Natural wonders: Ribera and Ribalta
Spain was turned on to the new, naturalistic style
by a pair of artists from Valencia.The first, actually a
Catalan who moved south, was Francisco Ribalta. Late
in life Ribalta began painting figures with a detailed
naturalism, rendering folds of cloth or sinuous flesh
almost real against a dark backcloth.Cristo abrazando a
San Bernardo(1625-27) nimbly shows off his talents.
José de Ribera was even more significant. By his late
teens he’d left Valencia for Rome, soon moving on to
Spanish-ruled Naples where he spent the remainder
of his life. His work returned to the motherland with
Spanish nobles, and Velázquez, Zurbarán and other
painters back home no doubt learned from his efforts.
Early on, Ribera evoked the style of Caravaggio in
paintings likeSan Jerome(1616-20), the dramatic
religious realism, with wrinkled saint and brooding sky,
heightened by the spotlight effects ofchiaroscuro.
His later paintings were lighter; some featured heroes
contorted in pain, as in the masterfulEl martirio de San
Felipe(1639), while others, likeClubfooted Boy(1641),
had a picaresque perkiness. Some of Ribera’s work is
less easily read: make what you will ofLa Mujer
Barbuda(1631) and its depiction of a heavily bearded,
balding, rather elderly woman breastfeeding a baby.Spain’s brush with genius: Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez puts most Baroque
Spanish art in the shade. In fact, his shadow looms over
pretty much everything that came out of Spain before
Picasso. His prestige came from an unrivalled ability to
humanise portraiture, to articulate emotion in a way
that seemed to freeze a moment in time. As a teenager
in Seville Velázquez already bore a prodigious talent,
painting everyday folk, including his family, with near
flawless realism.118- Identity: the
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In his adopted homeland
of Italy, Valencian
maestro José de Ribera
was known aslo
Spagnoletto, the little
Spaniard. He had a
significant influence on
Italian painting in the
17 thcentury.
“HE WET HIS
BRUSHES IN THE
BLOOD OF SAINTS,”
said Byron of José de
Ribera. The artist
has, perhaps unfairly,
been accused of a
preoccupation with
bloody martyrdom.