Luca Giordano

The first part of Luca Giordano’s life¹ can be reconstructed thanks to a short autobiographical document entitled Relatione della vita di Luca Giordano pittore celebre fatta sotto li 13 agosto 1681 now in the la Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence² but owned at the time by Filippo Baldinucci. Baldinucci fleshed it out with another essay by his own hand entitled Notizia del S. Luca Giordano a 17 marzo 1681 (in the Florentine calendar, or 17 March 1682 in the modern calendar), but it fell to his son Francesco Saverio Baldinucci to draft the first proper biography of Luca Giordano, some time between 1713 and 1721³, using both those documents and others supplied to him by Bernardo De Dominici.

Giordano was born in Naples on 14 October 1634 to Antonio, a painter, and Isabella Imparato. He was christened in the parish church of Sant’Anna di Palazzo with the name Agostino Francesco, to which the name Luca was added as his first name in the final part of his baptismal certificate.

He initially trained under his father, who sent him “to draw the rarest works in the Churches and Galleries of Naples” and took him with him to Rome “to have him study the old masters, and works by men of distinction”. According to Baldinucci, who tells the story in his Life of Ciro Ferri, it was in the course of this trip that Luca earned his famous nickname “Fa’ presto” (“Make haste”). Apparently, while drawing Giulio Romano’s Battle of Constantine in the Vatican, he was constantly egged on by his father with the words “Luca, make haste!”, followed by stern punishment and blows in the presence of Ferri himself. Whatever the truth of the matter, the nickname stuck on account of the astonishing speed at which Luca painted.

This (otherwise unrecorded) trip to Rome is confirmed not only by the words of the painter himself but also by the numerous drawings that the still very young Luca was to produce on the basis of what he had seen and studied in the papal capital.

According to De Dominici, Antonio subsequently involved his son in a project on which he was working by allowing him to complete two putti in Santa Maria la Nova which, though naturally of modest quality, are still in situ today.

Giordano’s earliest dated work includes a number of engravings in the style of Dürer – which we may consider to be exercises and tests of his expertise rather than the “counterfeits” which De Dominici seems to hint they were – while in 1654 he painted his first pictures for the tribune of San Pietro ad Aram, and in 1655 he frescoed the chapel of San Giacomo della Marca in Santa Maria la Nova (the frescoes have survived, albeit in poor condition), and painted St. Nicholas of Bari Saves the Young Cupbearer in Santa Brigida, for which the preparatory bozzetto has also survived.

In his younger years, Giordano also turned his hand to other engravings, producing for instance Christ and the Adulteress or Christ Disputing with the Doctors. In these engravings, as in his paintings for San Pietro ad Aram, we can clearly detect Ribera’s influence on the young artist combined with neo-Venetian influence, mediated by the Neapolitan works of Mattia Preti, yet already perfectly up to date thanks to his clear familiarity with Pietro da Cortona’s vaulted ceiling in Palazzo Barberini, which he had seen in the course of his second trip to Rome c. 1654. A third journey to Rome is documented in 1656, possibly to escape the plague raging in Naples that year.

Giordano’s subscription to Ribera’s style is particularly clear in the numerous images of Philosophers and martyrdom scenes that he produced before the end of the 1650s, but we encounter a fully-fledged tribute to Ribera in the Fondazione Gaudium Magnum’s Apollo and Marsyas, in the version now in the Museo Bardini in Florence and in the Capodimonte version, which explicitly echo the prototype painted by Ribera in 1637 (also in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte).

Still fully imbued with Ribera’s influence are the first paintings that Giordano sent to Venice between 1662 and 1664, clearly in response to the taste of his patrons, who were fond of the “gloomy” style of such artists as Langetti and Loth, and a St. Michael the Archangel now in the Staatlich Museum in Berlin, a variation on a well-known prototype by Guido Reni in Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome.

Giordano married Angela Margherita Dardi in 1658. The couple were to have at least ten children.

His earliest commissions from the Viceroy García de Avellaneda, Count of Castrillo, date back to 1657, testifying to the success he had achieved in Naples at that date.

Giordano’s connection with the Viceroy’s circle paved the way for numerous Spanish commissions, including in particular those for Sebastiano López Hierro de Castro, Marquis of Colforte and President of the Royal Chamber, general agent for the Duke of Medina and a go-between, together with his son Antonio, for payments to the artist on behalf of Don Sebastiano Cortizzo and for the Marquis Agostino Fonseca. In addition to commissioning a number of paintings from Giordano between 1662 and 1664, Fonseca also hosted him in Venice, where he was living in 1665. Giordano was absent from Naples in that year, breaking off his decoration of the old sacristy in the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro. As mentioned above, the paintings he produced in Venice are deeply marked by Ribera (see, for instance, the Deposition from the Cross now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, but originally in Santa Maria del Pianto), even though in the city he could study firsthand the work of Tintoretto, Veronese and Titian, an experience that was to prove crucial in the development of his style.

Giordano may have returned from Venice on account of a major commission for the Monastery of El Escorial and to produce numerous paintings ordered by Philip IV, via Sebastiano Cortizzo, which he was to paint “in imitation of Titian and Tintoretto”. Nevertheless, he still maintained close contact with Venice: by July 1665 he was back in Naples, but he was working on an Assumption of the Virgin for the Venetian church of Santa Maria della Salute (signed and dated 1667), originally commissioned from Il Volterrano but cancelled on account of the latter’s unjustified delay. A number of paintings that Giordano sent to Padua, in 1675, and to Verona also testify to his strong ongoing bond with the Veneto.

In 1668, Giordano resumed his work on the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro, which he had broken off when he left for Venice, and his firstborn son, Lorenzo, was born in 1669.

From that moment onwards, his Neapolitan commissions poured in in an endless stream, for example his decorations in the Chapel of St. Francis Xavier in the church of the Gesù Nuovo, in the Cathedral, in Santa Brigida (1678) and in San Gregorio Armeno (1679), while in April 1677 he embarked on the decoration of the vaulted ceiling in the abbey church of Montecassino, which he completed within the year but which was sadly destroyed during World War II.

Giordano’s move to Florence in the late 1660s was a result of his popularity with his Florentine patrons. From February to August 1682 he decorated the Corsini Chapel, dedicated by Marquis Neri and Marquis Bartolomeo Corsini to their ancestor Andrea Corsini, who had been canonised in 1629. The dome, which was not unveiled until 1683, was a major novelty on the Florentine art scene and contributed to Giordano’s lasting triumph in the city. It was followed by an important commission from Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici for a large canvas for the ceiling of the church of the Madonna della Pace, where, for the first time, the painter introduced a depiction of perspective typical of Roman Baroque decoration, the like of which had only been seen in Florence before then in the work of Pietro da Cortona in Palazzo Pitti. Giordano also painted a large canvas for Cosimo III depicting an Allegory of the Peace between Florence and Fiesole for the vaulted ceiling of the apartment inhabited by the Grand Duke’s son Ferdinando in Palazzo Pitti.

These Medici commissions paved the way for the most important decorative scheme that Giordano was to paint in Florence, involving the fresco decoration of the ceiling in the gallery of the palazzo owned by Cosimo III’s minister, the Marquis Francesco Riccardi. The scheme’s iconography was devised, in all likelihood, by the grand ducal librarian Alessandro Segni, a member of the Accademia della Crusca and the Marquis’s tutor. Giordano submitted a number of preliminary sketches to his patron and is likely to have embarked on the decoration in September 1682. Work, however, was suspended in December of that year, because Giordano was called back to Naples on account of his father Antonio’s health. Antonio eventually died in November 1683, but it was not until April 1685, in the wake of ceaseless pressure from the Marquis, that he was able to resume decorating the ceiling, completing the work by the end of the year. During the break in his time in Florence, he not only continued to work in San Gregorio degli Armeni but also painted the large Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple on the inner façade of the Girolamini church. Before returning to Florence, he spent a short time in Rome, where he painted an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Anne in the church of Santa Maria in Campitelli.

By mid-1686 Giordano was once again in Naples, but he certainly did not break off his ties with Cosimo III. On 26 December 1687 Cosimo commissioned two paintings from him for the church of Santi Quirico e Lucia in the Villa dell’Ambrogiana in Montelupo Fiorentino, an Immaculate Conception now in Palazzo Pitti and St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata.

In the six years between his return to Naples from Florence and his departure for Spain in 1692, Giordano engaged in frenzied activity in his native city, thanks also to his characteristic speed of execution. On 22 April 1692 he set out for Spain and the court of Charles II, accompanied by his son Nicolò, his nephew Giuseppe, three assistants (Aniello Rossi, Matteo Pacelli and Giovan Battista Sottile), a servant and a confessor. His summons to Spain perfectly reflects the traditional custom of using Italian artists to decorate royal residences in the Iberian peninsula, and the involvement of Europe’s greatest painter (in the view of one of his Neapolitan compatriots) in the reconstruction and redecoration of the Monastery of El Escorial, which had been destroyed by fire in 1671, fell precisely in the furrow of that tradition – something of a Hobson’s choice.

Giordano arrived in Madrid on 3 July but only travelled to El Escorial on 1 September, after perfecting the decorative scheme for the vaulted ceiling over the Escalera, the monastery’s monumental staircase. He had completed the work by April 1693. At the same time, he began to devise the decoration for the vaulted ceiling in the church, starting to paint in October after the King had approved his sketches. He finished the church ceiling some time between June and July 1694.

While in Spain, however, Giordano did not engage exclusively in painting frescoes, he also painted two altarpieces, one for the Commendadoras de Santiago in Madrid, in 1695, and the other for the old church of El Escorial, depicting the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, dated 1696. In those same years, he also produced a series of paintings on the Life of the Virgin (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna) and a number of canvases on the same subject for the Real Convento de San Jeronimo in Guadalupe.

Giordano certainly did not turn his back on the work of his greatest Spanish contemporaries. such as Murillo or Coello, but he forged a special bond with Velázquez, as we can see in his famous revisitation of Las Meninas with portraits of his own family members. The picture now hangs in the National Gallery in London and is still displayed under the evocative name of A Homage to Velázquez.

Charles II once again turned to Giordano for the decoration of his other royal palaces, including the Palacio de Aranjuez and the Casón, one of the most important palaces in the Buen Retiro in that it had been chosen by Charles II to receive foreign envoys. Giordano frescoed the palace’s vaulted ceiling with a large Allegory of the Monarchy, one of the most prestigious commissions he was to receive throughout his time in Spain.

In 1698 he received another major commission, to decorate the vaulted ceiling of the sacristy in Toledo Cathedral, while in November of that year he embarked on the decoration of the church of Sant’Antonio de los Portogueses (or de los Alemanes) in Madrid, his last great public undertaking in Spain.

Charles II died on 1 November 1700 and was succeeded on the throne by Philip V. Philip’s relations with Giordano lasted only a short while because the now ageing painter decided that it was time he returned to Naples. He left Madrid on 8 February 1702, but his ties with the Spanish court were not broken off completely, because Philip V commissioned him, even though he was now back in Naples, to paint the Stories from the Life of Solomon that now hang in the royal palaces of Madrid and Aranjuez. Unfinished at his death, they may have been completed by Francesco Solimena.

Giordano’s final years were not marked by a drop in his output by any means. One of the most impressive of the large-scale undertakings on which he embarked in Naples, often with the help of assistants, is a huge Triumph of Judith in the Chapel of the New Treasury in the church of San Martino, commissioned on 7 April 1703 and completed, and presented to the public, the following year.

Giordano wrote his will on 31 December 1704 and died on 3 January 1705. His funeral was a sumptuous affair, testifying to the status he had achieved. The day after his death, a catafalque was set up in Santa Brigida, where he was buried, and, as De Dominici tells us, “there was not a single person who did not hasten to see him, with much talk on all sides about his fine pictures and about the honour that he had brought to his Country through them”.