Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jusepe de Ribera
Italian, Spanish; 17th-century
St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts (Exhibition: In Caravaggio's Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi)
79%
Saint Thomas. c1612. Oil on canvas
Obviously Ribera's great, but on occasion you can see in him, almost more clearly than in any of the other tenebrists, what was lost in the transition from the breakthroughs of Caravaggio to the style of "Caravaggism." Of course this painting is amazingly structured, with the rumpled cloak bodying itself out the front of the image and the hard vertical of the staff bisecting that angled ray of light and the Saint's perfect laterality undercut just slightly by the twist towards the picture plane of his right hand and the faint grin on his face and the black beady eye beneath the lightness of his forehead and his ruddy cheeks. All great, but isn't there a slight aspect of "designyness" to this? Doesn't the light coming in from the left look more like Ellsworth Kelly's aestheticism than it does Caravaggio's violent grappling with the conflicting realities of painting and what it represents? Isn't Ribera taking things about this picture for granted? (TFS, 2026)