A male saint or philosopher

This painting dates to circa 1655, during the earliest phase of Luca Giordano's career and a short two years after his first recorded works. It recalls Jusepe de Ribera's depictions of philosophers, saints and hermits, which were prominent in Neapolitan collections from the 1620s. Produced in some numbers, Giordano's paintings of half-length male figures date primarily to the middle decades of the seventeenth century and can be divided into two distinct groups: as Nicola Spinosa proposes, the paintings from the 1650s derive directly from Ribera's dry and vigorous types of circa 1630; while in the following decade Giordano shifted to painting from life, using models he found in the streets and alleyways of Naples (N. Spinosa, in Luca Giordano 1634-1705, exhibition catalogue, Naples, 2001, p. 68).