Bacchus and Ariadne

We are grateful to Giuseppe Scavizzi for confirming the attribution to Luca Giordano on the basis of a photograph and for dating this picture to the late 1670s or early 1680s. It is probably a first idea for the artist’s more complex, finished painting of the same subject completed several years later circa 1685 and now in the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (see O. Ferrari and G. Scavizzi, Luca Giordano: L’opera completa, Naples, 2000, I, p. 317, no. A395; II, p. 688, fig. 532). In that same period, the artist was also working on his great mythological fresco cycle commissioned by Marchese Francesco Riccardi (1648-1719) to decorate the gallery of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence. The Norfolk work exhibits a bright, light palette more like the frescos than the earlier, darker painting. The Norfolk composition is also wider than the present canvas and many of the positions of the figures have been changed, so that Ariadne, for example, who here reclines backwards on her proper right elbow, in the later version leans forward on her proper left elbow in an attitude that echos Michelangelo’s figure of Night on the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici (Medici Chapel, San Lorenzo, Florence). Both pictures, however, share with the Medici Riccardi frescos fundamental stylistic elements that unite influences from Venetian sources and the art of the Roman Baroque.