Word: ribera
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
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...