The Massacre of the Children of Niobe

Born and trained in Naples, Luca Giordano, known as "Luca fa presto" (Luca who paints quickly), is recognized as one of the most important Neopolitan painters of the second half of the seventeenth century. At the age of 20, he traveled to Rome and Florence where he was inspired by the powerful monumental ceiling decoration of Pietro da Cortona, one of the most influential of the Roman Baroque illusionists. Based on this form of ceiling painting, Giordano's two large pictures in the Brooks collection bear the hallmark of the image di sotto in su, or the work seen from the bottom upwards. He is also indebted to Venetian colorism in which the brush stroke, rather than pure linearism, predominated.

A mythical subject, The Massacre of the Children of Niobe portrays the daughter of the king of Thebes who displayed haughty pride in the superiority of her seven sons and seven daughters. Boasting of her own superiority to Leto, who had only two offspring, she thus incurred the wrath of Leto's children, Apollo and Artemis, who avenged the insult to their mother by killing Niobe's children with their arrows. Niobe, through her incessant mourning, finally became a column of stone which continued to shed her tears.