A brilliant purveyor of dark and difficult art
‘His paintings dramatise the triumph of his own brand of Caravaggesque realism over the classical tradition’
Ribera: Art of Violence Dulwich Picture Gallery ★★★★★
Those accustomed to a certain sort of show at Dulwich Picture Gallery – cosy, respectable, polite – are in for a shock. A fortnight ago, the gallery was still celebrating 20th-century English artist Edward Bawden, in an exhibition full of watercolours and designs for wallpaper. Now comes Ribera: Art of Violence, the first ever British exhibition devoted to the 17th-century Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera – and visitors will need to be made of sterner stuff.
Executions. Public torture. Upsidedown crucifixions. Naked victims bound to the stake. Picture after grisly picture of saints or satyrs being flayed alive, their skin peeled back to reveal quivering crimson flesh beneath. And yet, despite all the savagery and gore, Ribera’s best works have, perversely, a strange beauty that is unforgettable.
Ribera was born near Valencia in 1591 but, after a stint in Rome where he was classically trained, he fetched up in Naples. He capitalised upon the vogue for shocking realism that Caravaggio had ushered in, and won patronage from viceroys, patricians, and wealthy merchants.
Indeed, he was so successful that, despite earning the nickname “lo Spagnoletto” (the little Spaniard), he did not return to his homeland, observing that “Spain is a merciful mother to foreigners but a most cruel stepmother to her own”.
Ribera could paint “nice” – his Mary Magdalene hangs in the Prado. Yet, principally, Ribera is known for his visceral martyrdoms and mythological scenes evoking suffering and pain.
According to one 17th-century writer, Ribera’s series of four paintings representing infamous sinners from ancient Greek mythology was so extreme that, after seeing one that depicted Ixion bound to a fiery wheel, the legend’s fingers “crisped with pain”, the wife of a Dutch collector gave birth to a child with deformed hands.
At Dulwich, several drawings of bound, naked men with supple musculature suggest sadomasochistic tendencies. Yet the curators of this self-contained, even sparse, exhibition discourage the voyeuristic impulse to speculate about Ribera’s biography. Instead, Edward Payne and Xavier Bray (who is now director of the Wallace Collection, but used to be Dulwich’s chief curator) remind us of Ribera’s pride in his academic training, and point out that, towards the end of his life, he was described by Neapolitan monks as “a pious person”.
Moreover, they situate Ribera’s art in the social context of 17th-century Europe, as well as contemporary aesthetic debates concerning the merits of classicism versus naturalism.
This is the lesson of the opening gallery, which contains two versions by Ribera, separated by 16 years, of the martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew. In both paintings, Ribera contrasts Bartholomew’s wrinkled, leathery skin with folds of smooth drapery that prefigure his flayed epidermis. He also turns Bartholomew’s coarse-faced executioners, wearing sweat-soaked bandannas and tattered tunics, into memorable characters.
The later painting, from Barcelona, is a compositional marvel. The prone saint’s limbs push outwards, almost touching the edges of the canvas, emphasising the intensity of his experience. Yet he appears strangely self-composed, staring straight at the viewer as one butcher-like torturer plunges a fist into his arm.
No doubt, the painting responded to the Church’s injunction to baroque artists to inspire religiosity by stirring up heated emotions. But it is evident, too, that Ribera was reflecting the violence of his times.
Two seemingly on-the-spot drawings by Ribera record a hapless offender enduring a violent form of torture known, in Italian, as “lo strappado”. Elsewhere, we find a marble head of Apollo, on loan from the British Museum, that resembles the fragmentary, decapitated bust of the Greek god that Ribera includes in both Bartholomew pictures. Surely, it refers to the pagan idols shattered by Bartholomew. But it also alludes to the Apollo Belvedere, a celebrated ancient marble sculpture that Ribera would have seen in Rome.
Thus, his paintings of Saint Bartholomew dramatise the triumph of his own brand of Caravaggesque realism over the classical tradition, represented by the head of Apollo.
Things become even more complex in the final gallery, which presents an astonishing canvas from 1637, almost cinematic in its effect, in which Apollo flays alive the satyr Marsyas as brutal punishment for having lost a musical competition between them.
Apollo gazes down almost tenderly at his victim, while probing a gaping and unmistakably vaginal wound on the satyr’s hairy leg, as though “playing” Marsyas’s body as if it were the lyre on which he has just demonstrated his musical supremacy. Meanwhile, Marsyas, red-faced and upside-down, tethered to a tree, roars with pain.
It is a ferocious vision and yet, with its allusions to music-making and creativity (Apollo was god of the arts, after all), it also feels, somehow, primal and fundamental: a mysterious meditation, perhaps, on the mechanisms of art itself. Amid the horror, Ribera could discern a rare glimpse of beauty; so much so, that he painted the subject more than once.
This is dark and difficult art, produced during a dark and difficult era. But it is also uniformly compelling, with an awareness of brutality and anguish that still resonates today.
From Sept 26 until Jan 27; information: 020 8693 5254