Jusepe de Ribera

Jusepe or José de Ribera (b. 1591–d. 1652), nicknamed “lo Spagnoletto,” was a prolific painter, draftsman, and printmaker whose art was a vital part of the visual and intellectual cultures of both Italy and Spain in the first half of the seventeenth century. A shoemaker’s son from the city of Játiva in the Kingdom of Valencia, Ribera moved to Italy in 1606, and settled in Naples in 1616 after a period of residence in Rome and travels in Northern Italy and Emilia, including short residence in Parma. The focus of his art is the human figure, though one finds brief forays into landscape painting and brilliant passages of still life within his oeuvre. Unlike many of his peers in the ranks of elite painters in his day, he seems never to have worked in fresco. His considerable stylistic range, the evolution of his art over the four decades of his career, and the difficulties that these pose for securely delineating his catalogue, have been central preoccupations of Ribera scholarship. Literate without being literary, Ribera has next to no written legacy, but his art evinces connections to the period’s intellectual culture in several areas, including antiquarianism, natural science, theology, philosophy, and literature. Ribera enjoyed elite patronage from an early date, particularly from the Viceroys of Naples. Many of his signatures advertise both his Spanish (and Valencian) roots and his Italian credentials, as for instance he was a member of the Roman Accademia di San Luca and a Knight of the Order of Christ. His biography suggests a social standing combining highs and lows, in which the central motif is his success in establishing himself as the dominant artistic voice in the highly competitive (and by no means peripheral) context of Naples, where he became the head of a substantial workshop and trained or influenced many of the next generation’s foremost painters. The city’s status as the capital of a wealthy Spanish viceroyalty, and Ribera’s extensive work for the Spanish nobility and royal court, provided him with a highly placed audience and a considerable impact in Spain during his own lifetime. In scholarship, Ribera has often been perceived, both despite and because of his success in Italy, as exemplifying a kind of essential Spanishness and viewed through the lens of stereotypes regarding religion and violence in early modern Iberia. Such views however, coexist with a varied corpus of nuanced, substantive understandings of the artist.