Page 40 - Luca Giordano - Liberation of St Peter

occasions, such as The Liberation of St Peter, he preferred
to tackle a classic composition head on and re-do it anew.

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THE LIBERATION OF ST. PETER Fig. 2. RAPHAEL, The Liberation of St. Peter, Vatican, Stanza di
Eliodoro.
I t was at the time of this crossroad of influences that
Giordano painted The Liberation of St. Peter. St. Peter’s on the ground. These two paintings are similar to yet
liberation from jail was not a common baroque theme. It another Giordano composition, now in a private collec-
is not, for example, included among the Barockthemen listed tion,25 which may be dated later than our painting (see
by Andreas Pigler24 nor is it quoted by Émile Mâle in his p.24). All of these works differ from ours on account of
monumental work on religious art after the Council of their simplicity having only the two figures of the angel
Trent. In Naples there was the painting by Battistello and the saint.26 But Raphael’s Liberation of St. Peter [Fig. 2]
Caracciolo at the Pio Monte (see p.14), done in an ortho- in the Stanza d’Eliodoro in theVatican constitutes a classic
dox Caravaggesque style, with a simple view of a dark prototype and must have made a great impression on the
interior and six figures.The standing figures of St. Peter young painter from Naples when he studied it in the early
and the angel exit towards the left. But Giordano it seems 1650s. That the present composition was created with
was not interested in this painting.There are at least two Raphael’s version in mind is clear. Unlike previous examples
paintings with the same subject by Ribera (now at the it is in the‘Grand Manner’, as large in size as a fresco, with
Prado and Dresden, respectively - see p.16) which Giordano a complete view of the prison. The monumentality and
may or may not have known. They have simple compos- symmetry of the composition are similar to Raphael’s
ition showing an angel liberating Peter who is still reclining fresco as are the idealized nobility of the main figures and
the gleaming rendering of the soldiers’ armor (see p.39).
24. A. Pigler, Barockthemen: eine Auswahl vonVerzeichnissen zur The painting was intended to be a meditation on Raphael
Ikonographie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, 1974. at his most complete. It is Roman in concept yet Venetian
in style and colour at the same time.
25. The painting was exhibited in Luca Giordano 1634-1705, quoted
above, n. 55, and later included in O. Ferrari, G. Scavizzi, Luca Not much has been said in the past about Giordano and
Giordano. Nuove ricerche e inediti, Naples 2003, n. A083, dated Raphael, but Raphael was in Giordano’s thoughts from
1660-1663. his earliest days in Rome.There are the early copies from
the Stanze, produced on one of his many trips to Rome,
26. The entry in the Sotheby’s sale catalogue December 8th 2010 lot
32 points to similarities between the figures of the soldiers in the
Liberation of St Peter and similar figures in two other compositions,
also by Giordano, with the Resurrection of Christ (a painting in the
church of S. Maria del Buonconsiglio in Naples datable 1665 and a
drawing in the Hessishes Landesmuseum in Darmstadt).This only
confirms the fact that, due to the enormous production of
religious paintings, Giordano often used similar ideas in works of
related subjects, and of different dates. Sotheby’s proposed that
the Darmstadt drawing dated by Ferrari to 1677 should be dated
to the 1660s but this is an error.

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