LUCA GIORDANO
(Naples, 1634 – 1705)

The Battle Between the Gods and the Giants and
The Massacre of the Children of Niobe

Oil on paper, laid down on canvas
6 ¾ x 44 ½ inches (17 x 113 cm
and
6 ¾ x 45 ½ inches (17 x 118 cm)

Provenance:

Private Collection, New York, 2013–2024.

These two oil sketches brilliantly substantiate Luca Giordano’s sobriquet “fa presto.” They were painted with phenomenal facility and rapidity, integrating many of the artist’s familiar figural types into new compositions of unusual format. The broad horizontal layout of each painting suggests that these were designs for overdoors, although they cannot be associated with any known surviving project by the artist.

In each painting a fluid arrangement of wounded and dead mortals is displayed along the bottom half of the composition. There is a focus, almost a mounding of the bodies, at the center—in one with Giants holding boulders, in the other with figures on horseback. Bracketing each of these scenes of the defeated are the victorious gods, wielding their weapons, whether bow-and-arrow, sword, or thunderbolt.

The first scene depicts the battle between the Gods and the Giants, known as the Gigantomachia. The Giants were an ancient people that attempted to overthrow the Olympian Gods by piling up boulders in order to ascend to Olympus. In our painting, Zeus appears at the right riding on his eagle and throwing thunderbolts, while the helmeted Minerva flies into the scene at the left, holding a sword in her right hand and a shield on her left. The bloodied Giants are crushed by the boulders they carried, while a siege ladder stands unattended behind one of the dead.

The subject of the second panel is the Massacre of the Children of Niobe. Niobe was a mortal and the mother of fourteen children, who boasted that she was superior to the Goddess Leto, who had borne only two. However, those two children were the twins Apollo and Diana and, in the face of Niobe’s effrontery, they slaughtered the children of Niobe. In our painting Apollo is at the left, firing arrows at the sons of Niobe, while Diana, with a crescent-moon adorning her forehead, enters from the right, killing the daughters. A figure at the lower center, perhaps Niobe, shrieks in horror.