Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652

The idea of an exhibition devoted to Jusepe de Ribera, o Lo Spagnoletto as he was popularly known, has been long in realizing. As far back as 1973 Jonathan Brown organized a ground-breaking exhibition at Princeton and Harvard that was devoted to Ribera as printmaker and draftsman. Then, in 1982, Craig Felton and William Jordan mounted a fine monographic exhibition of thirty-nine paintings at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Concurrently, the Royal Academy in London presented a remarkable survey of seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting, which was followed two years later by the opulent Civilità del Seicento a Napoli, held at Capodimonte. If Ribera's status as the undisputed protagonist of Neapolitan painting had ever been in doubt, it was no longer. Indeed, to many it seemed that Ribera emerged from these exhibitions as not simply the greatest Neapolitan artist of his age but one of the outstanding European masters of the seventeenth century (his pivotal role in Spanish art is the subject of an illuminating essay in this catalogue by Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez). That he had never been the subject of a comprehensive exhibition seemed inexcusable. To commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Ribera's birth, the Beni Artitisic e Storici and the Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte in Naples and the Museo del Prado in Madrid, along with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, mounted an exhibition that would fully investigate the remarkable range of his work. A selection of Ribera's paintings specific to each venue (Naples, Madrid, and New York) according to space constraints and audience, the full range of his etchings, and a select group of his drawings are included in this publication celebrating the exhibition, along with essays on varied aspects of Ribera's oeuvre. [This book was originally published in 1992 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]