18th century, Neapolitan school

18th century, Neapolitan school

The banquet of the rich Epulone

Oil on canvas, cm 73 x 98

There are also the inevitable silver plates, neatly arranged in ostentatious display on the right side of the painting, and the scumbags who alone lend aid to the beggar by licking his wounds, The present painting unfolds in an airy detail the parable of the rich epulon. Recalled in Luke (16,19-31), the account is a literary precedent to the Dante counterpoint: a very rich man, priest of the temple of Jupiter, organized every day lucullian banquets dressed in purple and bisso; one day came to him a poor man, Begging for help, named Lazarus. The rich man paid no attention to him. Answering the ancient Latin maxim of nomen omen, the beggar Lazarus, whose name in Aramaic, Elazar, means "he whom God helps", once sat beside Abraham, while the rich Epulon was damned among the flames. The proper name given to the rich man, Epulone, which does not appear in the gospel text, is the result of a later literary tradition; it is in fact a distortion of the Latin verb with which it was translated from Aramaic, the step: epulabor, that is "banchettare". 

The present reveals the debt all Neapolitan in the crowded unfolding of figures, defined with force by the dark-brown that pervades the canvas. The dramatic nature of the gestures, evident in the contemptuous expression of Epulone and in the alambiccata sitting of Lazzaro, reflects the great baroque season of the city of Naples, welcoming with full hands the traditional incisiveness narrative. The progressive illumination that caresses the figures however betrays a overcoming of the ways which had already belonged to Mattia Preti (1613-1669) and Bernardo Cavallino (1616-1656). The eighteenth-century declination of the work is revealed in particular through comparison with a painting of an analogous subject by Luca Giordano (1634-1705), and now kept at the Palazzo Magnani. The perspective plunge from the Jordan into the sky, in which nuanced architectures stand out, is reflected in the present in the holiday palace on the right background of the canvas. 

The object is in good condition

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