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The Parable of the Prodigal Son: Driven out by his Former Companions
Luca Giordano·1682
Historical Context
This second panel from the Prodigal Son series at the National Trust depicts the son's expulsion from the company of false friends who had helped him squander his inheritance — the social abandonment that followed economic ruin. Giordano's Prodigal Son series followed the parable through multiple episodes, a narrative sequence that gave collectors both the complete story and a set of compositionally related works designed to hang together. Each episode in the parable's progression offered Giordano different compositional and emotional material: the initial departure with inheritance, the dissolute living, the expulsion, the swineherd's penitent reflection, and the final homecoming. The series format was popular in seventeenth-century painting, from Rembrandt's single great homecoming canvas to the full narrative sequences that gave buyers both moral instruction and decorative coherence. These narrative sets for country houses combined the pleasure of storytelling with the dignity of classical and scriptural subject matter.
Technical Analysis
The expelled figure's isolation contrasts with the departing companions, creating a composition of rejection and loneliness. Giordano uses the architectural setting to emphasize the threshold between former luxury and approaching destitution.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice the expelled figure's isolation against the departing companions: Giordano uses spatial separation to make visible the social isolation of someone abandoned by fair-weather friends.
- ◆Look at the architectural setting emphasizing the threshold: the doorway or boundary between inside and outside makes the expulsion physically specific — the prodigal is literally on the threshold of destitution.
- ◆Find the departing companions' indifference: their casual departure contrasts with the prodigal's obvious distress, making the moral point about the unreliability of companions in pleasure.
- ◆Observe that this National Trust cycle scene connects to contemporary experience: the prodigal's false friends who abandoned him in need were recognizable social types that Baroque audiences encountered in their own world.
