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拍品專文
Undoubtedly among the most ambitious allegories of the seasons to emerge from seventeenth-century Naples, this monumental Allegory of Autumn stands as a triumph of collaborative invention, uniting the theatrical brilliance of Luca Giordano with the fecund naturalism of Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo. At three-and-a-half metres wide, the canvas fuses two strands of Neapolitan painting into a single pageant of Bacchic plenitude, where Giordano’s dynamic figures and Ruoppolo’s harvest still-lifes combine to form a spectacle at once festive and emblematic.
Its genesis has been associated with the Corpus Domini celebrations of 1684, staged under the viceregal patronage of Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, marqués del Carpio y de Eliche (1629-1687), when Naples was transformed into a theatre of Counter-Reformation splendour (Lattuada, op. cit.). The Largo di Palazzo was remade as an ephemeral stage, its temporary arches and façades adorned with allegorical paintings proclaiming both Eucharistic devotion and viceregal magnificence (I. Mauro, Spazio urbano e rappresentazione del potere. Le cerimonie della città di Napoli dopo la rivolta di Masaniello (1648–1672), Naples, 2020, p. 338). Mounted along the ceremonial route, these canvases turned the city itself into a gallery where allegories of the seasons were encountered amid the throng of civic ritual rather than within the private confines of palace or chapel. Giordano, already the city’s dominant artistic force, acted as impresario, orchestrating a cycle of monumental compositions in which Naples’s leading still-life specialists – Giuseppe Recco, Abraham Brueghel, Francesco della Questa and Ruoppolo – were enlisted to supply the naturalia. Their imagery of fruits, vines and sea creatures was marshalled into an exuberant Eucharistic allegory: Bacchic abundance transfigured into divine providence, civic prosperity recast as sacramental glory (De Vito, op. cit.). Within this setting, Autumn would have been understood not as decoration but as emblem – a painted affirmation of magnificence, faith and abundance.
The present canvas formed part of this cycle and was paired with an Allegory of Summer (fig. 1; Private collection; Ferrari and Scavizzi, op. cit., fig. A0152a). Identified by Riccardo Lattuada as the Ragazzo con uve (Autunno) within his reconstructed sequence of fourteen canvases for the 1684 Corpus Domini celebrations (op. cit., p. 160), it belongs to the small group of seasonal allegories promoted by the marqués del Carpio and orchestrated by Giordano. According to Mauro Natale, the four Seasons were recorded together in Carpio’s posthumous inventory of 17 November 1687, confirming their presence in his Neapolitan collection (Lattuada, op. cit.). Ferdinando Bologna recalled having seen the painting on its original canvas, reportedly bearing Carpio’s monogram stamp – the collector’s device used to mark works in his possession (ibid.). It was likewise Bologna who, as early as 1979, identified the picture as part of the Corpus Domini decorations, an attribution he reiterated at a postgraduate seminar at the University of Siena and in a lecture delivered at the opening of the still-life section of the exhibition Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli on 6 December 1984 (ibid.). This testimony, now reinforced by documentary evidence of the cycle’s early circulation, situates the painting within a tangible network of artistic and mercantile exchange: on 1 April 1684, the dealer Carlo della Torre sold a lot of eight large canvases, their figures “accordi” by Giordano, to the Venetian merchants Vincenzo Samuelli and Giovanni Battista Bertocchi, proof that parts of the festival apparatus were already being placed on the market in the very season of the feast (ibid.).
The iconography unfolds as an exuberant harvest pageant. Youths and putti gather fruit from a vine-laden arbour; to the right reclines a faun crowned with grapes, his muscular torsion animated by Giordano’s theatrical chiaroscuro. At his side, a sleeping child nestles against the satyr’s leg – a detail that, as Lattuada notes, was read by Maurizio Marini as Jupiter in infancy, with the faun identified as Pan, bearer of the shepherd’s staff, and the goat reinterpreted as Amalthea, his nurse (ibid.). In this reading, the conch shell in the foreground alludes to Pan’s sea-trumpet, with which he aided Jupiter in the Gigantomachy, while the maiden in the middle ground could be Hera or Terra personified (ibid.). Though such interpretations remain conjectural, they evoke the ‘panic’ classicism that pervades the composition. Even without explicit mythological reference, the interplay of intoxication and repose is striking: the satyr too languid to appear wholly sober, the putto slipping into sleep, vine tendrils resting upon the statue of Bacchus. These touches, described by Lattuada, suggest a bacchanal on the verge of dissolution, its festive energy tempered by drowsy abandon (ibid.). Sparse vistas of rustic landscape glimpsed at sunset act as quiet punctuation, conceived with the same economy as Giordano’s other festival canvases (ibid.). In the goat and the shell, placed prominently in the foreground, natural and mythic references coalesce – objects at once rustic and symbolic, poised between harvest and allegory.
The collaborative authorship of Autumn has long been recognised. At its 1993 sale, the picture was attributed to Ruoppolo and Paolo de Matteis, but later scholarship restored Giordano’s central role (De Vito, op. cit.; Lattuada, op. cit.), with Ferrari and Scavizzi further clarifying the division of labour (op. cit.). Professor Giuseppe Scavizzi, to whom we are grateful, has proposed that one of Giordano’s assistants may have participated in the execution of the figures, possibly Paolo de Matteis (private communication, October 2025). The faun’s powerful body, dramatically lit, is wholly Giordano; the vine clusters and goat recall Ruoppolo’s independent still-lifes, such as those in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (inv. nos. 1604, 1605). Comparisons may be drawn with other collaborative allegories, notably The Riches of the Sea (Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia), painted with Giuseppe Recco. More broadly, the conception reflects Flemish precedents – Abraham Brueghel, Monsù Bernardo and the Antwerp garland tradition – yet in Giordano’s hands these northern models were transformed into a Mediterranean spectacle, suffused with theatrical light and animated by the rhythm of his fresco cycles.
As part of the rare surviving group of seasonal allegories, Autumn embodies the culture of spectacle that defined baroque Naples, where civic ritual, painterly collaboration and allegorical invention converged. Monumental in scale, resplendent in its hybrid authorship and rare in survival, the canvas endures as more than a vestige of festival: it is a fragment of civic theatre itself – a vision of nature’s abundance transfigured into the grandeur of Naples.
Its genesis has been associated with the Corpus Domini celebrations of 1684, staged under the viceregal patronage of Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán, marqués del Carpio y de Eliche (1629-1687), when Naples was transformed into a theatre of Counter-Reformation splendour (Lattuada, op. cit.). The Largo di Palazzo was remade as an ephemeral stage, its temporary arches and façades adorned with allegorical paintings proclaiming both Eucharistic devotion and viceregal magnificence (I. Mauro, Spazio urbano e rappresentazione del potere. Le cerimonie della città di Napoli dopo la rivolta di Masaniello (1648–1672), Naples, 2020, p. 338). Mounted along the ceremonial route, these canvases turned the city itself into a gallery where allegories of the seasons were encountered amid the throng of civic ritual rather than within the private confines of palace or chapel. Giordano, already the city’s dominant artistic force, acted as impresario, orchestrating a cycle of monumental compositions in which Naples’s leading still-life specialists – Giuseppe Recco, Abraham Brueghel, Francesco della Questa and Ruoppolo – were enlisted to supply the naturalia. Their imagery of fruits, vines and sea creatures was marshalled into an exuberant Eucharistic allegory: Bacchic abundance transfigured into divine providence, civic prosperity recast as sacramental glory (De Vito, op. cit.). Within this setting, Autumn would have been understood not as decoration but as emblem – a painted affirmation of magnificence, faith and abundance.
The present canvas formed part of this cycle and was paired with an Allegory of Summer (fig. 1; Private collection; Ferrari and Scavizzi, op. cit., fig. A0152a). Identified by Riccardo Lattuada as the Ragazzo con uve (Autunno) within his reconstructed sequence of fourteen canvases for the 1684 Corpus Domini celebrations (op. cit., p. 160), it belongs to the small group of seasonal allegories promoted by the marqués del Carpio and orchestrated by Giordano. According to Mauro Natale, the four Seasons were recorded together in Carpio’s posthumous inventory of 17 November 1687, confirming their presence in his Neapolitan collection (Lattuada, op. cit.). Ferdinando Bologna recalled having seen the painting on its original canvas, reportedly bearing Carpio’s monogram stamp – the collector’s device used to mark works in his possession (ibid.). It was likewise Bologna who, as early as 1979, identified the picture as part of the Corpus Domini decorations, an attribution he reiterated at a postgraduate seminar at the University of Siena and in a lecture delivered at the opening of the still-life section of the exhibition Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli on 6 December 1984 (ibid.). This testimony, now reinforced by documentary evidence of the cycle’s early circulation, situates the painting within a tangible network of artistic and mercantile exchange: on 1 April 1684, the dealer Carlo della Torre sold a lot of eight large canvases, their figures “accordi” by Giordano, to the Venetian merchants Vincenzo Samuelli and Giovanni Battista Bertocchi, proof that parts of the festival apparatus were already being placed on the market in the very season of the feast (ibid.).
The iconography unfolds as an exuberant harvest pageant. Youths and putti gather fruit from a vine-laden arbour; to the right reclines a faun crowned with grapes, his muscular torsion animated by Giordano’s theatrical chiaroscuro. At his side, a sleeping child nestles against the satyr’s leg – a detail that, as Lattuada notes, was read by Maurizio Marini as Jupiter in infancy, with the faun identified as Pan, bearer of the shepherd’s staff, and the goat reinterpreted as Amalthea, his nurse (ibid.). In this reading, the conch shell in the foreground alludes to Pan’s sea-trumpet, with which he aided Jupiter in the Gigantomachy, while the maiden in the middle ground could be Hera or Terra personified (ibid.). Though such interpretations remain conjectural, they evoke the ‘panic’ classicism that pervades the composition. Even without explicit mythological reference, the interplay of intoxication and repose is striking: the satyr too languid to appear wholly sober, the putto slipping into sleep, vine tendrils resting upon the statue of Bacchus. These touches, described by Lattuada, suggest a bacchanal on the verge of dissolution, its festive energy tempered by drowsy abandon (ibid.). Sparse vistas of rustic landscape glimpsed at sunset act as quiet punctuation, conceived with the same economy as Giordano’s other festival canvases (ibid.). In the goat and the shell, placed prominently in the foreground, natural and mythic references coalesce – objects at once rustic and symbolic, poised between harvest and allegory.
The collaborative authorship of Autumn has long been recognised. At its 1993 sale, the picture was attributed to Ruoppolo and Paolo de Matteis, but later scholarship restored Giordano’s central role (De Vito, op. cit.; Lattuada, op. cit.), with Ferrari and Scavizzi further clarifying the division of labour (op. cit.). Professor Giuseppe Scavizzi, to whom we are grateful, has proposed that one of Giordano’s assistants may have participated in the execution of the figures, possibly Paolo de Matteis (private communication, October 2025). The faun’s powerful body, dramatically lit, is wholly Giordano; the vine clusters and goat recall Ruoppolo’s independent still-lifes, such as those in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (inv. nos. 1604, 1605). Comparisons may be drawn with other collaborative allegories, notably The Riches of the Sea (Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia), painted with Giuseppe Recco. More broadly, the conception reflects Flemish precedents – Abraham Brueghel, Monsù Bernardo and the Antwerp garland tradition – yet in Giordano’s hands these northern models were transformed into a Mediterranean spectacle, suffused with theatrical light and animated by the rhythm of his fresco cycles.
As part of the rare surviving group of seasonal allegories, Autumn embodies the culture of spectacle that defined baroque Naples, where civic ritual, painterly collaboration and allegorical invention converged. Monumental in scale, resplendent in its hybrid authorship and rare in survival, the canvas endures as more than a vestige of festival: it is a fragment of civic theatre itself – a vision of nature’s abundance transfigured into the grandeur of Naples.