This week’s Private View of the Week is devoted to a remarkably spirited and theatrical oil sketch by Luca Giordano, depicting The Judgement of Solomon around 1670. Executed at the height of the artist’s maturity, the composition condenses all the brilliance of the Neapolitan master into a cabinet-sized format: explosive movement, flickering light, Venetian colourism, and an almost operatic sense of drama. Here, Giordano captures the very climax of the biblical episode, the suspended instant in which the true mother renounces her child to save his life.
What is particularly compelling is the painting’s extraordinary immediacy. The brush seems to race across the surface with the confidence and freedom that earned the artist his legendary nickname, Luca fa presto. Far more than a reduced version, the work has the energy of invention itself, and, as Nicola Spinosa suggested, may well have served as a highly finished preparatory modello for a larger composition. The theatrical arrangement of figures and the glowing palette reveal Giordano at the moment he fully absorbed the lessons of Venice and Veronese, while retaining the dramatic force inherited from Ribera.
Confirmed by Nicola Spinosa and related to major versions today in Lausanne and Madrid, this vibrant composition offers a rare glimpse into the creative process of one of the greatest virtuosi of the Italian Baroque.