Works by Jusepe de Ribera
109 works · 146 msIn Rome and Naples, Jusepe de Ribera took fishermen, dockworkers, beggars and the old as models for his apostles, saints and philosophers, wrinkles, rags and all.
A shoemaker's son from Játiva in Spain, he was paid for a painting for a church in Parma in 1611, was a member of Rome's Accademia di San Luca by 1613 and in 1616 settled for good in Naples, then a Spanish possession. His contemporaries called him Lo Spagnoletto, the Little Spaniard, and from Naples he signed himself "Jusepe de Ribera, español", as at the lower right of The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of 1634. There the saint, tied up by one wrist, turns his face to the light while the man beside him holds a knife against a sharpening rod.
Religious and mythological subjects fill most of the works below, and far more of them show men than women. Saint Andrew, of about 1631, is an old man bared to the waist, with slack skin over his ribs and one hand on the wooden cross behind him. Most of his best etchings date from 1620 to 1626, made partly to win notice outside Naples. In Saint Jerome, of about 1620, the saint lifts a hand as an angel blows a long trumpet over his head, with a skull, books and a lion at his side. Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband and Son of 1631 is stranger: a woman with a full black beard nurses a baby while her husband stands in the shadows, and a Latin inscription fills the stone blocks beside them.
Sources: Wikipedia, Museo del Prado, Museo Fundación Lerma, Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Art.
