Luca Giordano

(Napoli, 1634 - 1705)

The subject of the painting is taken from Genesis (39–40): unjustly accused by Potiphar’s wife, Joseph is imprisoned. Shortly thereafter, the King of Egypt also has his chief cupbearer and chief baker imprisoned, and Joseph is assigned to serve them. One night, both the cupbearer and the baker have dreams of difficult interpretation, which they recount to Joseph the following morning: he then foretells the baker’s death by hanging after three days, and the cupbearer’s release from prison.

As strongly stated by Stefano Causa in his study of the painting, this four-figure seventeenth-century interior is an unpublished masterpiece by the young Luca Giordano, to be dated to the 1650s. An authentic early work by the master, still deeply influenced by Ribera and his followers. According to Causa: “We are before one of the most sensational autographs by the master to have emerged in the last ten years […] Here the discourse on the youth of the greatest Neapolitan painter of the seventeenth century takes an unexpected leap forward and invites us to rethink from the ground up Giordano’s formation between 1650 and 1664.”

The present painting thus testifies, at the highest qualitative level, to the germinal moment of the artist’s genius, “when all paths are still open. Giordano composes a kind of inventory of what had been produced over the previous fifty years, consciously selecting what he needed: if the detail of the prisoner peering through the bars had already appeared in an early work by Caracciolo […]  the rest of the painting is a brilliant recapitulation of the production of Ribera’s workshop by his most talented and original followers, from the Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds to Aniello Falcone.”