The Fall of the Rebel Angels

The Fall of the Rebel Angels is among Giordano's most spectacular and cosmically ambitious compositions, depicting the Archangel Michael casting Lucifer and the rebel angels from Heaven in a vortex of tumbling figures that fills the enormous canvas — over four meters tall — with dynamic energy from edge to edge. Painted around 1666, when Giordano was thirty-two years old, the Kunsthistorisches Museum composition demonstrates his already mastered command of multi-figure baroque composition on a scale that required absolute control of spatial organization. The subject had precedents in Rubens (his version is in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and in Italian predecessors from Signorelli to Beccafumi, and Giordano's direct engagement with these models is evident in the swirling composition and the muscular violence of the falling bodies. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, one of the world's great museums with an exceptional collection of Venetian and Flemish Baroque painting, holds this as one of the most visually overwhelming works in its entire collection.

Giordano deploys a vertiginous diagonal composition that plunges from the golden light of Heaven to the infernal darkness below. The muscular, foreshortened figures of the falling angels are rendered with bravura brushwork and a chromatic range spanning celestial golds and blues to hellish reds and blacks, demonstrating the virtuosic speed that earned him the nickname "Luca fa presto."