(Naples 1634–1705)
The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Joachim,
oil on canvas, 209 x 147 cm, framed

We are grateful to Nicola Spinosa for confirming the attribution of the present painting and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

The present work appears to be a previously unpublished work by Luca Giordano, and as such it is an important addition to his oeuvre.

Due to its size and importance the present painting was almost certainly made for the altar of an, as yet, unidentified church or oratory. The scene in the present composition is set in the open, under the warm light of a Mediterranean sunset. An imaginary mountain landscape fills the background while the sky is largely hidden by gold-tinted clouds, among which cherubim fly whilst the Saints Anne and Joachim pay homage to the infant Christ who is held in the arms of the young Mary. Beyond, meanwhile, Saint Joseph plucks a branch loaded with fruit from an apple tree, and at the lower right, a naked cherub seen from the back, advances with a freshly cut bunch of roses.

This painting belongs to Luca Giordano’s advanced maturity, a dating which is confirmed by his deployment of brightly lit, unusually saturated areas of dense colour. The lapis lazuli blue of the mantle worn by the Madonna is of especial beauty, and harmoniously combines with the red of her robe and the white cuff of her under garment and the cloth she holds in her hands, as well as with the pale rose skin tones of the Child.

The studied compositional balance of this intimate family scene and the attentive formal description of each of the protagonists, with an attention to rendering of form, complexions and the expressions of emotions shown on individual’s features, are elements that reoccur in other canvases by the Neapolitan painter. These are dated or datable to the end of the 1680s, before Giordano´s departure for Spain in 1692. Other works by the artist from this period include the canvases showing episodes from the life of the Virgin from circa 1687, which are today divided between the Casita del Pardo, the Prado Museum, Madrid and the Louvre, Paris, as well as the Birth of the Virgin, Presentation in the Temple and the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Dream of Joseph intended for the transept of the church of Santi Apostoli, Naples, and datable to between 1690 and 1692. All of these works show evident signs of Luca Giordano’s recent attention to the classicism of Carlo Maratti in Rome. These classicist qualities persisted even in his compositions made after his move to the Spanish court in the service of Charles II of Habsburg. Indeed, these stylistic concordances are even more accentuated and evident in the present canvas and the two series with near identical representations of episodes from the life of Mary of circa 1696-1697. The latter works were made after the completion of the fresco decoration of rooms in the Monastery of San Lorenzo in the Escorial and before his works on the vault of the Casón del Retiro, Madrid, his works for the Real Monastero di San Jeronimo in Guadalupe, and likely also his works in the sacristy of the chapel of the Alcázar, Madrid, which is now in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

These are canvases in which Giordano reached the apogee of his classically mediated compositional solutions of contained formal elegance and his refined brilliance in their colouring. In the figure of Mary, as in the present painting he also made use of the same calm, beautiful and sweetly communicative young model. Consequently, the most likely dating for the present painting should be between the years 1690-92 or 1695-96; that is the period in which Giordano made the above-mentioned canvases for Santi Apostoli in Naples, and those he painted of two Marian cycles for Guadalupe, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.