JUSEPE DE RIBERA

1591 Jativa - 1652 Naples

Aesop

Oil on canvas

93.5 x 119.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Comte de Lalaing, Embassy to Madrid, and by descent;

Comte de Lalaing, Château de Zandbergen 2008

LITERATURE

14. N.Spinosa, Ribera. La Obra Completa, Fundación Arte Hispánico 2008, p.365
    

We are grateful to Prof. Nicola Spinosa for confirming the attribution on first hand inspection of the painting after its recent cleaning in 2010. The painting is one of several versions Ribera painted of Aesop and Spinosa believes this work to be entirely autograph. Spinosa notes a number of versions in his latest monograph on the painter, including the present work, which has only recently emerged from the collection in Belgium where it has been since the eighteenth century.

The ancestor of the 19th Comte de Lalaing was in the 1730s Ambassador from the Low Countries to the court of Madrid, and brought back a number of Spanish masterpieces to Flanders, including a version of Velasquez’s Los Borrachos and works by Sannchez Coello, apart from this great work by Ribera. One of the versions of the painting was done for the Spanish Viceroy, the Duque de Alcalá, and may tentatively be identified with a painting in the Escorial. (although Spinosa in 2003 concluded that this is not autograph: Ribera, Electa, 2003, p. 273). It is much obscured by centuries of varnish and dirt, and has been reduced, particularly above the head of Aesop. The present painting in this exhibition is among the strongest examples of the kind of naturalism that Ribera embraced as soon as he came to Rome in 1612, with studio lighting that emulated that which Caravaggio had employed. He even negotiated an opening in his ceiling to reproduce the overhead lighting that Caravaggio had had in the Vicolo San Biagio - the only difference was that his landlady wrote a clause in his lease that obliged him to make it good when he left, whereas Prudenzia Bruni had to sue to obtain compensation from what little in terms of goods Caravaggio had left behind when he fled to Genoa in 1605.

It is some way from the worn and patched habit that Caravaggio borrowed form Gentileschi, and which he used for the various representations of St Francis he painted in 1602/03.  And it is sometimes difficult to comprehend the meaning of these characterizations of the great minds of antiquity for the highly civilized patronage of Naples and Madrid. Compared with the saints like St. Jerome, St. Lawrence and St. Bartholomew, who had engaged so many congregations from Florence to Rome and Naples, the philosophers had a different audience, with less emphasis on the pain and suffering that seems such a day-to-day feature of the Catholic experience in Spain and the Two Sicilies. It is an extension of the incredible innovation that Caravaggio introduced when he portrayed subjects like the Capture of Christ and the Supper at Emmaus; these were representations that illustrated for the first time the crucial episodes of the gospel as they might actually have happened.

It is difficult to reconstruct the need to be accompanied by the wisdom and experience of the past, not just the lares et penates of the classical world, but the spirit of the wisdom of ages. Paolo Giovio in the sixteenth century established a collection of portraits of the good and the great, and these were acquired for the Medici, and formed the basis of the passion that Florentine collectors, especially in Rome, assembled in their palazzi, in order to give an example by their presence of some of the wisdom that they represented. Cardinal Del Monte had a series of no less that 277 portraits of unknown personalities, and this was apart from those that are individually named so there may have been as many again. The generation of Counter-Reformation zeal maintained that the closer an image was to real appearance, the more effective it would be; so the verosimile held sway especially when all that one had was the descriptions of ancient philosophers, from sources like Diogenes Laertius in the Lives of the Ancient Philosophers. These are necessarily subject to the interpretation of the painter, who endows each of them with living spirit, or what was termed optical palingenesis to arrive at the communication of the inspiration that they were perceived to have incorporated. But these individuals gave comfort to a society in which the other example was the martyrdoms and decapitations that the Christian allegory demanded to put people on the path of reflection of fear and obedience.

The right hand side of the present canvas has been damaged in the past and the figure of Aesop has evidently been cut out from its original frame. We can only surmise the event that required the painting’s hasty removal, but judging from the canvas Aesop was relined onto, it was probably as long ago as the eighteenth century. With its history originating in Spain in the 1730s, when the Comte de Lalaing was on an embassy to Madrid, it has been suggested that this may have occurred in 1734, when the Royal Palace was destroyed by fire, apparently started by the painter Jean Ranc. The version of Velasquez’s Los Borrachos that shares this history at the Château de Zandbergen, has evident sign of damage by fire. But in the case of the Ribera, the damaged areas are confined in the main to the background, and the painted features are remarkably intact and full of the kind of impasto that one looks for in Ribera in the 1620s.