Sir Flinders Petrie, who did more than any other scholar to bring Ancient Egypt and Palestine alive for us, once remarked that the perpetual joy of being a historian is that, whereas most of mankind are confined to one plane, the present, those who study the past have the freedom to sample life on all. It is like being in possession of a time machine, without any of its dangers. Many times and places thus beckon me, but today I am setting its controls to ‘Naples in the 17th century’.
It was an amazing place, probably the most populous city on earth, with nearly half a million inhabitants, and certainly the most crowded. The policy of the Spanish viceroys, to underpin their rule, was to force the nobility of the region to live and build themselves houses there, with countless peasants following in their wake. The rules obliging all to live within the city walls were strictly enforced. Only about one in five Neapolitans had regular employment, and this was the cause of Masaniello’s revolt of 1647, followed by a massacre, an event celebrated in Auber’s superb opera, La Muette de Portici. There were other disasters: earthquakes, fires, huge eruptions of Vesuvius and, above all, the plague of 1656, which killed 250,000 people. The corpses were piled up in a square just outside the walls, and then carried away to pits by convicts and the city’s 10,000 Turkish slaves using long pitchforks.
Despite, perhaps because of, such horrors, Naples was the busiest artistic centre in Europe. The urbanised nobility built and decorated lavish townhouses. There were 20,000 clergy in the city and during the century 500 churches and convents were updated, extended or built, and all decorated. The viceroys were prodigious patrons of the arts. When Count Monterey sailed back to Spain in 1637 he took with him 40 shiploads of paintings and sculpture. One of his successors, the Marquis del Carpio, commissioned or collected 1,800 canvases. City merchants, like Gaspar Roomer, were equally generous patrons. Hence artists and craftsmen came from all over the civilised world to enjoy not only lavish financial rewards but also public esteem. Painters, particularly, were worshipped by the mobs as well as the elite and like pop singers today regarded themselves as above the law. They quarrelled, fought, murdered and, to use a phrase of Mark Twain’s (about the Wild West of the 1870s), ‘kept their private graveyards’. A new school of painting emerged whose hallmark was terribilità. The fashion was introduced by Caravaggio, who visited Naples briefly, in between murders, early in the century.
The combination of Caravaggio’s influence, and the peculiar tastes of collectors, especially the viceroys and the munificent Roomer, led painters to compete furiously to produce shockers: dreadful scenes of martyrdom or biblical lubricity, catastrophic events and, above all, acts of cruelty. Giordano painted Jezebel being torn to pieces by dogs; Guarini, St Agatha after her breast had been cut off; Lanfranco, gladiators hacking each other to death at a Roman feast; Spadaro, the corpses piled high in plague square.
Taking over Caravaggio’s role as inspirer and leader of the terribilità school was Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652). Born in Spain, he made his home in Naples where he was known as Lo Spagnoletto, ‘the little Spaniard’. He had an extraordinary skill in depicting in paint both extreme cruelty and the agony it provokes. His tormentors drool with delight, his victims scream from the canvas. He specialised in elaborate and painful martyrdoms and did all the usual massacre and decollection scenes, but introduced two shocking specialities of his own: Apollo skinning alive Marsyas and Ixion chained to the perpetually revolving wheel. The first, still in Naples at the Museo Nazionale, shocks us even today with Apollo’s complacent acceptance of Marsyas’s agony, while onlookers block their ears to deaden the screams. The Ixion, now in the Prado, shows the punishment inflicted on him for seducing Judo and features a devilish torturer of mesmeric repellence.
Ribera’s imagination and skill made him the most favoured exponent of the terribilità school, both with viceroys and with private collectors. But he was more than that. Violent and ruthless himself, he emerged as leader of the Naples artistic mafiosi who determined who did or did not get the best commissions, especially in the chapel of Saint Gennaro in the Cathedral, housing the saint’s skull and the phial of his blood, which liquefied twice a year amid scenes of savage ecstasy. Ribera, and his two ferocious painter-lieutenants, Corenzio and Caracciolo, persecuted outsiders invited to the city. Guido Reni, then the most celebrated painter in Italy, was scared off when his assistant was virtually killed by Corenzio. Domenichino was forced into hiding and, according to his widow, poisoned by the trio. Annibale Carracci died, it was said, as a result of this harassment. So long as Ribera lived, no ‘foreign’ artist was safe within the city walls.
Yet it is a curious fact that, despite Ribera’s passion for cruelty and what has been termed ‘the poetry of the repulsive’, and his actual behaviour, he was also capable of producing works of great tenderness and beauty. His ‘St Mary of Egypt’, in the Museo Civico in Naples, is among the most moving works of the century. Some of his Magdalens are exquisite both in their ravishing beauty and their spiritual form. His ‘Holy Family’, in the Met in New York, excels even Velázquez. And Ribera could portray even the grotesque with love, as is shown by his ‘Clubfooted Boy’ in the Louvre.
An outstanding example of how Ribera could transform horror into spiritual beauty is provided by what I regard as his masterpiece, ‘Magdalena Ventura with her Husband and Son’, now in the Lerma Foundation in Toledo. This woman, an Abruzzi peasant, was brought to the Viceroy in 1630 as a remarkable phenomenon. After giving birth to two children, she suddenly sprouted a luxurious beard and hair on her chest and elsewhere. She nonetheless continued to function as a woman, bore a third child and was now suckling him. The Viceroy, the Duke of Alcalá, being a Spaniard, did not recoil in horror but accepted this singularity as the will of God, and determined to have it properly recorded by the greatest living painter (in his opinion). So Ribera was summoned to his palace and on 16 February 1631 completed a full-length double portrait of the Venturas, with the baby at her breast. It is done with absolute fidelity to nature, overwhelming compassion and grim power. The Venetian ambassador visited Ribera’s studio five days before the picture was finished, and wrote home: ‘[She] has a completely masculine face with a beautiful black beard more than a palmo long and a very hairy chest. Her Excellency wanted me to see her, thinking it was a marvellous thing, and truly it is.’ All this is confirmed by an inscription on the painting itself, which is proudly signed and dated.
Painters can be monsters in human shape, as witness Picasso, and Ribera was almost in the Picasso league for cruelty and nastiness. But the redemptive quality of great art is unfathomable in its bounty, and the ways of Almighty God are beyond our comprehension. Here we have a wonderful instance of both, and it is a pity this astonishing work is not more widely known.
Comments