Attributed to Luca Giordano
Kingdom of Naples · Baroque
The story
Luca Giordano ran one of the busiest workshops in Naples, and his assistants learned to paint so close to him that the boundary between them is often hard to draw. The early pictures of one of them, Giuseppe Simonelli, were sometimes taken for Giordano's own, partly because the master retouched them himself.
Attributed to Luca Giordano is how a museum labels a picture its specialists believe is by him, without the signature, the document or the settled agreement that would make it certain. The label stands a step below a plain attribution, and above workshop of Giordano or follower of Giordano, which point to a hand near him rather than his own.
Such questions are usually argued against the catalogue of his work compiled by the Italian art historians Oreste Ferrari and Giuseppe Scavizzi, first published in 1966.
