Page 18 - Luca Giordano - Liberation of St Peter

Fig. 3. JUSEPE DE RIBERA, The Liberation of St Peter, 1642. Oil on
canvas, 176 x 226 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Dresden.
position is overshadowed by the influence of Massimo
Stanzione, who at this date was painting the Chapel of
St Bruno in San Martino. The picture has something of
the refinement and poetry of Cavallino, whose elegant
gallery paintings are amongst the most original works in
Naples of this decade.The German artist Johann Heinrich
Schœnfeld drew on similar sources; his Liberation of St Peter
(Rome, Galleria Corsini), painted in Naples, echoes
both Caracciolo’s composition and figures, and yet his
sketchy touch, and the frailty of the figures, create a haunt-
ing atmosphere. These highly personal works suggest the
immense variety and conflicting trends present in the city
in the middle years of the century, ranging from robust nat-
uralism to a restrained classicism, and to a more Venetian
painterliness, which became increasingly dominant in the
1650s and 1660s.
9. For the Italian text see G. Galasso, ‘Dall’eruzione alla peste: il next day the procession went to the Porta Capuana,
tempo di Micco Spadaro’, in Micco Spadaro; Napoli ai tempi di
Masaniello, catalogue of the exhibition, Naples 2002, pp. 15-16.
16
From the early 1630s the optimism and confidence of
the early years of the 17th century, so marked in contem-
porary accounts, began to falter, and a series of natural
and political disasters oppressed the city. First, on 16
December 1631, came an eruption ofVesuvius, the most
terrible for a thousand years, which filled all Naples with
fear. A contemporary chronicler, Antonio Bulifon, de-
scribes how, the night before, the ground shook, and on
the next day dense clouds erupted from the volcano’s
summit, and ‘twisting and spiralling’, they ‘reached to such
heights that the eye could no longer percive them.They then
spread and scattered little by little over the city in such a way
that it turned that day, serene as it was, into the densest night’.
The following eruption destroyed the surrounding coun-
tryside; the people rushed to high places, to see‘the hor-
rid spectacle of elemental fury’. Cardinal Buoncompagno
ordered a procession from the cathedral to the church
of the Carmine, with the aid of the Viceroy and a caval-
cade of horsemen, bringing the relics of St Januarius,
patron saint of Naples.This had little effect, but on the
where the lava, threatening to engulf the city, halted as
the Cardinal ‘three times made the sign of the cross towards
that horrendous earthquake’. So great a miracle was to be
celebrated yearly.9
lll
T he next decade was one of oppression and hunger,
for the demands of the Spanish king for money, men
and arms to fight the wars of Spain escalated, and the
people were increasingly weighed down by a heavy bur-
den of taxation which began to fall even on such neces-
sities of life as fruit. In July 1647 the Neapolitans, led by
the youthful fisherman Masaniello, rose in arms against
the Spanish government.There followed Masaniello’s ten
days’ career, a meteoric rise to the heights of being made
Capitano Generale of the people, praised by the Tuscan
representative in Naples for his ‘great soul, spirit and wis-
dom’ followed by his dizzyingly rapid descent into oblo-