Of the 302 works collected by Francisco de Benavides Dávila y Corella, IX Count of Santisteban, during his viceroyalty of Naples, 42 were devotional images with portraits or stories of saints, rising to 66 if we add those of saints and blessed, of which 18 were attributed by the inventories to Luca Giordano. Among them, Italian saints and founders of monastic orders predominated (Cerezo, 2005).
In this work Giordano depicts the founder of the Order of Preachers in apotheosis, above the clouds and surrounded by angels. In his depiction, the artist emphasises the characteristic that the Counter-Reformation church most appreciated in this order: its role in defending the doctrine of the Church by providing numerous theologians for the inquisitorial tribunals and for drawing up the index of banned books. He represents this idea with a brightly coloured angel holding up an open, spotless book - presumably the Bible, one of the saint's traditional attributes - which contrasts diagonally with the shredded, flaming leaves and books enveloping the figure who covers his face, an idea that is reinforced by painting one of his iconographic attributes at the saint's foot: a dog with a torch in its mouth which, on the one hand, recalls the dream his mother had and which Saint Dominic of Silos interpreted as the light that the child would give to the world with his preaching and, on the other, recalls the false etymology that attributes the name of the order to its condition of "dogs of the Lord" or "Domini canis". In the opposite corner, an angel carries a white lily, another of his usual attributes.
