However today, there was an enormously complimentary Art Review in the Los 
Angeles Times Calender Front Page.

Professor Emeritus Jim Mancuso who just returned from LA visiting his 
Daughter,
advises us that replicas of his paintings can be seen at: 
<< http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/g/giordano/index.html >> 
=======================================================
Art Review

A BAROQUE REDEMPTION 
By Christopher Knight
LA Times Art Critic
November 6 2001

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

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