Page 36 - Luca Giordano - Liberation of St Peter

for the peculiarly Christocentric quality that was so clearly
part of that tradition and which he could not find in
Naples.The paintings reflect a phase in the artist’s career
of intelligent learning, supervised (and probably exploited
for commercial reasons) by Giordano’s father. All these
‘neo-Renaissance’ works were painted with the greatest
commitment as is exemplified by the two paintings in the
Prado, the Kiss of Judas and Christ in front of Pilate. Despite
some awkward details such as the figures in the foreground
presented with faulty perspective, they show a superb ob-
servation of portraiture and expression and a really exquisite
sense of colour and finish.These works also demonstrate
a marked evolution from his earlier works - tentative, plain
compositions - indicating that Giordano pursued this
interest for several years. Another indication that these
paintings were intended as serious efforts is the fact that
some of the compositions which had met with obvious
success were replicated with improvements. At an early
age, Giordano had become an expert art historian.
The serious character of Giordano’s earliest activity
has often been overlooked by modern critics who have
been ambivalent and actually negative towards it. Those
works that were not just dismissed as fakes or imitations
were excused as a form of amusement for the artist.16
They have also been chronologically spread over such a
vast period of time that the original intentions of the
16. On Giordano the forger, see W.Valentiner, ‘An Early Forger’, in
Art in America, 1913, vol. 1, pp. 195-208.
17. The most accomplished of these works, like the Baptism of Christ in or modern painting. Documents also indicate that the
Toledo, have been dated as late as 1680.
18. See A. Nagel: Michelangelo as art critic shown by his forgeries, in Dürer (the painting now in Athens) was rejected by the
Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, Princeton UP, 2000, pp. 1ff.
19. ‘A new and different forgery of nostalgia grew up alongside the
classical sort’: A. Grafton, Forgers and Critics. Creativity and
Duplicity inWestern Scholarship, London 1990, p. 32.
20. M. Loh, ‘Original, Reproductions, and a “Particular Taste” for
Pastiche in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Painting’, in N.
De Marchi, H. J.Van Miegroet, Mapping the Market for Painting in
Europe, 1450-1750,Tumhout 2006, pp. 237-262.
34
painter have been misinterpreted, fomenting the belief
that Giordano parodied the style of the old masters all his
life simply to make money.17 It seems therefore that in
order to endow them with any artistic value their date of
execution must be pushed backward by twenty years.
Considering that the painting in Athens, which is among
the most accomplished, is dated 1653, it is a reasonable
supposition that the whole group was produced in the
early years between 1652-1655.
Giordano was certainly not the only artist to imitate
others to the point of falsification. A precedent, known
to all throughVasari, was Michelangelo, whose early works
were as much tainted with the perfume of forgery as
Giordano’s, and showed as much historical knowledge.18
Anthony Grafton stated that a Renaissance inclination to
forgery morphed in the baroque period into a‘forgery of
nostalgia’.19 It is here proposed that imitation and a sense
of affection might also have been valid for Giordano. Art
of the early modern period in any case indicates a new,
fluid understanding of the artistic form. Masters of the
seventeenth century played with styles, copying and elab-
orating freely the works of other masters.As a result, the
border line between originals, variations, replicas and
copies became blurred in the eyes of the artist. It also
became blurred in the eyes of the collectors.The demand
for paintings of this kind seems to have been high. Patrons,
more open to a sense of what was ‘original,’ conditioned
and influenced artists by accepting whatever came from
their hand. A painting was valued for its own intrinsic
beauty, independent of whether it resembled another old
value of such ‘false’ works remained the same after they
had been recognised as ‘false’; Giordano’s imitation of
original owner but bought by a new owner for the same
price. Giordano was never prosecuted. In other known
cases of supposed falsifications brought before a judge the
painter responsible for the ‘falsification’ came out equally
unscathed.20 Many of these works by Giordano fit better