St. Michael

This picture of Saint Michael triumphing over Satan and the Rebel Angels must have originally served as an altarpiece, and judging by its dimensions, was intended for a side chapel. It is not known for which church it was executed. It dates from circa 1663, during a stylistic phase when Giordano had overcome the influence of Mattia Preti, who was active in Naples from 1656 until 1660, and the Venetian component of Preti’s style (Veronese), and was now occasionally receptive to stimulus from the great Bolognese painter Guido Reni. The latter’s influence is reflected in the conspicuously fluid brushwork, in the lightness of the paint application, in the airy, transparent appearance of the garments in particular, and in the bright, luminous palette. Reni’s major late work, the Adoration of the Shepherds in the choir of the Carthusian church of San Martino in Naples, exercised a powerful influence. There, we encounter a colour triad, consisting of blue, white, and red, which resembles the one, which dominates Giordano’s picture. In it, Giordano drew on Guido Reni in an even more direct fashion, first from the latter’s celebrated Saint Michael altarpiece, produced shortly before 1636 for the Capuchin church in Rome, and secondly from an anonymous etching of Saint Michael after Reni. In this picture, Giordano fuses elements from these works by Reni with another famous prototype: Raphael’s Saint Michael, dated 1518, which Lorenzo de’ Medici gave as a gift to King François I of France. Giordano knew that composition from an engraving by Beatrizet. Giordano borrowed the motif of the lance, which the archangel holds in both hands and plunges downward, and the almost dancelike pose of the splayed legs, either from Raphael or from the etching after Reni. The diagonal composition, the corresponding inclination of the head, which Giordano rotates from a three-quarters view into a pure profile, the facial type with the curly blonde hair, and in particular the brilliant colouration of the blue mail shirt and the pale pink of the fluttering drapery too are borrowed from Reni. Readily noticeable in the figure of Satan, finally, is the influence of Giordano’s presumed teacher Ribera, namely in the richly contrasting modelling of the figure, and in the savage gestures and the grotesque face with its wide-opened, snarling mouth. Serving as a direct model here is an etching by Ribera that dates from 1622. The proximity to Ribera is far stronger in the much larger, darker altarpiece of Saint Michael in Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum), produced five or six years after the Berlin picture, while the influence of Reni is not yet perceptible. Giordano took up this theme – a fairly common one in the 16th and 17th century generally – in additional altarpieces. Saint Michael, as a “miles christianus”, was a symbol of the triumphant Catholic Church in the struggle against both Protestantism as well as the Turkish menace. The theme was particularly current during the Great Turkish War, which led to enthusiastically celebrated successes during the 1670s and 80s, with the victory of Johann Sobieski in the battle of Khotyn in 1672, with the defence of Vienna in 1683, and the liberation of Budapest in 1686. The triumphant character of Giordano’s picture, which expresses the self-assured optimism of the Roman church during this period, is underscored by the bright, festive colour scheme. Here, Giordano has translated impulses derived from Raphael, Reni, and Ribera into the language of the High Baroque. Erich Schleier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019