(Naples 1634–1705)
David with the head of Goliath,
oil on canvas, 120.5 x 96.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection

We are grateful to Riccardo Lattuada for confirming the attribution after examining the present painting in the original.

Luca Giordano’s David is a fierce, dark haired youth and his standing figure fills the entire canvas. The painter focuses on David’s moment of triumph as he displays the emblem of his victory: the severed head of Goliath impaled on the end of his sword.

Luca Giordano’s composition emphasises the heroic, muscular body of David, wrapped in a green mantle. David appears to be advancing on foot, his gestures are dynamic, and the close framing of the composition accentuates his energetic force. The work’s potent, emotive charge is expressed entirely in the courageous figure. These vigorous qualities amount to the painter’s stylistic hallmark: the half-length figure composition, seen from a close view-point, was used by Luca Giordano in a number of works, such as for example the Sacrifice of Isaac and Jacob wrestling with the Angel both in Neapolitan private collections (see O. Ferrari, Luca Giordano: 1634–1705, exhibition catalogue, Naples 2001, pp. 104-06, cat. nos. 14-15); another comparable work is the Death of Cleopatra also in a private collection in Naples.

During his earliest training in the city of his birth, Luca Giordano learnt the rudiments of the Caravaggist tradition in Naples. After the death of Ribera in 1652, Giordano travelled to Rome aged twenty. Here he acquired a new freedom of expression and, particularly in the wake of his first journey to Venice, his palette gained a vibrancy of colour. On a return visit to Venice in 1674, he executed his influential works for the basilica of Santa Maria della Salute. Additionally, he attained prestigious commissions in his native city of Naples, as well as in Padua, Florence and elsewhere. Subsequently he was called to Spain where, from 1692 to 1702, he was court painter to King Charles II. Here he executed important decorative cycles in Toledo Cathedral and the Palacio del Buen Retiro, Madrid.