5845 Views |  Like

Luca Giordano classically baroque

by Riccardo Lattuada

LUCA-GIORDANO-CHIAMATA-DI-SAN-PIETRO-E-ANDREA-FIRMA

Luca Giordano
Vocazione dei Santi Pietro e Andrea,
olio su tela, cm 240X379
Stima € 60.000 – 80.000

The image contained within the large canvas unravels against the backdrop of a coast landscape beneath sculpted clouds. On the right, the majestic figure of Christ, authoritatively yet at the same time serenely gesticulating in concentrated pose and with his right hand held out in front of him. He appears relaxed and is waving to two fishermen who are mooring their boats and who seem almost disoriented. The fisherman with his foot already outside the boat (Saint Andrew?) seems incredulous and is holding his hand up to his chest as if to exclaim: “What? Me? Really?”. The other fisherman (Saint Peter?), standing, is all ready to hold Christ in embrace.
The intensity of the empathic relationship between Christ and his two new disciples is augmented by their isolation – not physical, but mental – in comparison to the boatman who is busy bringing the boat to dock and, furthermore, in comparison with the other fishermen to the left in the background.
In the bottom right, behind the figure of Christ, there is an inscription, ‘L. Jordanus / etat sue 55 / 1690’, that need not necessarily be interpreted as a signature but it does precisely refer to both the author of the painting and what would appear to be the date of the painting – 1690 – proving the actual date of birth of the Neapolitan artist to be, give or take a year, October 14th 1634.
The “Calling to the Apostleship of Saints Peter and Andrew” by Luca Giordano is one of the largest compositions by the artist that has ever come onto the market (240 x 379 cm). It’s well-preserved conditions are such that they illustrate clearly that the painting has been in private hands for centuries with an occasional retouching of the work and a natural yellowing of the paintwork, all of which would appear to be wholly reversible and would not hinder our interpretation of the artist’s intentions in all their original clarity. The year 1690 within the inscription is perfectly coherent with a highly stylistic moment in the career of Giordano: the great Neapolitan maestro, two years after his departure for Spain as Royal Painter to King Charles II, came closer still, the great artist that he was, to his very own reinterpretation of those classical styles that were being applied at the same time by the theorists of the French Academy and by the most authoritative painter of the second half of the Seventeenth century in Rome, Carlo Maratti.
The recuperation, or recovery, of the art of Raphael, seen more and more as an insuperable standard of harmony and equilibrium, led to more of a moderate approach to the emotionalism contained within Baroque aesthetics in favour of a more tranquil style of language in which the attention paid to the compositional and chromatic equilibrium of the image was about to produce an exceptional level of formal sophistication. As recorded by Giuseppe Scavizzi, Carlo Maratti himself told Giordano “that he was the only painter of those times, since God had given him a gift to create that had not been given to Raphael”. Even when we choose not to consider the taste for exaggerated appreciation that was the typical language of the Seventeenth century there is little doubt that even during his own life Giordano was perceived as one of the greatest European painters of his time.
It is in the light of these artistic energies, of which as we have said Giordano was one of the main protagonists, that we should interpret the sweet, emotional and highly formal sweetness of the “Calling of Peter and Andrew to the Apostleship” in discussion here. There is an exceptionally controlled pictorial ductus that contradicts – head on – the over-used nickname of “Luca presto fa” or Quick Luca in reference to his proverbial swiftness in completing his work. In this painting, the artist outlines the drapes in Christ’s clothes and produces a work of sublime pictorial virtuosity as witnessed in the fishing net upon which it is supposedly Saint Andrew who rests his right hand. At the same time, the weightless expression of the face of the fisherman believed to be Saint Peter, standing out virtuously against a cloudy sky, brings to mind the desired synthesis of Classicism and Baroque in the Roman works of the latter part of the career of Giovan Battista Gaulli, called Il Baciccio.
If we look at the painting in its entirety we notice how it resembles the far-reaching depths of Raphael’s Cartoons for the tapestries in the Sistine Chapel, now kept at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. However, as if exuding a sort of veiled meaning, our eyes are startingly reminded of the great classics of seventeenthcentury Rome, such as the frescoes by Domenichino in the gallery of Sant’Andrea della Valle in the Eternal City.
Furthermore, the painting was already known on account of the existence of a painting in Pittsburgh at the Frick Art Museum. Due to its reduced dimensions (61 x 75 cm) it might well be considered to have been a model or by Luca Giordano himself as a record of the work under discussion here.
In1690, in the same period to which one might legitimately date the “Calling of Peter and Andrew”, Luca Giordano was 56 years old which for a man in the Seventeenth century, was at such an old age that one would be tempted to consider him upon the threshold of senility. Nevertheless, destiny would grant the Neapolitan maestro a further fifteen years, ten of which spenta at the Court of the King of Spain during which he would crown an already embellished career by producing series after series of pictorial cycles, altarpieces and paintings of every conceivable type and use.
Defined by the eighteenth-century biographer, Bernardo de’ Dominici, as a “prodigy in painting” and, therefore, a genius that was the fruit of a sheer miracle, almost an oddity of nature, in this powerful painting now having come to light at Wannenes, Luca Giordano shows us his freshness of inspiration, his creative energy and his affectionate tenderness shared by the main protagonists of his story in a picture. These are not merely the fruits of his almighty technical skills but also a bright example of the profundity and the sensitivity of the way in which he depicted the figures in his painting as a whole.