Page 48 - Luca Giordano - Liberation of St Peter

Did Giordano exhibit some hubris in re-working a
Raphael? By present standards it would appear so but the
values of the seventeenth century were different from
ours’. Carlo Maratta said of Giordano ‘he was the only
Painter of his time, because God had given him a gift for
creating, such as He had not given to Raphael’.40 Maratta
did not hesitate to compare Giordano to Raphael, the
Renaissance master he most admired.
The date of The Liberation must be the same as that of
St. Michael, that is shortly after 1660.41 In the series of
drawings and paintings leading up to The Liberation (first
the copies, then the fakes/pastiches, then the mature
works indicating emulation) we can see a logical sequence.
Giordano’s rapport with the work of Raphael was sustained
throughout his life. Even if he was focused on baroque
visions, Giordano always bore in mind Raphael, as we can
see in a variety of works inspired by him, among them the
late Holy Family in the Museo del Prado Madrid, [Inv.
P169], executed c. 1697, a few years prior to his death.
40. Maratta said “che lui solo era il Pittore di quei tempi, perciocchè
Iddio l’aveva dato un dono di creare, che non avea dato a
Raffaello...” De Dominici, Vite, quoted above, p. 427.
41. The St Michael was dated 1662-1663 by E. Schleier, Painting in Naples
1606-1705. From Caravaggio to Giordano, catalogue of the exhibition,
London-Washington 1982-1983, n. 67, pp. 195ff; same date inW.
Prohaska in Luca Giordano 2001, quoted above, n. 35, pp. 146f.
42. Naples ‘differed from centers like Genoa and Rome in not
adhering so closely to the ideal of the nobility of painting;’ there
painters did not require mediators in order to sell paintings: C.R.
Marshall, ‘Senza il minimo scrupolo. Artists and Dealers in
Seventeenth-Century Naples’, in Journal of the History of Collections
12, 1 (2000), p. 15.
43. InVenice the increase in interest in opera led to the multiplication of sented, but new petits maîtres from the northern Europe
theaters, and forced composers to produce rapidly works that could
please the public, with little concern for ‘originality’; the public
wanted to be pleased and had relatively little regard for the names of
the composers: E. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth CenturyVenice.The
Creation of a Genre, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1991, passim.
44. G. Labrot, Collections of Paintings in Naples 1600-1780, Munich
1992, pp. 31ff.
46
POSTSCRIPT
Aconfluence of circumstances made Giordano unique
within the Neapolitan school and within the general
seventeenth century panorama. His education, which was
unstructured and dominated by a greedy, art dealing father
who probably exploited his ability to imitate the style of
others in order to make money must have been a formu-
lating factor in his early years. In Naples, painters were
often directly involved in the market.42 This may have
favored a lax attitude towards ‘copying’ or manipulating
originals. In addition, Giordano started out in Rome selling
copies of paintings and frescoes by other artists to for-
eigners. A changing world of patronage had expanded
from patrons, who were rulers and princes, or at least
aristocratic nobility, to a wider merchant class.This pub-
lic itself changed the role of the artist and Giordano met
the challenge with his ability to provide a vast output. A
certain degree of commercialization of the‘product’ was
affecting the arts in general. A significant indicator of
what was happening and how the public conditioned the
market can be seen in the production of operas in Venice
in the 1650s, the same period when Giordano started
painting.43 Just asVenetian theatres demanded an endless
supply of new operas of a certain kind,Venetian collect-
ors did not hesitate to demand from Giordano paintings
‘in the style of Ribera’. In seventeenth-century Naples’
new palaces were filled with vast numbers of paintings,
the majority of which were copies, derivations or re-elab-
orations of other works.44This did not necessarily debase
the art of painting however but it actually offered the
artist a greater range to exploit and allowed him to explore
and show his intelligence when copying.
The time span in which Giordano operated was impor-
tant in other ways. He spent much of the 1650s in Rome
where not only were all the major artistic trends repre-
had arrived, subverting the established schools. It would
have been easy for a young and very impressionable artist