David avec la tête de Goliath

Stanzione worked in Naples around 1642, in a city whose painters were still under the long shadow of Caravaggio, whose brutal realism and hard raking light had passed through Naples a generation earlier and never quite left. You can feel it here in the way David steps out of deep darkness, elegant and almost tender, holding the severed head of Goliath so that the horror is kept at a cool distance. The picture had its own tangled afterlife. When it was given to the San Diego museum in 1947 it was catalogued as a work by the Spaniard Ribera, and only in 1951 did a specialist reassign it to Stanzione, an attribution later scholars confirmed. A cleaning also brought Goliath's full face back into view after it had been painted over.