A Baroque Redemption

The critical rap against Neapolitan Baroque painter Luca Giordano has always been that he was an artistic magpie. Extraordinarily prolific, the widely traveled 17th century painter borrowed from countless artists over his long career. The question is, did he mix them into his own distinctive stew?

From Caravaggio he got a sense of focused drama, from Jusepe de Ribera a skill for naturalistic illusion meant to expose a subject’s inner life. Brilliant color and glorious pageantry came from the Venetians--Titian and Veronese, especially--while Rubens provided an unparalleled model for the inseparability of intellectual heft from pictorial spectacle. Velazquez taught him the poetic uses of ambiguity. Even Drer revealed how acute observation of the smallest details could enlarge a picture’s scope, enabling it to encompass worlds within worlds.

More than anyone, the architect, painter, decorator and monument designer Pietro da Cortona gave Giordano a sense of what was possible. Cortona’s magnificent vault for the main salon of Rome’s Palazzo Barberini, which trumpets the virtues of a powerful family that included the reigning pope, is for Roman Baroque painting what the Sistine ceiling is for the Renaissance.

Giordano, meanwhile, became a whiz at assembling spacious pictorial orchestrations in huge decorative fresco schemes. His effusive, chromatically complex painted vault for the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence ranks as the greatest Baroque ceiling decoration outside Rome.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an imposing new survey of Giordano’s career reveals all these interlocking relationships and more. It’s the first Old Master exhibition LACMA has organized in 13 years. Deftly assembled by curator Patrice Marandel in conjunction with the Capodimonte Museum in Naples and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where the show has already been seen (in a slightly different version), it’s also the first full retrospective of Giordano’s work ever mounted.

And it convincingly sweeps away the long-standing critical rap about Giordano’s magpie ways. He certainly wasn’t a singular artistic inventor, like Caravaggio, Titian, Velazquez or the other towering figures whose work was so important to his own. But he wasn’t just an eclectic borrower, either.

Giordano was instead a harbinger of a new and increasingly common breed: a worldly cosmopolite who moved in a rapidly expanding, internationally sophisticated milieu. This unusual position makes him especially intriguing in our differently globalizing world today.

“Luca Giordano: 1634-1705” brings together 77 paintings, many of monumental scale, from all phases of the artist’s career. Born the son of a minor painter in the rather rough-and-tumble seaside town of Naples, long under Spanish rule, Giordano is thought to have trained in Ribera’s studio.

A room in the show pairs a 1637 Ribera portrait of a philosopher from LACMA’s collection with several pictures by Giordano that demonstrate both his debt to the older artist and his own maturing manner. One is a genre scene at an inn, where the humble patrons are portrayed with Ribera’s tender brand of melancholic grace. Another shows the suicide of Portia, wife of Brutus, the ill-fated traitor against Caesar. The haunted figure set before a plain wall recalls Ribera, but the creamy fluidity of paint shows Giordano leaving his teacher’s lessons behind.

Giordano’s mature work dates from the middle of the 1660s to his 1692 departure for Madrid and the refined court of Charles II, where he executed dozens of elaborate fresco cycles. The second half of the 17th century saw a significant change in Baroque art in Italy, and Giordano is one important pivot on which it turned.

Before, Rome had been the powerful magnet, drawing artists from all over Europe to participate in the Catholic propaganda campaigns of the Counter-Reformation. By mid-century that polemical crusade was on the wane. Giordano’s art represents a loosening of strictures, a growing sense of personal intellectual exploration, a lessening of Rome’s attraction for artists and the impact of an enlarging private marketplace, alongside the established patronage system of church and state.

Color is key to Giordano’s significance. He could be an amazing colorist. Sometimes it enhances the picture’s narrative. Elsewhere it performs spatial magic.

Early in the show a Ribera-like altarpiece from the 1650s showing Christ’s entombment casts a dark, almost monochromatic pall over the mournful scene. The dun color functions like a shroud.

The principal illumination within the gloom is the body of the dead Christ, about to be lowered into the sarcophagus. Like the tomb, it’s painted an ashen gray. A jolt of color is injected next to the corpse in a crimson cloak thrown over the shoulder of St. John the Baptist. Recalling Christ’s own robe from the Passion, the crimson flow also doubles as a cascade of blood, which seems to drain from the lifeless body adjacent.

Far more subtle is a later, recently rediscovered painting. The magnificent “Rape of Europa” (1684-85) is an intricate array of pinks, gold and blues. Here the color is orchestrated to accentuate a conception of unified yet unlimited space.

The dramatic scene is pushed into the foreground, as the flower-bedecked black-and-white bull (Jupiter in disguise) rises up and carries aloft the beautiful daughter of the Phoenician king, who had been frolicking by the seaside. The colors of her creamy pink skin, wrapped in a transparent gold cloth and backed by a billowing blue cape, are spread out through the distant landscape and into the radiant sky. Giordano’s use of color to articulate space is enhanced by the composition’s zigzag structure, which unfolds like an accordion across the 71/2-foot-wide picture.

With one hand Europa clutches the bull’s forelock; with the other, held warily on an outstretched arm, she balances herself at the precarious moment of her liftoff into space. A sea nymph, her golden tresses tangled with pink coral, looks on in wonderment at the improbable abduction, while beneath her elbow a pointy-eared cherub looks directly at the spectator. He seems to say, Imagine!

The intricately conceived space of this picture shows Cortona’s powerful impact on Giordano. “Bacchus and Ariadne” (circa 1680) does, too. Roughly the same size as the Europa, but vertical, it crams scores of figures (goats, rams, dogs, jungle cats--a veritable zoo) into a tangled space that shifts from land to sea to sky with the energy of coiled springs.

The old pictorial sense of space portrayed a sequence of carefully controlled compartments, which implied a world of rigid and unbreakable hierarchies. Here it gives way to fluid movement and infinite complexity, which reflect the new social mobility of the era that Giordano himself was enjoying. Who could have guessed that this unlikely artist from a relative backwater would end up a wealthy and revered international celebrity?

Giordano brought that difficult sense of perilous openness to a crescendo in the great ceiling vault of Florence’s Palazzo Medici-Riccardi--which of course cannot be included in the show. In one of several distinctive displays, however, the curators have assembled a room with 10 large oil sketches for those frescoes, and for reference they’ve suspended a smaller-scale black-and-white reproduction of the vault overhead.

There are other special moments in this important show. One room gathers seven oil paintings on copper, highlighting this luxury brand of painting popular among collectors of the era. Three of four self-portraits show Giordano wearing big, round, black pince-nez glasses; his enlarged eyes, seen through the lenses, create a sly commentary on vision as the foundation of his art.

Prepare yourself, however, for an unconventional yet dramatic gesture. LACMA’s gallery walls have been painted a splendid array of surprising colors--dusty rose, curry yellow, violet, cinnamon, moss green and more.

The brightly tinted walls italicize two critically important features of Giordano’s art. One is his introduction of a new sense of dramatic color into Baroque painting. The other is the power of decoration itself as a vehicle of art. Like the cosmopolitan openness and erudition that are essential to understanding Giordano’s work, these are important qualities that also have resonance for art today.

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LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Jan. 20. Closed Wednesdays.