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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.