For the next 10 minutes or so, we're going to be looking at what's going on in this picture,
and why this wedding feast has been interrupted in Luca Giordano's highly original and dramatic take
on a classical tale, 'Perseus turning Phineus and his Followers into Stone'.
Luca Giordano was born in Naples. He actually trained with a Spanish painter because at the time
in the 17th century, Naples was actually under Spanish rule. But despite being Neapolitan, he
actually traveled throughout Italy and had a very long career. He died in his 70s. Giordano
traveled to Rome, to Florence, to Venice and even, for about a decade towards the end of his life,
to Spain, where he worked for the king there, Charles III. Now Giordano was particularly adept
at painting on a huge scale as you can see from the picture behind me, countless altarpieces
and frescoes. He was also well known for painting very, very quickly, so much so that it earned him
the nickname Fapresto, which means, in Italian, literally "does it quickly". In this picture,
Giordano tackles the story of Perseus, the Greek hero, turning Phineus and his followers into stone.
It's a story that's told by the roman poet Ovid in his book, 'The Metamorphosis', which means literally
"transformations". It's a collection of short stories that tell of tales between the gods and mortals
and transformations, and it was widely read by artists and poets and used from the Renaissance
onwards. Now here we see Perseus dressed in blue. He has just saved the young beautiful
Princess Andromeda from a sea monster and he's been promised her hand in marriage in return,
and what we see here is their wedding feast, which has been brutally interrupted by Phineas, who was
formally betrothed to Andromeda. He has stormed in on this wedding feast with a thousand followers
and Perseus, seeing that he is outnumbered, knows he cannot fight these figures alone, so what he's
done is, he's pulled out the head of the gorgon Medusa, whom he has just slain. Now Medusa was known
for turning people to stone. Anyone who looked into her eyes would be turned instantly to stone, and
as you can see Perseus is holding up her head, and actually turning away from the head of the
Medusa, and actually facing her towards these three warriors over here, and what Giordano is showing us
is the actual act of transformation. These figures are literally turning into stone as we watch.
Now the man at the far left is almost certainly Phineas, the former fiancee of Andromeda, and I say
that because he has the most elaborate helmet and quite a beautiful breastplate, and then next to him
he has two of his thousand followers. Now Phineas is in a very kind of strong, active, and sort of
striding pose. It's what we call a contrapposto pose, where one arm is forward, and the equivalent
leg is back, and the opposite happens on the other direction, and it gives an enormous amount
of dynamism to this figure. He's really in movement here but he's actually rooted to the spot, and his
face is sort of fixed in a sort of petrified scream, literally petrified, literally turning to
stone, because the upper part of his body is grey. He's already turned to stone, but you can just see
on his thigh, there's still a hint of that pinkish flesh which shows even his toes are still very
much pink and alive, but he is gradually turning into a statue. Now the man in to the right in the
centre scene in profile is completely in stone, but that's probably because he's the figure closest to
the head of the medusa, and the man between them that we see from behind, his upper body is twisted
and fixed into, you know, a sort of statuesque pose. But his legs are very much still alive. Now what I
find fascinating about these three figures is that they're very much conceived like statues, you see
that they're very much rooted to the spot, and what Giordano does is he contrasts that with Perseus.
Perseus is full of movement, he's striding forward, and he turns away, his waves of his hair sort
of flying in the wind, the plumes in his hat, his drapery is billowing behind him and fluttering.
You get a real sense of movement, which of course contrasts with what's happening on the left.
Now Giordano adopted a very witty conceit in this picture because what he's doing with these three
men shown in very different poses, one seen from the front, one seen from behind, one in profile,
and if you look closely here, there's even a figure seen from below who's really sharply
foreshortened, and what he's doing here is referencing a famous debate of the time. It
was known as the paragon, which in Italian means comparison, and it's the paragon, the debate, that
really questions whether painting or sculpture was better at presenting a kind of life-like
figures, and here of course he's arguing for the supremacy of painting. Although this is a
two-dimensional object, he can show a figure in the round from the front, from behind, from the side,
and that's what he's trying to show here. Now another witty thing that Giordano has done is that
he's based two of the warriors on real sculptures, very famous classical sculptures, the one on the
left, Phineas is actually based on the Borghese Gladiator. Now this is a figure that was actually
excavated in the early 17th century in Rome. It's today in the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and
that classical sculpture has exactly the same pose, and although the front part
of the arm is actually fallen off, you can see there's still a strap where he used to hold a
shield, and Giordano has even included that in this picture here. Now the man seen from behind is taken
from an incredibly famous group of figures called "Laocoön and His Sons" which today is in the Vatican, and
this, in the 17th century, was an incredibly famous group of sculptures. Even Rubens copied it. Many, many
artists went to see it when they visited Rome, but what's unusual is we see it from behind, because in
fact in Giordano's day, this sculpture was shown in a niche, so you wouldn't have been able to stand
and walk around it, and he may have seen engravings, or Giordano may have actually seen the sculpture
in the flesh, because he was in Rome in the 1680s when this picture was painted. Now we don't know
who commissioned this picture, we don't know where it was for, but judging from its scale, one
can imagine it was for a very wealthy private patron. It was meant to hang in a large palazzo,
certainly, and it had as its pendants, as its companions to other pictures, also by Giordano,
and we have to think that 17th century audiences, so the patron for whom this picture was painted,
but also his erudite circle of friends, would have instantly recognised the story depicted here,
and would also have immediately recognised that these two figures were based on, these very famous
sculptures in the early 18th century. This picture actually hung in a palazzo in Genoa in the Balbi
Collection, and in the same collection was displayed Rubens's famous landscape,
with Het Steen, also now in the National Gallery. Now today, that picture by Rubens is far more well
known than this one by Giordano, but in the early 18th century, this picture was valued much more
than that. It shows it was much more highly prized, which is very surprising to us today. This picture
was the first major painting by Luca Giordano to enter the National Gallery's collection
in 1983, and in 2012 it was reframed with this magnificent 17th century Florentine frame,
and today this picture hangs at the very heart of the newly refurbished Hans and Julia Rausing room,
where the real highlights of the Italian Baroque collection hang, and it's here that Luca Giordano
quite rightly takes his place alongside Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Orazio Gentileschi, and the other great
painters of the Italian 17th century. If you're interested in learning more about art history,
you can click here or here. Thank you very much for watching, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.