Baroque Futurist To Jusepe de Ribera, "the Little Spaniard," realism was the violence of cruel images

By ROBERT HUGHES

The work of Jusepe de Ribera, whose masterpieces are displayed in a new exhibition at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the very antitype of the great Matisse show 30 blocks downtown at the Museum of Modern Art: darkness, Baroque realism and a relentless admixture of piety with sadistic guignol, all done at the highest level of skill and conviction. Surprisingly, given the enormous reputation Ribera had in his day, this is the first comprehensive exhibition of his work ever held in America, or for that matter in Europe (it was previously shown in Naples and Madrid). It rounds off the series of shows by Spanish artists of the 17th and 18th centuries -- Murillo, Zurbaran, Velazquez, Goya and now lo Spagnoletto, "the Little Spaniard," as Ribera was known to his Italian admirers -- designed to close gaping holes in our collective art-historical knowledge, and to make concrete sense of the pictorial achievements of what imperial Spain called its siglo de oro, its golden century.

All Ribera's known career lies outside Spain. He emigrated to Italy, that artistic magnet of the 17th century, when he was hardly out of his teens and spent most of his life in Spanish-ruled Naples, doing commissions for the Italian church and expatriate Spanish grandees. He rapidly became the unchallenged star of Neapolitan painting and remained so until his death in 1652. Until recently, his art stayed in a sort of limbo; very few visitors to the Prado would ever turn out of the traffic stream headed for Velazquez to take a good look at the great Riberas, like The Martyrdom of Saint Philip, 1639, which hung in the corridor. This show will certainly change that, although it leaves Ribera himself still rather an indistinct figure.

Quite a lot of insignificant detail is known about Ribera, especially after he got to Naples. Of more essential matters -- what sort of training he had in Spain, what paintings influenced him as a young man -- little has been found. We know more about his shopping lists than his personality, not because Ribera was self-effacing (you would infer, from the work, a character of singular, even uncomfortable, vividness) but because artists in the 17th century rarely left the paper trail they do now.

Still, the work displays its own sources. Ribera saw, and was completely bowled over by, the work of Caravaggio, which he must have heard about in Spain though not seen until he got to Rome. This happened around 1610, the year Caravaggio died. It is hardly fanciful to suppose that Ribera, barely 20 years old and full of an expatriate's ambition, was anxious to move into the space only just vacated by this great and still controversial painter.

Other contemporaries, such as Guido Reni and Annibale Carracci, affected him deeply as well; he had worked on their turf, in Parma, before coming to Rome. It was, however, Caravaggio, the tragic realist, with his dramatically articulate figures sculpted by darkness, his appetite for common life and his candor about the apprehensible world, who had blown away the mincing academism of late mannerist art and shown the way forward to a whole generation of younger European painters, of whom Ribera was the most gifted.

An essential difference between him and Caravaggio, though, was that Ribera believed strongly in drawing for its own sake -- no drawings by Caravaggio survive -- and was a passionate student of the 16th century grand manner, whose defining masters were Michelangelo and Raphael. Their works, he said, "demand to be studied and meditated over many times. For though we now paint following a different course and method, if it is not established upon this kind of study, ((our)) painting may easily end in ruin." This is why Michelangelesque poses often recur in Ribera's early work, such as the half- ruined, still impressive Crucifixion, circa 1625, whose twisting Christ is based directly on a famous Michelangelo drawing.

Caravaggio was the first Italian painter to make still life an independent subject, and Ribera follows him. The still-life details of his paintings, the luscious precise fruit bowls and the piles of books whose every parchment page is given its own stiffness and weight -- even the yellowed skulls that remind his saints (and his audience) of their mortality -- are not so much rendered as embodied. Like Caravaggio's, his early St. Jeromes and St. Sebastians seem transfixed by light, which hits them from a single-point source. In the days before gaslight, this was known as "cellar painting" because the only way to get the effect was by putting the model in darkness with a window that let in a single ray of sun. This gave their poses and gestures both the emphasis of drama and a degree of abstraction.

In some of Ribera's more complex figure arrangements, one seems to be looking at a mechanism of limbs and torsos that have suddenly frozen in mid- action. The models are muscular and, when old, stringy. One is left in no doubt that Ribera found them on the street, in their patched, tatterdemalion clothes, and got them into the studio for a few coppers. In his early Roman allegories of the five senses, The Sense of Smell is a beggar holding up not the flower that was usual in versions of this common subject, but a cut onion, so that tears trickle from his eyes. Touch, very movingly, is a blind man feeling out the broken nose of a classical marble head, which he can just apprehend by touch, while on the table in front of him lies a painted portrait that he will never see or apprehend.

This presence of the antique, which was an obsessive and recurrent aspect of all artists' experience in Rome or Naples, surfaces elsewhere in Ribera's work, sometimes in a disguised form. Looking at the great white belly-bulge of his Drunken Silenus, 1626, one sees it as gross and comic. Yet there may be something more behind it; namely, the sarcophagus figures of Etruscan bigwigs, each displaying his un-ideal paunch, a common sight around Rome.

Ribera could reimagine the antique in terrifyingly concrete terms. Baroque painting, which aimed to make its lessons as vivid as possible, is full of cruel images, none more sadistic than Ribera's Apollo and Marsyas, which makes Titian's treatment of the same theme look almost dreamy. In the myth, Apollo, the god of music and hence of order, was challenged by the flute-playing satyr Marsyas to a contest of musical skill. The god won, and the satyr paid the penalty, which was to be flayed alive. Ribera has Marsyas tied upside down on the ground, his mouth gaping in a soundless scream; the god of order has just begun to skin his hairy leg, and is reaching into the pink, vulva-like wound with a look of calm, interested abstraction that exceeds in pure horror anything in the repertoire of Baroque floggers and crucifiers.

In general, Ribera's art drew much of its strength from the contest between the ideal and the real, the latter winning in the secular subjects, the former, though only by a nose, in the religious and mythological ones. Reality was violence and the grinding poverty of the Naples streets. When Ribera's figures smile, they reveal the worst teeth in Western art; a small gust of caries blows from the museum wall. No deformity was euphemized in those days, not the bizarre goiters and warts that Ribera liked to draw, not the clubfoot of the cheerily grinning beggar boy in the Louvre's The Clubfooted Boy, 1642, which has long been his best-known painting.

Ribera often makes you think of Goya, not just by his interest in cruelty and deformity, but in his grandeur of construction and his sense of the mysteries of human expression. As the body of St. Philip is hauled up on the Cross, like a lateen sail being hoisted by sailors, you admire the construction -- the pyramid of straining arms, the crossbar, the heroic geometry of the saint's body, the deep gulf of blue sky behind the figures. There are also premonitions of Goya in the low eyeline and the groups of figures: the Sibylline woman on the left, the whispering men on the right. Ribera was one of those artists whose work contained the future, and it is wonderful to see his work in this abundance.