(Xátiva 1591- Naples 1652)
Also known as Jusepe de Ribera or Giuseppe Ribera in Italian. He was a Spanish tenebrist painter and engraver of the 17th century. He was also called, by his contemporaries, Lo Spagnoletto, or "the little Spaniard," due to his habit of signing his works this way.
He was the son of a shoemaker, and although there is a lack of solid data regarding his artistic beginnings, it is known that he studied painting in Valencia. There, he was a disciple of F. Ribalta. However, this late indication, while not improbable, is more of a deduction than a fact, and is not corroborated by any documents or specific stylistic relationships. What Ribera may have painted at that time is completely unknown to us.
Around 1608-1610, he went to Italy, from which he would not return. It is recorded that he spent some time in Lombardy, and that in Parma he completed a public commission that led to admiration and rivalries. Thanks to recent research, we now have considerable information about his Roman period, which was previously very obscure. Ribera lived a poor and bohemian life in Rome, and for a time had to work for other established painters. He lived with his brother Juan, two years younger, who was also a painter and would later move to Naples as well. He was a member of the Academy of San Lucas, and an exceptional witness, the treatise writer G. Mancini, noted that no painter of greater natural talent had appeared in Rome for a long time, who gained great fame and whose paintings were highly valued for their resolution and color, in the manner of Caravaggio, but “more tinted and fiercer.”
In 1616, he moved to Naples, where he would reside until his death, and married the daughter of a local painter, Azzolino. Ribera quickly established himself as the most prestigious figure in the Neapolitan artistic scene, which was then becoming one of the brightest in Italy.
From Naples, his fame spread throughout Europe. A large part of his production was created for the Spanish elite that governed the Neapolitan government apparatus, especially for the viceroys, most of whom adopted him as their unofficial court painter. Through the aristocratic clientele, many of Ribera's works were concurrently sent to Spain, where they earned their author a prestige only comparable to that of Velázquez.
Ribera worked for Neapolitan churches, such as the New Jesus, Santa Trinidad de las Monjas, the chapel of San Jenaro in the cathedral, and especially the Carthusian monastery of San Martín, which houses a magnificent collection of his works (Pietà, series of Prophets, Communion of the Apostles).
Between 1620 and 1626, no paintings of his are known. However, most of his engravings, which are not inferior in technical mastery to his painted works, belong to this period.
These prints significantly contributed to spreading his fame throughout Europe: the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, engraved in 1624, was the master's most copied invention, and the series of prints made for pedagogical purposes representing details of human anatomy became, directly or through imitations, one of the most used drawing primers during the 17th and 18th centuries.
From 1626 onwards, Ribera's pictorial development can be followed closely, as from that moment, we have signed and dated paintings of his from almost every year. The largest section of his catalog consists of religious subjects: characters or scenes from the Old Testament; isolated figures of saints, among which those of penitents are very abundant; scenes of miracles and martyrdoms, in which, contrary to what has been said, the painter only shows bloodshed, preferring to capture the moments that precede or follow the actual torture; episodes from the New Testament… These themes are not evenly distributed over time, but their relative frequency is closely related to the stylistic and spiritual evolution of the artist.
The alliance of violent contrasts of light, hard plasticity, infallible accuracy in the microscopic description of details, and a tendency towards compositional monumentality, characteristic of Ribera before approximately 1634, shows from then on assimilations of “neo-Venetianism” and Bologna influences.
It is an evolution that, without abandoning naturalistic positions, tends towards a more or less solar painting, less laden with matter, and open to full Baroque. This orientation is simultaneously concretized in an iconographic repertoire that increasingly accommodates and delights in pleasant subjects, and is also revealed in the different tone of sentiment that resides in austere themes.
Ribera also cultivated themes of mythology, sometimes with demystifying and ironic accents akin to those of Velázquez; others adopting traditional humanist emphasis; in some paintings of this genre, he developed the motif of physical sensation with impressive rawness.
Ribera's taste for the characteristic and the popular, for individuals of flesh and blood, found a much freer field for expression than in religious or mythological subject painting in the series of Philosophers, picturesque evocations of wise figures from classical antiquity, and in representations of beggars and other types of surrounding life, which constitute one of the most attractive aspects of his production: The Muscatel Drinker, The Merry Drinker, The Girl with the Tambourine, and The Boy with the Pot.
Also known as Jusepe de Ribera or Giuseppe Ribera in Italian. He was a Spanish tenebrist painter and engraver of the 17th century. He was also called, by his contemporaries, Lo Spagnoletto, or "the little Spaniard," due to his habit of signing his works this way.
He was the son of a shoemaker, and although there is a lack of solid data regarding his artistic beginnings, it is known that he studied painting in Valencia. There, he was a disciple of F. Ribalta. However, this late indication, while not improbable, is more of a deduction than a fact, and is not corroborated by any documents or specific stylistic relationships. What Ribera may have painted at that time is completely unknown to us.
Around 1608-1610, he went to Italy, from which he would not return. It is recorded that he spent some time in Lombardy, and that in Parma he completed a public commission that led to admiration and rivalries. Thanks to recent research, we now have considerable information about his Roman period, which was previously very obscure. Ribera lived a poor and bohemian life in Rome, and for a time had to work for other established painters. He lived with his brother Juan, two years younger, who was also a painter and would later move to Naples as well. He was a member of the Academy of San Lucas, and an exceptional witness, the treatise writer G. Mancini, noted that no painter of greater natural talent had appeared in Rome for a long time, who gained great fame and whose paintings were highly valued for their resolution and color, in the manner of Caravaggio, but “more tinted and fiercer.”
In 1616, he moved to Naples, where he would reside until his death, and married the daughter of a local painter, Azzolino. Ribera quickly established himself as the most prestigious figure in the Neapolitan artistic scene, which was then becoming one of the brightest in Italy.
From Naples, his fame spread throughout Europe. A large part of his production was created for the Spanish elite that governed the Neapolitan government apparatus, especially for the viceroys, most of whom adopted him as their unofficial court painter. Through the aristocratic clientele, many of Ribera's works were concurrently sent to Spain, where they earned their author a prestige only comparable to that of Velázquez.
Ribera worked for Neapolitan churches, such as the New Jesus, Santa Trinidad de las Monjas, the chapel of San Jenaro in the cathedral, and especially the Carthusian monastery of San Martín, which houses a magnificent collection of his works (Pietà, series of Prophets, Communion of the Apostles).
Between 1620 and 1626, no paintings of his are known. However, most of his engravings, which are not inferior in technical mastery to his painted works, belong to this period.
These prints significantly contributed to spreading his fame throughout Europe: the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, engraved in 1624, was the master's most copied invention, and the series of prints made for pedagogical purposes representing details of human anatomy became, directly or through imitations, one of the most used drawing primers during the 17th and 18th centuries.
From 1626 onwards, Ribera's pictorial development can be followed closely, as from that moment, we have signed and dated paintings of his from almost every year. The largest section of his catalog consists of religious subjects: characters or scenes from the Old Testament; isolated figures of saints, among which those of penitents are very abundant; scenes of miracles and martyrdoms, in which, contrary to what has been said, the painter only shows bloodshed, preferring to capture the moments that precede or follow the actual torture; episodes from the New Testament… These themes are not evenly distributed over time, but their relative frequency is closely related to the stylistic and spiritual evolution of the artist.
The alliance of violent contrasts of light, hard plasticity, infallible accuracy in the microscopic description of details, and a tendency towards compositional monumentality, characteristic of Ribera before approximately 1634, shows from then on assimilations of “neo-Venetianism” and Bologna influences.
It is an evolution that, without abandoning naturalistic positions, tends towards a more or less solar painting, less laden with matter, and open to full Baroque. This orientation is simultaneously concretized in an iconographic repertoire that increasingly accommodates and delights in pleasant subjects, and is also revealed in the different tone of sentiment that resides in austere themes.
Ribera also cultivated themes of mythology, sometimes with demystifying and ironic accents akin to those of Velázquez; others adopting traditional humanist emphasis; in some paintings of this genre, he developed the motif of physical sensation with impressive rawness.
Ribera's taste for the characteristic and the popular, for individuals of flesh and blood, found a much freer field for expression than in religious or mythological subject painting in the series of Philosophers, picturesque evocations of wise figures from classical antiquity, and in representations of beggars and other types of surrounding life, which constitute one of the most attractive aspects of his production: The Muscatel Drinker, The Merry Drinker, The Girl with the Tambourine, and The Boy with the Pot.
