Riberas Repetitions

The seventeenth-century Valencian artist Jusepe de Ribera spent most of his career in Spanish Viceregal Naples, where he was known as “Lo Spagnoletto,” or “the Little Spaniard.” Working under the patronage of Spanish viceroys, Ribera held a special position bridging two worlds. In Ribera’s Repetitions, art historian Todd P. Olson sheds new light on the complexity of Ribera’s artwork and artistic methods and their connections to the Spanish imperial project. Drawing from a diverse range of sources, including poetry, literature, natural history, philosophy, and political history, Olson presents Ribera’s work in a broad context. He examines how Ribera’s techniques, including rotation, material decay (through etching), and repetition, influenced the artist’s drawings and paintings. Many of Ribera’s works featured scenes of physical suffering—from Saint Jerome’s corroded skin and the flayed bodies of Saint Bartholomew and Marsyas to the ragged beggar-philosophers and the eviscerated Tityus. But far from being the result of an individual sadistic predilection, Olson argues, Ribera’s art was inflected by the legacies of the Reconquest of Spain and Neapolitan coloniality. Ribera’s material processes and themes were not hermetically sealed in the studio; rather, they were engaged in the global Spanish Empire. Pathbreaking and deeply interdisciplinary, this copiously illustrated book offers art history students and scholars a means to see Ribera’s art anew.

El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo--these are but a few of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists of Spain's golden age of painting. In this authoritative and handsome book, an enlarged, extended, and revised version of his Golden Age of Painting in Spain, eminent Spanish art scholar Jonathan Brown surveys the development of painting in Spain during this fascinating period. Focusing on the interaction between art and the socioeconomic and political conditions that prevailed in Spain's golden age, this book offers information about religious beliefs, social attitudes, the activities of patrons and collectors, and how these were absorbed and interpreted by painters. The author sets the history of Spanish paintings within a European context and explores Spain's contact with artistic centers in Italy and the Netherlands. He discusses not only Spanish artists but also such non-Spanish painters as Titian, Ruben, and Luca Giordano, who either worked in Spain or influenced other artists there. Brown also examines the collections of foreign paintings that Spanish noblemen and prelates assembled and how these collections affected the production of art and the social status of the Spanish artist. In this up-to-date and innovative analysis of two hundred years of Spanish painting, Brown describes a country that brilliantly transformed the artistic impulses it received from abroad to fit the needs of its own society.