SPAGNOLETTO, Jusepe de Ribera, called Lo. - Painter, b. at Játiva (Spain) on 12 January 1588, d. at Posillipo (Naples) on 2 September 1652.
As an adolescent, in Valencia he was drawn to the works of Francisco Ribalta, the leading exponent of Valencian painting of the time, who tempered his innate realism with the teaching of the Carracci, which he had observed during a journey to Italy. R. too soon went to Italy; first to Rome, where on account of his dissolute life he received the name Spagnoletto, and then, in 1616, after travelling in northern Italy (to Parma, Padua and elsewhere) and having admired Correggio, Titian, Veronese (of whom it appears that he copied 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 Duke of Osuna and of his successors. In 1626 he was elected a member of the Roman Academy of St. Luke. The naturalistic tendency, to which Ribalta had directed him, grew stronger in Italy through contact with the painting of Caravaggio, which he nevertheless interpreted in a personal way, with an unusual richness of chromatic substance, perhaps derived from the painting of Bassano, in the ostentatious imitation of the most minute and sensual details (cf. the figures of the shepherds in the Adoration of the Shepherds [1650] in the Louvre). To this he adds a vehement and dramatic lighting, in keeping with the subjects treated, in which impassioned emphasis and gloomy asceticism (typical is the St. Mary of Egypt in the Borghese Gallery in Rome) rarely alternate with the Baroque pietism of Bolognese origin. He approaches the Emilian school, moreover, in the blond and transparent tonalities of a Correggesque character in certain of his paintings, such as the St. Agnes in Dresden (1641), in the rhythmic elegance of certain figures inspired by the academic beauty of Reni, such as the Dead Adonis in the National Gallery of Ancient Art in Rome, the Apollo and Marsyas in Brussels, the St. Sebastian in the Hermitage, as well as in the bemused 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 Stories of the Life of St. Ignatius in the Gesù Nuovo in Naples, in which a Correggism tempered by Venetian manners predominates) and undergo no substantial changes in the course of his prolific activity. A creator of vigorously realistic figures, which he represents full-length or half-length, isolated within the field of the picture (Archimedes, 1630, Madrid, Prado; St. Peter, Diogenes, Dresden; St. Mary of Egypt, 1641, Montpellier, Museum, akin to the aforementioned one in the Borghese Gallery in Rome; the Clubfoot, 1642, Paris, Louvre), he reaches his masterpiece in the powerful twelve Prophets of the Charterhouse of St. Martin in Naples (1638-1643). And although he rarely indulges in complex compositions, he nevertheless also produces notable works in this field, such as the Martyrdom of St. Andrew in the Museum of Budapest (1628) and the famous Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew (1630) in the Prado. Also to be remembered are: The Drunken Silenus (1626, Naples, Picture Gallery), the St. Jerome with the Angel (ibid.), the Pietà (1637) and the Communion of the Apostles (1651), in the Charterhouse of St. Martin: works that help to establish the influence of S. on Neapolitan painting of the 1600s and in particular on Stanzione, on Andrea Vaccaro, on Francesco Francanzano, on G. B. Ruoppolo. - See pl. LXXII.
Bibliography7 works
Amalia Mezzetti