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Spain was a small, provincial place in 1650. Its economy was chaotic, its empire was fraying, the royal treasury was near bankruptcy and state policies were mostly devised by knaves or fossils. Art patronage was erratic, and to learn any thing about the "mainstream," a young painter of talent like Ribera or Murillo had to spend long stretches abroad.
But provincial beginnings often confer a certain intensity on painters. The eye becomes obsessive, prehensile. Sanchez Cotán was a cloistered monk who never went outside Spain—but his Bodegon of vegetables (see color overleaf) is one of the most remarkable still-lifes ever painted. Each form—the ribbed curves of the cardoon stalks, the fleshy convolutions of the hanging cabbage, the ragged lace of the lettuce—is rendered with breathtaking economy. The picture is a lesson in ideal vegetarian geometry, with the slice of lemon and the slender cones of carrots occupying space like Renaissance mathematical models. At the same time, the darkness (coupled with the close focus) gives the objects a painful density. The hanging lemon seems ready to explode. One will see few still-lifes like this until the 20th century, when another Spaniard—Picasso—would give their components a similar energy, distinctness and isolation.
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.
His 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).
During the Peninsular War, French soldiers used it for target practice. It is a wreck, blackened and blistered: but of what a vessel! Spanish religious painting takes on the grand rhetoric, the "mighty line" of Marlowe: the arc of stricken figures at the foot of the cross, its profile ending in a folded blaze of green, gold brocade and crimson; the faces of weeping women, smeared and half eroded by darkness; the immense twisted figure of Christ, "quoted" from a Michelangelo drawing, that rises on the cross. Even if there were nothing else in the Royal Academy, this painting alone would justify the show.
Robert Hughes