(Naples 1650–1710)
Battle of the Centaurs against the Lapiths,
oil on canvas, 190 x 257 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Christie’s, Rome, 27 May 1987, lot 601 (as Luca Giordano);
Private collection, Italy;
Art market, Liguria, 1993;
Private European collection

Literature:
G. Scavizzi, Drawings by artists in Giordano’s circle: Simonelli, Malinconico, and De Matteis, in: Master Drawings, 37:3, 1999, pp. 241-242, fig. 6, p. 259, note 17 (as Giuseppe Simonelli)

The present painting is registered in the Fototeca Zeri under no. 54884 (as Luca Giordano).

Giuseppe Simonelli was a student of Luca Giordano and one of the finest interpreters of his pictoral style. Simonelli interpreted a pictoral language with a taste for grand compositions, as well as a brilliant pallet together with an understanding of light as warm and golden. The preparatory drawing for this painting is conserved in a private collection (see op. cit. Scavizzi, 1999, p. 241, fig. 5).

The energetic strokes with which the figures are defined is typical of Simonelli, as is the means of describing volume, such as is seen in the depiction of the Centaurs for example: both qualities inherited from Giordano’s work of the 1680s. Indeed, Giuseppe Scavizzi compares the present work to the painting of Bacchus and Ariadne from the Palazzo Marchetti at Pistoia dated to around 1690 (M. Chiarini, Un episodio giordanesco a Pistoia, in: Festschrift Klaus Lankheit zum 20. Mai 1973, pp. 173–174).

The present painting represents the mythological episode when Hercules battled the Centaurs. Hercules brandishes his club, his typical attribute, at the centre of the scene. He is flanked and framed on each side by Centaurs, one of whom is about to release an arrow. The landscape that serves as background is also characteristic of the artist’s pictoral style: the light blue of the sky tending to mauve and the clouds intensifying beyond the branches of the tree fronds, are all rendered with elegant light strokes of the brush. A subtle play of light with gilded highlighting picks out the flesh and fabrics depicted in the scene, lending a sense of material reality. Both the soft impasto of the pallet and the quality of growing dynamic tension in the composition seem to derive from Giordano’s Florentine period and his crowning achievement at the time, the frescoes representing the The Apotheosis of the Medici Family (1682–1685) in the vault of the Galleria degli Specchi of Palazzo Medici Riccardi.

The present painting, like its compositional study, is of excellent quality. Indeed, the modus operandi of Luca Giordano’s studio is well known: the master often furnished drawings for paintings which were subsequently brought to completion by his studio. Moreover, Simonelli himself often requested that Giordano apply the finishing touches to his paintings (see G. Rosini, Storia della pittura italiana esposta coi monumenti, tomo VII, 1835–1837). Therefore a work would often have been created by a collaboration overseen by Giordano.