Page 34 - Luca Giordano - Liberation of St Peter

Devotion in the city was imbued with the spirit of the
Counter-reformation yet with a Neapolitan twist, re-
ferred to as devozionalismo. Practices focused on the cult
of the Virgin and saints, among them the patron saints of
the city whose number increased exponentially from three
to fifteen in 1657. Devotion was often‘corporate’ in char-
acter as each order promoted its own saints, hierarchy and
religious practices.A cult of miraculous crosses and images
favored superstition and the basically rogatory quality of
devotion brought about a great belief in miracles; one
popular saint, St Ciro of Alexandria6, was believed to have
performed 11,000 miracles in forty years.7 Ceremonies
were pompous and sermons (which still followed the
Marinist tradition) were highly emotional.8The church of
the time has been justly considered a significant obstacle
to the development of a secular culture in Naples.
From his early days Giordano was very religious and
he travelled with a personal confessor in later life. His
early production was entirely religious in nature. His
rapport with the local church authorities was extremely
solid. In 1654 at the age of only twenty, he received his
first commission for the two large altarpieces depicting
St Peter and St. Paul in the Basilica S. Pietro ad Aram. On
6. Saint Ciro of Alexandria c. 250-303 was a doctor who healed for
free and patron saint of Sicily.
7. R. De Maio, Pittura e Controriforma a Napoli, Bari 1983, p. 217.
8. R. De Maio, Società, 1971, quoted above, pp. 50ff. By marinist De
Maio refers to a type of preaching which used rhethorical devices,
exaggeration and concetti which followed the tradition of
Giambattista Marino, the Neapolitan poet.
9. These canvasses are now in Capodimonte, Naples.
10. Id., R. de Maio, 1983, p. 189.
11. The Relatione della vita di Luca Giordano, pittore, celebre fatta sotto li of 168111 the earliest reliable (although very short)
13 agosto 1681, Ms. in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence,
published by C. Ceci in Napoli Nobilissima VIII (1899), pp. 166-
68, and again by G. De Vito, ‘Il viaggio di lavoro di Luca Giordano
a Venezia e alcune considerzioni sulla scelta riberesca’, in Ricerche
sul ‘600 napoletano, 1991, pp. 121f.The Relatione was reputedly
found among Giordano’s own papers.
32
his departure for Venice ten years later he had completed
no less than fifty large paintings, plus several fresco
decorations for local churches and other religious insti-
tutions. The dominant dogma in Naples is reflected in
Giordano’s Neapolitan altarpieces of the 1650s and early
1660s, whose compositions, such as those painted for
S. Nicola a Nido and S. Agostino degli Scalzi in 1658, or
the two canvases for S. Maria del Pianto in 1662 were
devised to emotionally excite the viewer.9 Giordano’s
paintings of these decades depicted visions and imagery
of ecstatic rapture which in the words of the church
historian Romeo De Maio, occasionally bordered on
parody.10 But Giordano was very sensitive to his public
and he soon developed more than one style when painting
religious subjects. In 1664 he painted both conventional
altarpieces for Naples and religious paintings for Venice
that reflected a more introspective form of piety and
whose imagery was steeped in theological learning.
lll
GIORDANO’S EARLY WORK
W hen Giordano painted The Liberation of St. Peter in
the early 1660s he was still a young man. Not yet
thirty years old he had already established an extensive
oeuvre as a painter.We have recently started re-incorpor-
ating many paintings of a decidedly lesser caliber into the
catalogue of works that are accepted as being by his hand.
These include paintings going as far back as 1650, or even
earlier, which had previously been rejected and expunged
from his opus because they did not conform with our idea
of his development as a painter.These latter works show
that he was probably active as an artist from the late
1640s, when he was still in his teens. The Relatione della
vita di Luca Giordano [Account of the Life of Luca Giordano]
biography of the painter, states that he had been a child-
prodigy and that from a very early age he handled colours
and brushes the way other children play with toys. The