Jusepe de Ribera: The Complete Story
Jusepe de Ribera was the Spaniard who ruled Naples with a paintbrush. Born near Valencia in 1591, called Lo Spagnoletto, the little Spaniard, he took Caravaggio's darkness and pushed it further into flesh, age and pain than anyone of his century.
The most feared painter in the most violent art city in Europe was also capable of its tenderest portrait of a disabled child. Both facts are the story.
Jusepe de Ribera at a glance:
1591: born in Játiva, near Valencia, a shoemaker's son.
1606 or so: leaves Spain as a teenager for Italy and never comes back, though he signs paintings español all his life.
1616: settles in Naples, marries the daughter of a painter, and starts taking the viceroys' biggest commissions.
1631: paints Magdalena Ventura, the bearded woman of the Abruzzi, for the viceroy's cabinet of wonders.
1652: dies in Naples after a decade of illness, debt and a houseful of dependents.
Valencia, Rome, Naples
Ribera left Spain young and never returned. Documented in Parma in 1611 and Rome soon after, where the Caravaggio circle marked him for life, he settled in 1616 in Naples, then a Spanish possession and the largest city in Italy.
Marrying a painter's daughter and courting the Spanish viceroys, he built the dominant workshop in the south, and his canvases sailed home to Spain by the dozen, which is why the Prado owns him in depth.
Darkness with a licence
His saints are old men with cracked hands, his martyrdoms are lit like interrogations: the Martyrdom of Saint Philip of 1639 stretches its victim across the canvas diagonals with the crowd chatting behind.
But 1626's Drunken Silenus shows the other register, mythology as sagging flesh and comedy. He signed proudly, often adding espanol, Spaniard, to the signature.
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The myth: the sadist of Naples
Because the martyrdoms are unsparing, Ribera is cast as cruelty's specialist, helped by the legend of the Cabal of Naples, the ring of local painters said to have driven rivals like Domenichino out of town with threats and sabotage.
The pictures complicate the caricature.
The Clubfoot of 1642, in the Louvre, gives a grinning street boy with a deformed foot the full length, sky backed portrait format reserved for princes; the Bearded Woman of 1631 treats a medical wonder, Magdalena Ventura nursing her child, with documentary gravity.
The realism was never mockery. It was attention.
The hard last decade
The 1640s brought illness, money trouble, and the1647 revolt of Masaniello that turned Naples upside down; family tradition added the story of his daughter and a Spanish royal bastard, Don Juan of Austria. He died in Naples in 1652, still the city's reference painter, and his manner ran forward into Neapolitan painting for a century, and back into Spain through Velazquez's generation.
Where to see Ribera
The Prado in Madrid holds the largest collection; Naples keeps him at Capodimonte and in its churches. The Louvre has The Clubfoot, and the Bearded Woman hangs in the Prado after decades in Toledo's Lerma collection.
The etchings that taught Europe
Ribera etched only a couple of dozen plates, but they traveled further than his canvases. His printed studies of eyes, ears and mouths became standard teaching sheets, copied by art students for two hundred years.
The Large Grotesque Head, a man swollen with tumors, was reprinted until the plate wore down. Painters who never set foot in Naples learned his shadows from paper.
Drawing the unspeakable
His private drawings are stranger than his paintings: men strung up by the wrists, figures tied to trees, small scenes of punishment set down with a calm, exact line.
Some were studies for martyrdoms that never became paintings. Others seem drawn for no client at all, which in a seventeenth-century workshop is the strange part.
Scholars still argue about what they were for. The honest answer is that Naples showed him these things, and he kept looking.
The bearded woman of the Abruzzi
In 1631 the viceroy of Naples sent Ribera a sitter: Magdalena Ventura, a mother from the Abruzzi who had grown a full beard in her late thirties.
Ribera painted her nursing her child, her husband half lost in shadow behind her, and a stone tablet at the right recording her case in Latin, like a medical file carved in marble.
It unsettles because it refuses to mock. She stands the way a saint stands in an altarpiece: this happened, the picture says, look properly.
The Jusepe de Ribera questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Caravaggesque saints and martyrdoms painted in Naples with unmatched realism of flesh.
Why is he called Lo Spagnoletto? The little Spaniard: born near Valencia in 1591, he worked his whole career in Italy.
What is The Clubfoot? His 1642 portrait of a disabled Naples street boy, painted with royal portrait grandeur.
When did he die? In Naples in 1652, at about 61.
Was Ribera Spanish or Italian? Born in Játiva near Valencia in 1591, he left Spain as a teenager and never returned. He still signed his canvases Jusepe de Ribera, español, from Naples, for decades.
Where is the bearded woman today? The Magdalena Ventura portrait belongs to the Medinaceli foundation and hangs in the Hospital de Tavera in Toledo. Prado exhibitions borrow it whenever they can.
More secrets to unlock
A beggar's request on a palace wall
The Clubfoot carries its own caption: the boy holds a paper reading, in Latin, give me alms for the love of God. It was painted for a viceroy's collection, meaning the grandees of Naples hung a beggar's request on their palace wall, smiling at them, at full princely scale, forever.
