Philosopher

(Jusepe de Ribera)

Jusepe de Ribera was baptised on 17 February 1591 in Játiva, in the province of Valencia, but left Spain for Italy when very young, perhaps specifically to train as a painter. He seems to have arrived in Rome already by 1605;[1] his first recorded activity, however, was in 1611, up in Parma where he was painting altarpieces at the behest of Mario Farnese, Duke of Latera. Such favour cannot have been won overnight; Ribera must by then, when still only twenty years old, have amassed a seriously impressive body of work. Undoubtedly, his talent was prodigious and, soon enough, everyone, including the aged Ludovico Carracci back in Bologna, was taking note of it.[2]

In 1616 Ribera moved to Naples, a city rich in opportunities for soliciting the patronage of Spanish dignitaries. From that point his artistic progress is relatively easy to chart, since he stayed put and established a most successful studio, producing so many pictures that his influence spread not just locally, but back to the land of his birth where the tenebrist style was to become increasingly popular. Yet until quite recently, little was known about what Ribera had done before, over that youthful decade or so when he was based in Rome. Gradually it has come to be accepted that many of Ribera’s earliest works, made in another particular style, had been misattributed to a supposedly different artist, the ‘Master of the Judgement of Solomon’, so named by Roberto Longhi for a powerful painting of that subject in the Galleria Borghese.[3]

Crucial to Gianni Papi’s proving the theory – that the paintings attributed to the Master of the Judgement of Solomon actually all came from one brief moment in Ribera’s unique stylistic development  – was the re-examination of near-contemporary inventories of Roman collections, where a whole range of still-identifiable paintings had originally been listed as by Ribera.[4] One of those was the Beggar in the Villa Borghese, which had more recently been attributed instead to various Netherlandish artists – all of whom were, presumably, most inspired by Ribera – until Papi noticed that it exactly matched the description of a work by Ribera himself that Scipione Borghese owned.[5]

And that unprecedentedly direct and sympathetic depiction of an unfortunate – might Velázquez have seen it during his first stay in Rome and called it to mind later when painting his dwarfs and buffoons? – happens to compare best with the Philosopher presented here.[6] The scale of the figure is the same, as is his slight turn of the head, to make the expression in the eyes all the more engaging. The brushstrokes also move at the same phenomenal pace, especially in the clothes; and the same earthy palette was used, incorporating the warm ground colour to unifying effect (exactly how Giulio Mancini told us that Ribera worked up his pictures).

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Old Roman inventories describe various paintings by Ribera that could have been this one. ^[7]  Yet the attribution is really proven not by any single document, but stylistically and, most curiously, by the figure here depicted. For this completely bald, wide eared, bony nosed, wrinkly little man is immediately recognisable from a number of Ribera’s other now-identified Roman paintings, including that Borghese Judgement of Solomon, but partially obscured there at far right. In the Susanna and the Elders in the San Diego Museum of Art, he looms menacingly over a parapet; in the Christ Among the Doctors in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Langres, he is caught In conversation just behind the main action; in the Denial of St Peter in the Palazzo Corsini, Rome, he points an accusatory finger; and in a newly discovered Christ Crowned with Thorns, offered by Rob Smeets Gallery, his offensive profile is effectively contrasted with that of the young, resigning Jesus.[8] He also appeared alone elsewhere, as the flayed St Bartholomew on a canvas once part of a series of Apostles painted for a Spanish diplomat in Rome named Pedro Cosida, but now belonging to the Fondazione Longhi, Florence; and as St Gregory the Great in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome – by this point, clearly, we are trusted to know him just by the back of his head! However, not even in these last two instances did he appear quite as self-possessed, as in our Philosopher.

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This face reappears – albeit less characterfully – in paintings by most of Ribera’s leading contemporaries too, including Orazio Borgianni, Cecco del Caravaggio, David de Haen, and even those as far removed from the Caravaggesque school as Domenichino. But all were inspired in the first place by Guido Reni who, in c.1604-06,[9] when positioning himself as Caravaggio’s chief rival, found an old Dalmatian man down by the banks of the Tiber, brought him back to his studio and sculpted a bust with his features that came to be known as the Seneca.[10] Indeed, Reni’s treatment of this personage, though wholly naturalistic, was so noble that the sculpture was repeatedly copied – we are not sure which, if any, of the surviving versions might be original[11] – until it became fully part of the canon and was, eventually, even mistaken for a true antique.[12] Its huge significance for other artists, therefore, attests to their taking Caravaggio’s lesson as already interpreted, and refined, by Reni. Ribera was particularly impressed by the quality of Reni’s craft;[13] and he was surely also fascinated by the celebrated airs and graces of Reni’s figures, perhaps especially because he himself had no such capacity for abstracting expressions. That is what makes this Philosopher so fascinating: here Ribera paid open tribute to Reni’s accomplishment, of seemingly effortlessly elevating Caravaggio’s realism by turning such a vulgar specimen into a classical artwork, while also gently mocking it by returning the old Dalmatian man to his true ignoble self. So here he is, fashioned as a learned man of antiquity, but looking out at us knowingly, almost with a wink, to make us doubt that the optical diagrams he holds could ever have been of his own invention.

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A possible precedent for such a confrontational ‘villano che ride’ is Dosso Dossi’s Buffoon in the Galleria Estense, Modena, which, interestingly, is thought to have been in Rome back in Ribera’ time.[14] Yet Ribera’s painting was no simple exercise in rustic moralising. Fow whilst the ragged clothes may properly symbolise a stoical rejection, or surpassing, of material concerns, they could just as well belong to a modern-day down-and-out; and the bohemian hat, replete with feather and worn at a decidedly jaunty angle, further suggests vanity – so the philosopher’s expertly-painted wrinkles, deepening as he smiles, take on a new significance for us. Was Ribera, almost alone among his contemporaries,[15] thus experimenting towards a new pictorial burlesque?

In playing with our expectations, Ribera was certainly testing the sensible limits of realism as reconceived at the start of the seventeenth century. Specifically, how far can momentary, naturalistic details be let animate a picture before they contradict, or even cancel out, appropriately artistic affects? And, conversely, how far can artifice be employed – or be tolerated – before those details, as observed, come to seem pathetically nonsensical? This Philosopher seems almost to ask us that question by himself and, in so doing, he stands as an icon for that pivotal phase just after Caravaggio, which Ribera, partly in critical response to Reni, would do most to define.

[1] G. Porzio and D.A. D’Alessandro, ‘Ribera between Rome and Naples: New Documentary Evidence’, The Burlington Magazine, no. 157 (October 2015), pp.682-683.

[2] Letter to sig. Ferrante Carlo, 11 December 1618.

[3] For the first elaboration on the Master of the Judgement of Solomon, see R. Longhi, ‘Ultimi studi sul Caravaggio e la sua cerchia’, Proporzioni, I (1943), p. 58. For the first major challenge to that theory, see G. Papi, ‘Jusepe de Ribera a Roma e il Maestro del Giudizio di Salomone’, Paragone, LIII, No. 44 (629) (July 2002), pp.21-43.

[4] Ibid. Ribera’s early paintings seem to have been especially popular with Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani and his brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani the papal treasurer. Only Caravaggio’s name appeared more often than Ribera’s in the post-mortem inventory of Vincenzo’s collection (into which Benedetto’s had previously been absorbed).

[5] Ibid., pp.26-27.

[6] The painting was published in N. Spinosa, Il Maestro degli Annunci ai pastori e i pittori dal “tremendo impasto” (Napoli 1625-1650) (Rome: Ugo Bozzi Editore, 2021), p.219, cat.D9. It was also the subject of an extended essay by J. Willer in Jusepe de Ribera: A Roman Philosopher (London: The Matthiesen Gallery, 2022). It has now been catalogued by M.C. Terzaghi in A. Lemoine and M. Metz (eds.), exh. cat. Ribera: Ténebres et Lumière (Paris: Petis Palais, 2024-25), pp.60-61, cat.6.

[7] For example, in the 1638 Giustiniani inventory was listed a painting by ‘Spagnoletti’ (Ribera’s nickname) of an uncouth, grinning peasant shown at half-length, holding up an illustrated page and with various other books on a table. For which, see L. Salerno, ‘The Picture Gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani II: The Inventory, Part I’, The Burlington Magazine, 102, no.684 (March 1960), p.103. We are grateful to Florent de Vernejoul for drawing attention to this.

For another, in the 1620 inventory of Duke Giovan Angelo Altemps was listed a painting of an old beardless philosopher with two books and a cap on his head, measuring about 4 palmi. For which, see Terzaghi in Lemoine and Metz, Ribera, p.60.

[8] The painting was first identified in G. Porzio, ‘Un’aggiunta per il tempo romano di Ribera’, Storia dell’arte in tempo reale (20 April 2022).

[9] That date has always seemed likeliest, but can now be confirmed, since Ludovico Cardi, ‘il Cigoli’, seems faithfully to have copied the Seneca bust into his signed and dated 1607 altarpiece of the Third Appearance of Christ to St Peter, now in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

Cigoli was the most eminent representative of the Florentine School in Rome; and that an artist of his stature was by 1607 paying tribute to Reni’s bust implies that its fame was already secure.

[10] C.C. Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice: Vite de’ Pittori Bolognesi (Bologna: 1678), II, p.82.

[11] The terracotta version in the Palazzo di Venezia, Rome, is perhaps the best known.

[12] The fascinating story of the sculpture’s fame has been told many times. See O. Kurz, ‘A Sculpture by Guido Reni’, The Burlington Magazine, 81, No. 474 (September 1942), pp. 222-26; S. Pierguidi, ‘Il “Seneca” di Guido Reni e il dibattito sul primato tra Naturale e Antico’, Strenna storica bolognese, 65 (2015), pp.363-377; V. Farina, Al sole e all’ombra di Ribera (Questioni di pittura e disegno a Napoli nella prima metà del Seicento) (Castellamare di Stabia: Eidos Longobardi, 2014), pp. 72-97; J. Willer, Jusepe de Ribera: A Roman Philosopher, pp.22-31; Y. Primarosa, ‘«Due teste fatte per studio»: Un dipinto inedito di Orazio Borgianni e la fortuna del «Seneca» di Guido Reni’, in G. Papi and Y. Primarosa (eds.), Orazio Borgianni: Bilanci e nuovi orizzonti (Rome: Officina Libraria, 2022), pp.36-49.

[13] As already explored in detail by Farina and Willer. See n.12 above.

[14] Probably in the collection of Cardinal Alessandro d’Este. For which see P. Humfrey in P. Humfrey, M. Lucco and A. Bayer (eds.), exh. cat. Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), pp.86-88, cat.2

[15] Perhaps only Angelo Caroselli, in the post-Caravaggesque world, had such a sense of mischief about picture-making.