Jusepe de Ribera was a Spanish painter, born near Valencia in 1591, who left Spain as a young man, settled in Naples in 1616 and died there in 1652. The Italians called him Lo Spagnoletto, the Little Spaniard. He is remembered for brutal martyrdoms, a grinning beggar boy with a deformed foot, and a bearded woman nursing her child.
He was a feared man in a violent city, and he gave the poorest faces in it the size other painters kept for princes.
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In Naples, Ribera had the reputation of a bully. Rival painters were said to have been threatened and sabotaged until they left town, and the legend named Ribera as the head of the ring, the Cabal of Naples. The paintings seemed to agree: saints hauled onto crosses, a satyr flayed alive, old men with cracked hands lit like prisoners under questioning.
Then came the boy. In 1642 Ribera painted a Neapolitan beggar with a deformed foot, standing against open sky and grinning straight at the viewer. In his hand is a scrap of paper that reads, in Latin, Give me alms, for the love of God. Ribera signed the canvas with a single Spanish word, español.
The same man who is said to have run a gang of bullies gave a street boy a canvas 164 centimeters tall, the format painters normally kept for princes. The legend of the cruel painter rests mostly on rumor. The picture hangs in the Louvre, and anyone can see how Ribera treated the poorest face in Naples.
What You'll Discover
Why he never went home.
Whether he ran a painters' gang.
Who watches his martyrdoms.
Who the grinning boy was.
What the bearded woman's tablet says.
What his etchings were for.