LUCA GIORDANO
(Naples, 1634-1705)

Allegory of Human Progress
(The Triumph of Bacchus and the Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite)

Oil on canvas
47 ¾ x 74 ¾ inches (121.5 x 190 cm)

Provenance:

Marchese Francesco Riccardi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence; by descent in the Riccardi family at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, the palace sold in 1814; then with the Riccardi family until after 1822

(Probably) Collection of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Staffordshire, Ingestre Hall and Alton Towers

Private Collection, England

With Wildenstein & Company, New York, 1984

Frederick W. Field Collection, Beverly Hills, California, 1984–2003

Private Collection, USA, 2003–2024.

Exhibited:      

Santissima Annunziata, Florence, 18 October 1705, lent by Marchese Cosimo Riccardi (see Nota de’Quadri che son esposti per la Festa di S. Luca degli Accademici del Disegno l’anno 1705, Florence, 1705).

“From Sacred to Sensual: Italian Paintings, 1400–1750,” Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, 20 January – 14 March 1998.

“Luca Giordano: Maestro barocco a Firenze,” Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence, 30 March – 5 September 2023.

Engraved:      

Giovanni Paolo Lasinio, 1822 (in Riccardi Vernaccia, cited below)

Literature:      

Francesco Saverio Baldinucci, “Vita di Luca Giordano Pittore Napoletano,” (Ms. Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, c. 153v., ca. 1710–1721); published by Oreste Ferrari, “Una vita inedita di Luca Giordano,” Napoli nobilissima, vol. 4 (1966), p. 130.

Francesco Riccardi Vernaccia, Galleria Riccardiana dipinta da Luca Giordano...incisa da Lasinio figlio, Florence, 1822, pp. 17-20 and pl. IV.

Tony Ellis, Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Painting, exh. cat., 1 June – 12 August, Durham, 1962, under cat. no. 55, unpaginated (as lost).

Oreste Ferrari and Giuseppe Scavizzi, Luca Giordano, Naples, 1966, vol. 1, p. 100, and vol. 2, p. 113 (as lost).

Paintings by Old Masters, ext. cat., Colnaghi, London, 1968, under cat. no. 2 (as lost).

W. H. Wilson, “An Unpublished Giordano Bozzetto,” Fogg Art Museum Acquisitions 1966–1967, 1968, pp. 28, 30, 32, and 34 (as lost), fig. 4 (Lasinio’s engraving).

Frank Büttner, Die Galleria Riccardiana in Florenz, Frankfurt, 1972, pp. 43-44, 76, 194 note 16, 239-240, and 270 (as lost), fig. 31 (Lasinio’s engraving).

Silvia Meloni Trkulja, “Luca Giordano a Firenze,” Paragone, vol. 23, no. 267 (May 1972), pp. 38-40, 53, note 62.

Marco Chiarini, in The Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence 1670–1743, ed. Susan Rossen, exh. cat., Detroit and Florence, 1974, pp. 261, 264 (as lost).

Fabia Borroni Salvadori, “L’esposizione del 1705 a Firenze,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, vol. 19, no. 3 (1975), pp. 393, 397.

Ronald Millen, “Luca Giordano in Palazzo Riccardi; II: The Oil Sketches,” in Kunst der Barock in der Toskana, Munich, 1976, pp. 297, 303.

Silvia Meloni Trkulja, “I due primi cataloghi di mostre fiorentine,” in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Ugo Procacci, ed. Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto and Paolo Dal Poggetto, Milan, 1977, vol. 2, pp. 579, 582.

Oreste Ferrari, in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, exh. cat., Naples, 1984–1985, vol. 1, pp. 318-319.

Oreste Ferrari, Bozzetti italiani dal Manierismo al Barocco, Naples, 1990, pp. 157, 163, illustrated.

Frank Büttner, “‘All’usanza moderna ridotta’: gli interventi dei Riccardi,” in Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed. Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli, Florence, 1990, p. 160 note 86.

Oreste Ferrari and Giuseppe Scavizzi, Luca Giordano: L’Opera Completa, Naples, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 87, 315, cat. no. A387l, vol. 2, fig. 509.

Gabriele Finaldi in Discovering the Italian Baroque: The Denis Mahon Collection, exh. cat., London, 1997, pp. 80-81, fig. 27.

Robert B. Simon, From Sacred to Sensual: Italian Paintings, 1400–1750, New York, 1998, pp. 80-83, illustrated and cover.

Gabriele Finaldi, “Gli Affreschi di Palazzo Medici Riccardi,” in Luca Giordano: 1634–1705, exh. cat., Naples, 2001, pp. 252, 257 note 31.

Oreste Ferrari, in Oreste Ferrari and Giuseppe Scavizzi, Luca Giordano: Nuove ricerche e inediti, Naples, 2003, p. 74.

Donatella Livia Sparti, “Ciro Ferri and Luca Giordano in the Gallery of Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, vol. 47, no. 1 (2003), pp. 188-206, p. 216n.139.

Cristina Giannini, “Between ‘modello’ and ‘ricordo’ Luca’s ‘macchie’ for the Riccardi and the late-baroque taste for the ‘inaccompli’ / Fra ‘modello’ e ‘ricordo’ le macchie di Luca per i Riccardi e il gusto tardo barocco per l’inaccompli,” in Stanze segrete: gli artisti dei Riccardi. I ‘ricordi’ di Luca Giordano e oltre, exh. cat., Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, 15 April – 17 July 2005, ed. C. Giannini and S. Meloni Trkulja, pp. 1ff, 235ffm for the present work pp. 5n11, 238n11.

Cristina Acidini Luchinat, “The ceiling of Luca Giordano’s gallery: terrestrial courses, stellar triumphs / La volta della galleria di Luca Giordano: percorsi terreni, trionfi stellari,” in Stanze segrete: gli artisti dei Riccardi. I ‘ricordi’ di Luca Giordano e oltre, exh. cat., Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, 15 April – 17 July 2005, ed. C. Giannini and S. Meloni Trkulja, pp. 25-54, 251ff.

Giuseppe Scavizzi, Luca Giordano: His Life and Work, Naples, 2017, pp. 171-173.

Giuseppe Scavizzi in Luca Giordano: Baroque Master in Florence, exh. cat., ed. Riccardo Lattuada, Giuseppe Scavizzi, Valentina Zucchi, Florence, 2023, p. 15.

Francesca Whitlum-Cooper in Luca Giordano: Baroque Master in Florence, exh. cat., ed. Riccardo Lattuada, Giuseppe Scavizzi, Valentina Zucchi, Florence, 2023, p. 68-70.

Valeria Di Fratta in Luca Giordano: Baroque Master in Florence, exh. cat., ed. Riccardo Lattuada, Giuseppe Scavizzi, Valentina Zucchi, Florence, 2023, p. 164, cat. no. 41.

Luca Giordano’s lavish painted decoration of the Galleria and Library of the Medici Riccardi Palace in Florence is generally considered his masterpiece (Fig. 1). Measuring nearly 25 meters long, the barrel-vaulted ceiling on which Giordano painted his rich allegorical mural is in a room within the extension to Michelozzo’s venerable Medici Palace, which the Riccardi had constructed following their purchase of the palace in 1659. The Galleria was intended as a public reception room and space for displaying the family’s collection of antiquities and paintings. The commission for the project was given Giordano shortly after his arrival in Florence in 1682, but recent scholarship has indicated that the actual painting—executed in tempera a secco, rather than fresco—was not begun until three years later and was carried out entirely in the period between April and August of 1685.

The present painting is one of eleven large independent canvases by Giordano associated with the Galleria Riccardiana. Nine of these are now in the National Gallery London—the gift of Sir Denis Mahon, along with an additional canvas relating to Giordano’s painting in the adjoining Library of the palace—and a tenth is in a private English collection. The purpose of these paintings has been the subject of some debate—varying between their consideration as bozzetti (preliminary oil sketches), modelli (prototypes for approval), or ricordi (finished repetitions of the completed composition). Recently, Giuseppe Scavizzi has convincingly argued that the paintings are finished bozzetti, painted for Giordano’s principal patron Marchese Francesco Riccardi.

Scavizzi notes that these are fully finished paintings, with elaboration of details and ornament—very different from Giordano’s rapidly executed summary sketches, which Marchese Riccardi’s secretary, Giuliano Bandinelli, termed macchie, literally “blotches.”[i] Yet they clearly depict the compositions in evolution—between the initial broadly painted macchie, often close to monochromatic, and the finished composition seen on the ceiling of the Galleria. As a highly finished bozzetto, our painting is at once an oil sketch of grand dimensions and a collector’s piece of exquisite quality and finish. Notably, the figures in the present work and in the others of the series, have not yet been altered into the foreshortened poses they exhibit on the ceiling. Their more naturalistic attitudes appropriate to an easel painting indicate that the series was painted to be hung on a wall and viewed horizontally.

In his most recent discussion of the painting in conjunction with the 2023 exhibition in Florence, Scavizzi suggests on the basis of new documentary evidence that the four large, horizonal bozzetti for the long sides of the Galleria (including the present work, another in a private collection, as well as the Hades and the Rape of Prosperine and the Scene of Agriculture at the National Gallery) were already painted by April 1682.[ii] However, other scholars continue to consider the surviving canvases from the project to be ricordi of the Galleria ceiling and distinct from the preparatory paintings mentioned in the documents. Francesca Whitlum-Cooper has left open this possibility for the National Gallery paintings writing, “It seems most accurate now to consider these paintings as closely related to, but independently conceived from, the gallery ceiling: painted at the same time, but not in preparation for, the great fresco.”[iii]

Our painting corresponds to the left and central portions of the ceiling decoration above the south wall of the Galleria Riccardiana (Figs. 2-3). In translating this preparatory work onto the vaulted ceiling, Giordano expanded and reformulated the composition, adjusting the perspective for the curved wall and to be seen from below rather than frontally. The present canvas reveals the freshness of Giordano’s invenzione within this initial design for the ceiling, with its dynamic arrangement of the gods along a diagonal from upper left to lower right. Bacchus appears at the left in a chariot drawn by panthers (recalling his recent return from India), holding a thyrsus, and accompanied by satyrs, maenads, and putti. He represents the element of Earth and his Triumph is associated with maturity and the richness of autumn fruits. Above him the wind-god Aeolus sends furious winds that fill the sails and buffet the ship of the Argonauts, alluding to the element of Air and the struggle of man against the hostile forces of nature. Below him the figure of Atlas, signifying responsibility, passes the weight of the world to Hercules. As a counterpoint two male figures sit in the foreground: Harpocrates, the god of silence (holding his finger to his mouth), and Momus, the god of ridicule and laughter (in black holding a whip and a trumpet). At the right Neptune stands on a shell drawn by sea-horses as he reaches toward his wife, the Nereid Amphitrite, who rises up out of the sea while riding a dolphin. Their son Triton blows a conch-shell and a putto holds Neptune’s trident as the sea-god calms the waters. This would signify the flowering of emotions, marriage, and the adventure of navigation, set in the season of summer in the element of Water. In the sky at right Venus and Cupid benignly observe and tacitly sanction the dynamic activity of the scenes below, which together represent the love of the gods and reciprocal love.[iv]

The iconographic program of the Galleria, which sought to illustrate the progress of mankind by means of Wisdom and the Virtues, was devised by Giordano with the assistance of Alessandro Segni, the tutor and friend of the Marchese Riccardi, although the form and composition of the works are clearly the artist’s own. Segni later described the ceiling as representing “in a continuous narrative, comprising several hundred figures, all the theology of the Gentiles and the chief figures adored as divinities by that superstitious religion. Sky, Sea, Earth, and Fire are here represented by numerous figures expressing in a variety of different dramatic attitudes, the various strong passions which the Gentiles in their legendary tales attributed to their imaginary gods.” 

The meaning of the entire decorative scheme of the Galleria is complex and has been much discussed. Gabriele Finaldi writes that “the frescoes represent the progress of mankind by means of Wisdom and the Virtues…through the realms of the elements, Fire, Water, Earth and Air, represented in the narratives along the sides of the vault.” Cristina Acidini Luchinat refines that premise, considering the scenes on the side walls (including those depicted in our painting) as linking the Beginning of Life, on one end wall, to the Triumph of Wisdom on the one opposite, “alluding to the four Elements…, to the times of the day and of the year, to the ages of man—as well as exempla of possible modes of behavior, expressed in mythological terms.” 

The present work was retained by the Riccardi family as part of the set of twelve paintings relating to the Galleria and library ceiling project. This group is recorded in Riccardi inventories of the 1690s and was exhibited in a 1705 exhibition in the Cloister of Santissima Annunziata in Florence. In 1715 they are cited in an inventory of the Palazzo as “Twelve paintings of various dimensions painted by Giordano [being] all the models for the decoration of this palace.”[v] They remained together in Florence at least until 1822 when they were engraved by Lasinio before being sold at an unknown date by the Riccardi family (Fig. 4). At least ten, and probably the full set of twelve, were later in the collection of the Earls of Shrewsbury in Staffordshire.

When and how the paintings entered the collection of the Earls of Shrewsbury is unknown. It has long been stated in the scholarly literature that the paintings were hung at Ingestre Hall. However, the historical family seat of the Earl of Shrewsbury was Alton Towers. Ingestre Hall was first the seat of the Earls Talbot, and later that of the Earls of Shrewsbury after Henry, the 3rd Earl Talbot, succeeded the titles and estates of his distant cousin and became the 18th Earl of Shrewsbury in 1857. At that time, almost the entire contents of Alton Towers was auctioned off. The new 18th Earl of Shrewsbury maintained his residence at Ingestre Hall, only residing at Alton Towers for a brief period after Ingestre Hall was completely destroyed by a fire in 1882. Interestingly, that same year “a good many allegorical subjects from the brush of Luca Giordano” are recorded at Alton Towers.[vi] A photograph of the Talbot Gallery at Alton Towers from ca. 1890 shows several of the Giordano paintings now at the National Gallery hanging in their distinctive, original frames (Fig. 5).[vii] Whether the paintings might have already been at Alton Towers—perhaps left out of the 1857 auction—or if they were saved from the fire at Ingestre Hall and subsequently moved there is unknown.[viii] Curiously, in his publication of the Giordano paintings in Denis Mahon’s collection, Giuliano Briganti stated that it was believed that the present painting and the Death of Adonis in an English private collection were lost in the Ingestre fire.[iv] Clearly by the 1950s the fate of those paintings had been forgotten by the Shrewsbury family or was unknown to the dealer Matthiesen, who sold the series of Giordano paintings to Denis Mahon. Presumably they had been separated from the National Gallery group or were sold off by the family at an earlier date.

All critics consider the present painting to be a fully autograph work by Giordano, executed without any workshop participation, as one might expect for a project for the artist’s most significant patron. Giuseppe Scavizzi has further commented that the present work is one of the artist’s masterpieces. The painting was recently shown in the exhibition “Luca Giordano: Maestro barocco a Firenze” in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, hanging alongside the other paintings related to the Galleria, each placed beneath the corresponding frescoes in the vault above (Figs. 6-7).

[i] Giuseppe Scavizzi, Luca Giordano: his life and work, Naples, 2017, pp. 171-173. And verbally on first-hand examination of our painting (2018).

[ii] Giuseppe Scavizzi in Luca Giordano: Baroque Master in Florence, exh. cat., ed. Riccardo Lattuada, Giuseppe Scavizzi, Valentina Zucchi, Florence, 2023, pp. 14-16.

[iii] Francesca Whitlum-Cooper in Luca Giordano: Baroque Master in Florence, exh. cat., ed. Riccardo Lattuada, Giuseppe Scavizzi, Valentina Zucchi, Florence, 2023, pp. 68-70.

[iv] Scavizzi in Luca Giordano, 2023, p. 25.

[v] Inventory of Marchese Francesco Riccardi, 27 March 1715, p. 8, item 86 (in the Palazzo di via Larga, nella camera a canto alla sopradetta) f.c.22v, as one of “dodici quadri di diverse grandezze, dipintovi da Giordano tutti i modelli della pittura che ha fatta nella Galleria di questo palazzo; con ornamenti intagliati e tutti dorati ... 2400.” Also recorded in the 1753 inventory of Marchese (Vincenzo?) Riccardi as one of the “dodici quadri,” and later among the various undescribed bozzetti for the Galleria (recorded either in individually or in groups of 3 or 4) in the 20 July 1810 inventory for Giuseppe Riccardi and in the 14 September 1814 for Vincenzo Riccardi. (See the Getty Provenance Index for all above).

[v] Our Own Country: Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial, vol. 4, London, Paris, and New York, 1882, p. 227.

[vii] Michael Fisher, Alton Towers: A Gothic Wonderland, Stafford, 1999, p. 108, fig. 77. See also:

[viii] A newspaper article of 22 November 1882 reporting the Ingestre Hall fire noted that as many “valuable paintings and heirlooms of the Shrewsbury family” as possible were removed during the course of the fire. See: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/33627794.

[ix] Giulio Briganti, “The Mahon Collection of Seicento Paintings,” The Connoisseur, vol. 132 (August 1953), p. 16.