SPAGNOLETTO, JUSEPE DE RIBERA, known as lo. — Painter, born in Jativa (Spain) on 12 January 1588, died at Posillipo (Naples) on 2 September 1652.
As an adolescent, in Valencia he was drawn to the works of Francesco Ribalta, the leading exponent of Valencian painting of the period, who tempered innate realism with the teaching of the Carracci, whom he had observed during a journey in Italy. R. too went to Italy soon afterward; first to Rome, where his Bohemian way of life earned him the name Spagnoletto, and then, in 1616, after travelling through northern Italy (to Parma, Padua, and elsewhere) and admiring Correggio, Tiziano, Veronese (whom he is known to have copied in a painting at Padua), and the other Venetians, he settled in Naples, where he married the daughter of a local painter and enjoyed the protection of the viceroy, the duke of Osuna, and of his successors. In 1626 he was elected a member of the Roman Accademia di S. Luca. The naturalistic tendency to which Ribalta had directed him was strengthened in Italy through contact with the painting of Caravaggio, which he nevertheless interpreted in a personal manner, with an unusual richness of chromatic pigment, perhaps drawn from the painting of Bassano, in the ostentatious imitation of the minutest and most sensual details (cf. the figures of the shepherds in the Adorazione dei pastori [1650] in the Louvre). To this he added a vehement and dramatic illumination, corresponding to the subjects treated, in which passionate emphasis and sombre asceticism (typically, the S. Maria Egiziaca in the Galleria Borghese in Rome) only rarely alternate with the Baroque pietism of Bolognese origin. He nevertheless approached the Emilian school in the blond, transparent, Correggesque tonalities of certain paintings, such as the S. Agnese in Dresden (1641); in the rhythmic elegance of certain figures inspired by the academic beauty of Reni, such as the Adone morto in the Galleria nazionale d'arte antica in Rome, the Apollo e Marsia in Brussels, and the S. Sebastiano in the Hermitage; and also in the doll-like sweetness of certain Madonnas.
These stylistic features of S. appear fully defined from his earliest works (the Osuna paintings for the collegiate church of Osuna in Andalusia, 1616; and those with the Storie della vita di s. Ignazio in the Gesù Nuovo in Naples, in which a Correggesque manner tempered by Venetian modes predominates) and undergo no substantial changes during the course of his prolific activity. A creator of vigorously realistic figures, which he represents either full-length or half-length, isolated within the field of the painting (Archimede, 1630, Madrid, Prado; S. Pietro, Diogene, Dresden; S. Maria Egiziaca, 1641, Montpellier, Museum, akin to the one cited from the Galleria Borghese in Rome; Pie' storto, 1642, Paris, Louvre), he achieves his masterpiece in the powerful twelve Profeti of the Certosa di S. Martino in Naples (1638–1643). And although he rarely undertook complex compositions, he nevertheless produced notable works in this field as well, such as the Martirio di s. Andrea in the Budapest Museum (1628) and the famous Martirio di s. Bartolomeo (1630) in the Prado. Also worthy of mention are: Il Sileno ebbro (1626, Naples, Pinacoteca), the S. Gerolamo con l'Angelo (there), the Pietà (1637), and the Comunione degli Apostoli (1651), in the Certosa di S. Martino: works that helped establish S.’s influence on seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting, and in particular on Stanzione, Andrea Vaccaro, Francesco Francanzano, and G. B. Ruoppolo. — Vedi tav. LXXII.