"In 2014, at the suggestion of Ian Kennedy, Jeffrey Wilcox -- then registrar of the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, Columbia -- sent me images of a powerful David with the Head of Goliath. I realized immediately that the artist of the painting was Andrea Vaccaro, a seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter, who lived from 1604 to 1670. In January 2015, I presented a lecture, titled Framing Andrea Vaccaro's David. In this article I repeat some of the arguments I offered in my lecture, and I expand my views on Andrea Vaccaro's early career, a difficult issue despite the recent interest of various scholars, including myself."--First paragraph. ; Includes bibliographical references