As of Tuesday, November 11, 2025, the Museum of Palazzo Grimani - National Archaeological Museums of Venice and the Lagoon welcomes Luca Giordano’s Samaritan Woman at the Well to its exhibition itinerary, which officially becomes part of its collections. A presentation event will be held in the afternoon of Monday, November 10, during which the acquisition process, the art-historical aspects of the work and the recent restoration work will be explained.
The entry of the painting into the museum’s holdings is the result of a virtuous collaboration between several institutions of the Ministry of Culture. After being reported by the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, the work was declared of cultural interest in 2018 by the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the metropolitan city of Venice, and was subsequently purchased by way of pre-emption by the state in 2021 following the bankruptcy of a Venetian auction house.
Datable to the 1790s, the painting depicts the encounter between the seated Christ and the Samaritan woman who, holding an amphora, is on her way to fetch water, while two figures observe them from above. The scene is set around the well and is characterized by a refined perspective construction and intense colors that enhance its narrative vividness. In this work Luca Giordano reworks classicist language in a personal key, drawing inspiration from the Roman Renaissance tradition and Raphael in particular.
The work was assigned to Palazzo Grimani because of the documented presence of other works by Luca Giordano within the collections of one of the most illustrious members of the Grimani family of Santa Maria Formosa, the cardinal and patron Vincenzo Grimani, who was viceroy of Naples on behalf of the Habsburg family. Moreover, with its classicist forms, it succeeds in placing itself in perfect dialogue with the palace’s decorations and the collection of antiquities that, as of 2019, has returned to decorate its rooms.
The restoration, conducted in 2025 by restorer Claudia Vittori, has restored the work’s brilliant colors typical of the Neapolitan painter and its perspective depth, revealing large portions of the original pictorial surface, long concealed by heavy retouching.
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| Luca Giordano's restored Samaritan Woman at the Well enters the itinerary of Palazzo Grimani in Venice |
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