The Well of Bethesda

Giordano's Well of Bethesda from 1687 at Harvard Art Museums depicts the miraculous pool in Jerusalem described in John 5, where an angel periodically stirred the waters to give them healing power, and where Christ healed a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. The subject combined the spectacle of the many sick and disabled gathered at the pool — an opportunity for depicting physical suffering across its full range — with the central miracle of Christ's healing act, which bypassed the traditional requirement to enter the water first. Giordano's 1687 treatment belongs to his prolific final Neapolitan phase before Spain, when he was completing numerous church and private commissions with his characteristic rapid fluency. The Harvard Art Museums, which hold both the Well of Bethesda and the Dives and Lazarus, together demonstrate the range of Giordano's scriptural subjects — from the intimate to the spectacular, from the Old Testament to the New — across a career that treated the full breadth of Christian narrative with equal facility.

The architectural setting of the pool provides a monumental backdrop for the crowd of afflicted figures. Giordano's command of multi-figure compositions is evident in the varied poses and expressions of the suffering and healed.