SPAGNOLETTO, JUSEPE de RIBERA, known as lo. — Painter, b. at Játiva (Spain) on 12 Jan. 1588, d. at Posillipo (Naples) on 2 Sept. 1652.
As a youth, in Valencia he was drawn to the works of Francisco Ribalta, the leading exponent of Valencian painting at the time, who combined the then-unknown realism with the teachings of the Carracci, which he had observed during a trip to Italy. Ribera too soon went to Italy; first to Rome, where he earned the name Spagnolettto because of his fiery temperament, and then, in 1616, after traveling in northern Italy (to Parma, Padua and elsewhere) and admiring Correggio, Titian, Veronese (of whom he is known to have copied a painting in Padua) and the other Venetians, he settled in Naples. There he married the daughter of a local painter and enjoyed the protection of the Viceroy, the Duke of Osuna, and 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, whom he interpreted in his own way, with an unusual richness of chromatic texture, perhaps drawn from the painting of Bassano, in the ostentatious rendering of the minutest and most sensual details (cf. the figures of the shepherds in the *Adoration of the Shepherds* [1650] in the Louvre). To this he added a vehement and dramatic illumination, in keeping with the subjects he treated, in which passionate emphasis and dark asceticism (typical of the *St Mary of Egypt* in the Galleria Borghese in Rome) rarely alternate with the Baroque piety of Bolognese origin. To the Emilian school, however, he drew near 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, as in the *Dead Adonis* in the Galleria nazionale d’arte antica in Rome, the *Apollo and Marsyas* in Brussels, the *St Sebastian* in the Hermitage, and in the immaculate sweetness of certain Madonnas.
These stylistic features of Ribera’s appear fully defined even in 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 Correggesque manner is tempered by Venetian modes) and undergo no substantial changes throughout his fruitful career. Creator of vigorously realistic figures, which he represents full-length or half-length, isolated in the picture field (*Archimedes*, 1630, Madrid, Prado; *St Peter, Diogenes*, Dresden; *St Mary of Egypt*, 1641, Montpellier, Museum, akin to that cited from the Galleria Borghese in Rome; *Peter*, 1642, Paris, Louvre), he reached his masterpiece in the powerful twelve *Prophets* in the Certosa di S. Martino in Naples (1638–43). And although he rarely indulged in complex compositions, he also produced notable works in this field, such as the *Martyrdom of St Andrew* in the Budapest Museum (1628) and the famous *Martyrdom of St Bartholomew* (1630) in the Prado. Also worthy of mention are: *The Drunken Silenus* (1626, Naples, Pinacoteca), *St Jerome with the Angel* (there), the *Pietà* (1637) and the *Communion of the Apostles* (1651) in the Certosa di S. Martino: works which helped to establish Ribera’s influence on 17th-century Neapolitan painting and in particular on Stanzione, Andrea Vaccaro, Francesco Francanzano and G. B. Ruoppolo. — See pl. LXXII.