XVIII, The Banquet Of The Rich Dives

XVIII, Neapolitan school
The banquet of the rich Dives
Oil on canvas, 73 x 98 cm - with frame 101.5 x 126.5

Also present are the inevitable silver plates, carefully aligned in ostentatious display on the right side of the painting, and the dogs that alone help the beggar by licking his wounds, this painting unfolds the parable of the rich man in ethereal detail. Recounted in Luke (16.19-31), the story constitutes a literary precedent for Dante's reprisals: a very rich man, priest of the temple of Jupiter, organized Lucullian banquets every day dressed in purple and fine linen; one day a poor man came to him, imploring help, named Lazarus. The rich man paid no attention to him. Responding to the ancient Latin maxim of nomen omen, the beggar Lazarus, whose name in Aramaic, Elazar, means "he whom God helps", once gone sat next to Abraham, while the wealthy Dives was damned in the flames. The proper name attributed to the rich man, Epulone, which moreover never appears in the Gospel text, is the fruit of a later literary tradition; it is in fact a distortion of the Latin verb with which the passage was translated from Aramaic: epulabor, or “to feast”. The present reveals the entirely Neapolitan debt in the cluttered unfolding of the figures, strongly defined by the burnished chiaroscuro that pervades the canvas. The drama of the gestures, evident in the contemptuous expression of Epulone and in the still seat of Lazarus, reflects the great Baroque season of the Neapolitan city, fully welcoming the traditional narrative incisiveness. The gradual illumination that caresses the characters, however, betrays a going beyond the paths that had already belonged to Mattia Preti (1613-1669) and Bernardo Cavallino (1616-1656). The 18th century variation of the work is revealed in particular through the comparison with a painting of a similar subject by Luca Giordano (1634-1705), and now kept in the picture gallery of the Palazzo Magnani. The perspective slit made by Giordano in the sky, in which nuanced architectures stand out, is reflected in the present in the holiday building at the bottom right of the canvas.