Word: ribera
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...smaller, edited version of the exhibition that was seen in 1982 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It contains many loans of the first importance, from Caravaggio's altarpiece of The Seven Acts of Mercy to groups of work by Mattia Preti and Jusepe de Ribera, along with many remarkable paintings by lesser-known artists...
...very surprising to learn that Ribera and two painter friends (Battistello Caracciolo and Corenzio) ran what amounted to an artists' Mafia in Naples, grabbing the commissions for themselves and frightening rivals with bloodcurdling threats. Poor Domenichino, the Bolognese master who had been invited to decorate the chapel of St. Gennaro in Naples' cathedral, rushed back to Rome in a state of collapse after hearing from this cabal. Grand Guignol abounded, especially in details like the amputated hand in the foreground of Massimo Stanzione's Massacre of the Innocents, which seems ready to scuttle away, like a pink...
...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...
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...