Ribera jusepe de biography sample

Biography

José (or Jusepe) de Ribera, Spanish painter, etcher, and draughtsman, active for all his known career in Italy, where he was called 'Lo Spagnoletto' (the Little Spaniard).

Little is known of his life before he settled in Naples (at the time a Spanish possession) in 1616. Naples was then one of the main centres of the Caravaggesque style, and Ribera is often described as one of Caravaggio's followers.

However, although his early work is markedly tenebrist, it is much more individual than that of most Caravaggesque artists, particularly in his vigorous and scratchy handling of paint.

Ribera jusepe de biography sample

Similarly, his penchant for the typically Caravaggesque theme of bloody martyrdom has been overplayed, enshrined as it is in Byron's lines: 'Spagnoletto tainted/His brush with all the blood of all the sainted' (Don Juan, xiii.

71). He undoubtedly painted some powerful pictures of this type, notably the celebrated Martyrdom of St Bartholomew (Prado, Madrid, c. 1630), but he was equally capa