painted the Liberation of St Peter
(1639; Madrid, Prado) as a powerful image of man alone
in the prison of this world. His St Peter is old and frail,
brought low and stretched out on the earth, utterly des-
erted, in the dark shades of prison.8 He has been sleeping
on the night before his execution; Ribera does not show
the soldiers, but he does show a moment of high drama,
as the angel tells Peter to rise, and the chains miraculously
fall from his hands. His portrayal of the apostle, ungainly,
startled, unsure whether this is vision or reality, and
about to clamber to his feet is extraordinarily moving;
the severe block like forms and broad areas of strong
colours, are set against the flickering and insubstantial
beauty of the angel, whose robes have a painterly rich-
ness that Ribera had begun to introduce into his art in the
1630s. From Caravaggio comes the fall of light from the
window on the left, so often used to suggest the presence
of the divine, and the sudden call to God.A little later, in
1642, Ribera painted a second version of the theme, a com-
expression (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlung. Fig. 3)
Francesco Guarini had painted a harsh and pared down
Riberesque Liberation of St Peter for the Collegiata of Solofra
in the 1630s.
There followed, probably in the early 1640s, Antonio
de Bellis’ rendering of the scene (Formerly Clovis & Lit-
field Gallery, London. Fig. 4); here Caracciolo’s com-
5. Reproduced in Painting in Naples 1606-1705: From Caravaggio to
Luca Giordano, catalogue of the exhibition, London-Washington
1982, p. 71.
6. N. Spinosa in Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), catalogue of the
exhibition, NewYork 1992, p. 105.
7. N. Spinosa, ‘Baroque and Classical Tendencies in Neapolitan
Painting 1650-1700’ in Painting in Naples 1606-1705; From
Caravaggio to Giordano, catalogue of the exhibition, London -
Washington 1982-3, p. 50.
8. Illustrated in A. E. Perez Sanchez and N. Spinosa, L’Opera Completa
del Ribera, Milan 1978, n. 151, colour plate XLV.
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