Word: ribera
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this gave an eclectic tone to Venetian art. With no dominant brush to impose its presence, as Titian's had, almost anything went -remnants of international mannerism. Venetian color, quotations from Roman or Flemish Baroque, borrowings from the new realism of Caravaggio and his great Spanish follower, Ribera. The city was visited by geniuses, like the young Rubens; but its art colony consisted mainly of third-rate painters turning out ragged marsh peasants, holy Virgins with the rolling eyeballs of mad colts, and wardrobe-like, impermeable nudes...
Quite a few are: there are five other Velásquezes and five major El Grecos, including that overwhelming trumpet voluntary, the Prado's huge Annunciation of 1600. There are works by Francisco Ribalta and his great junior Jose de Ribera, a group of paintings by Zurbarán-including an exquisite still-life of cream and ocher pots drawn up like liturgical vessels on a table...
...small, provincial place in 1650. Its economy was chaotic, its empire was fraying, the royal treasury was near bankruptcy and state policies were mostly devised by knaves or fossils. Art patronage was erratic, and to learn any thing about the "mainstream," a young painter of talent like Ribera or Murillo had to spend long stretches abroad...
Cyclopean Breast. Even when a Spanish painter lived away from Spain, he could keep a peculiarly Iberian fla vor. Such was the case with Ribera, who spent most of his working life in Italy, becoming the most gifted of Caravaggio's followers and the best artist in 17th century Naples. His portrait of Magdalena Ventura, the bearded lady of the Abruzzi, exposing one cyclopean breast as her worn husband looks on, belongs to the same Spanish tradition of dispassionate curiosity about freaks as Velasquez's court dwarfs and idiots...
...Penitent Magdalene, circa 1640, with her pert mouth and enormous dark eyes, is in effect a maja. But the high point of Ribera's career is the great Calvary from Osuna, never displayed before outside Spain (see color opposite...