Luca Giordano

With Heim Gallery, London, by 1975;

Where acquired by Ian Ross, Toronto, 1983;

Thereafter acquired by the present collector.

E. Nappi, "Il palazzo e la cappella del Sacro Monte e Banco dei Poveri," in Le arti figurative a Napoli nel Settecento, N. Spinosa (ed.), Napoli 1979, p. 148;

G. A. Galante, Guida Sacra della citta di Napoli, 1985, p. 287;

O. Ferrari, Bozzetti italiani dal manierismo al barocco, Naples 1990, p. 172, reproduced;

O. Ferrari and G. Scavizzi, Luca Giordano: L'opera completa, Naples 1992, vol. I, p. 358, no. A716; vol. II, reproduced fig. 937.

This freely executed bozzetto is an oil sketch for part of the fresco decoration of the Cappella del Tesoro in the Certosa di San Martino, Naples, which Giordano completed in 1704. This scene, which depicts the biblical story of three men thrown into a furnace by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar, corresponds to one of the lunettes of the chapel's vault.