(Naples 1634–1705)
The Education of the Virgin,
oil on canvas, 77.5 x 100 cm, framed

Provenance:
art market, Spain;
where acquired by the present owner

The attribution has been suggested by Nicola Spinosa after examining the present painting in the original.

We are grateful to Riccardo Lattuada for confirming the attribution on the basis of a photograph.

We are also grateful to Giuseppe Scavizzi for independently confirming the attribution on the basis of a photograph.

This newly discovered work by Luca Giordano is a great example of the painter’s latter artistic career. The present composition relates to a painting of the same subject conserved in the Royal Palace of La Almudaina in Palma Mallorca and formerly in the Royal Palace in Madrid, where it was part of a series of seventeen works depicting the life of Mary. The series was executed by Giordano in Naples around 1687, after his return to Florence in 1685 and before his departure to Spain in 1692 (see G. Fernandez Baytón, Inventarios reales. Testamentaria de Carlo II, 1701–1703, Barcelona 1975).

The free and lively manner of depicting atmospheric light, as is evident in the present work, is typical of Luca Giordano, a technique he had originally acquired by the influence studying the works of Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In the present painting and in the works of the aforementioned series, he elaborates a new style, influenced by the classical models of Carlo Maratti in Rome. Giordano had already done this between 1685 and 1690, when he painted with modern sensibility a series of mythological figures, from the most part adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example the Bacchus and Ariadne and Diana and Endimyon (Verona, Museo del Castelvecchio), Bacchus and Ariadne (Virginia, Chrysler Museum) and Latona transforming the farmers into frogs (Naples, Museo di Capodimonte), but also from biblical scenes (as with the series of David and Solomon painted for Charles II, King of Spain), and Roman-related historic events.

What all of these works have in common, including the present painting, is a high-quality execution and an expressive rendering of the character’s emotions and actions.