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.