Ribera, José (Jusepe) de (1591-1652)

Spanish painter. He was active in Italy from 1616 under the patronage of the viceroys of Naples. His early work shows the impact of Caravaggio, but his colours gradually lightened. He painted many full-length versions of saints as well as mythological figures and genre scenes, which he produced without preliminary drawing.

Although Ribera never abandoned his brown shadows, he made some progress towards richness and luminosity of colour in his mature work, of which the Martyrdom of St Bartholomew about 1639 (Prado, Madrid) is an example. One of his last paintings, Boy with a Club Foot 1652 (Louvre, Paris), is a masterpiece of realism.

Life Ribera was born near Valencia and may have studied under Francisco Ribalta in his early days, but by 1616 he had settled in Naples, where his life was mainly spent. Naples was then under Spanish rule. Many of his works went back to Spain, and he may be credited with having introduced into his native country the Caravaggesque light and shade and attitude to art.

Work Like Ribalta and in the spirit of his time and country, Ribera painted gloomy religious subjects of martyrdom and torture, though these were varied by realistic studies of common types in which the ‘naturalism’ derived from Caravaggio was opposed to the ‘idealism’ of the School of Bologna. Such studies of types (represented as celebrities of antiquity) as his Aesop and Archimedes (Prado) are in a vein that Velázquez also pursued.