A little beyond the middle of the 17th century, Luca Giordano began to flourish in Naples. This master, though he did not excel his contemporaries in his style, surpassed them all in good fortune, for which he was indebted to his vast talents, confidence, and unbounded powers of invention, which Maratta considered unrivalled and unprecedented. In this he was eminently gifted by nature from his earliest youth. Antonio, his father, placed him first under the instructions of Ribera, and afterwards under Cortona in Rome,[121] and having conducted him through all the best schools of Italy, he brought him home rich in designs and in ideas. His father was an indifferent painter, and being obliged in Rome to subsist by his son's labours, whose drawings were at that time in the greatest request,[122] the only principle that he instilled into him was one dictated by necessity, despatch. A humorous anecdote is related, that Luca, when he was obliged to take refreshments, did not retire from his work, but, gaping like a young bird, gave notice to his father of the calls of hunger, who, always on the watch, instantly supplied him with food, at the same time reiterating with affectionate solicitude, _Luca fa presto_. Upon this incident he was always afterwards known by the name of _Luca fa presto_, among the students in Rome, and which is also his most frequent appellation in the history of the art. By means like these, Antonio acquired for his son a portentous celerity of hand, from which quality he has been called _il Fulmine della pittura_. The truth however is, that this despatch was not derived wholly from rapidity of pencil, but was aided by the quickness of his imagination, as Solimene often observed, by which he was enabled to ascertain, from the first commencement of his work, the result he proposed to himself, without hesitating to consider the component parts, or doubting, proving, and selecting like other painters. He also obtained the name of the Proteus of painting, from his extraordinary talent in imitating every known manner, the consequence of his strong memory, which retained every thing he had once seen. There are numerous instances of pictures painted by him in the style of Albert Durer, Bassano, Titian, and Rubens, with which he imposed on connoisseurs and on his rivals, who had more cause than any other persons to be on their guard against him. These pictures are valued by dealers at more than double or triple the price of pictures of his own composition. There are examples of them even in the churches at Naples; as the two pictures in the style of Guido at S. Teresa, and particularly that of the Nativity. There is also at the court of Spain a Holy Family, so much resembling Raffaello, that, as Mengs says in a letter, (tom. ii. p. 67,) whoever is not conversant with the quality of beauty essential to the works of that great master, would be deceived by the imitation of Giordano.