Art History for Dummies by Wilder Jesse Bryant;

Author:Wilder, Jesse Bryant; [Wilder, Jesse Bryant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2022-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Ribera and Zurbarán: In the shadow of Caravaggio

Like so many other artists of the time, Jusepe (or José) de Ribera (1591–1652) went to Rome, the art capital of the western world, to study painting in about 1613. Later, he moved to Naples where he remained for the rest of his life. While in Rome, Ribera became an ardent disciple of Caravaggio. Like the Italian master, Ribera used striking contrasts between light and dark and chiaroscuro to heighten the drama in his paintings.

Counter-Reformation clergy and political leaders often commissioned paintings of martyrs to inspire Catholics not to lose their faith and to attract Protestants back to the Catholic fold. Like Caravaggio,

Ribera typically used street people as models for his martyrs, giving his religious paintings an earthy look. Ribera’s St. Jerome (the fourth- to fifth-century author of the Latin or Vulgate Bible) has an emaciated, been-through-it-all body. Similarly, in his The Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew (the 1634 version in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), he depicts a careworn, rustic-looking saint confronted by a coarse executioner who looks like a Mafia hit man.

Ribera dramatizes the events he paints, in this case, by having the saint spread his old but muscular arms heroically to accept the blade of his brutal executioner. St. Bartholomew was flayed alive.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.