TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101292/1012400.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 8.4 KB | 172 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 82

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.