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 Riberas Repetitions, art historian Todd P. Olson sheds new light on the complexity of Riberas 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 Riberas work in a broad context. He examines how Riberas techniques, including rotation, material decay (through etching), and repetition, influenced the artists drawings and paintings. Many of Riberas works featured scenes of physical sufferingfrom Saint Jeromes 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, Riberas art was inflected by the legacies of the Reconquest of Spain and Neapolitan coloniality. Riberas 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 Riberas art anew.