JUSEPE DE RIBERA, CALLED SPAGNOLETTO | Saint Lawrence

Private collection, Italy.

The following condition report is provided by Henry Gentle who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Jusepe Ribera Portrait of a monk Oil on canvas, 30" x 25", approx. The original canvas is heavily lined. The paint layer is stable and secure, but slightly raised. The paint texture , especially the brushstrokes , are well preserved. There is a restored loss to the lower right corner and along the bottom edge. Under U-V lighting small paint loss can be seen scattered across the image of the monk, most of this is confined to the face and the robe . There is the remains of an older varnish to the background and its removal would improve the overall tonality. The painting is in a good preserved condition.
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This beautiful Saint Stephen is a newly-discovered work, painted by Ribera around 1620, shortly after he had completed his canvases for one of his important early patrons, Pedro Girón, Duke of Osuna and Viceroy of Naples. The soft yet precise modelling of the saint's physiognomy finds parallels with the Osuna Saint Sebastian, from 1617, as well as with the clearly defined aquiline noses of each of the figures in the Lamentation in the National Gallery, London, painted shortly after 1620 for Marcantonio Doria.¹ Born in Valencia, Ribera travelled to Italy as a young man and his presence is recorded there in 1611, the year in which he is paid for an altarpiece in Parma. A document dated 27 October 1613 notes Ribera's admittance to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, suggesting that he had already completed a number of commissions by this date. In April 1615 and March 1616 he is recorded as living in a house with other painters in via Margutta and the recent discovery of a document dated 5 June 1612 indicates that Ribera was in Rome much earlier than had previously been thought.² The document describes the artist asking his landlord for authorisation to make a window in the roof of his studio; a single overhead light source was a lesson that he and other artists had learnt from Caravaggio and can clearly be discerned in the present work. Ribera was still in Rome in May 1616 but moved to Naples in the summer of that year. It was in that city that his reputation grew, both within Italy and abroad, and although he lived and worked in Naples he received numerous commissions from Spain through the intercession of Spanish painters and dignitaries.³

Following first-hand inspection, the attribution was endorsed by Professor Nicola Spinosa, author of the catalogue raisonné dedicated to the artist. 

1 N. Spinosa, Ribera, la obra completa, Madrid 2008, p. 340, cat. no. A67, and pp. 349–50, cat. no. A79, respectively, both reproduced. 

2 S. Danesi Squarzina, 'New documents on Ribera, 'pictor in Urbe', 1612–16, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXLVIII, no. 1237, April 2006, pp. 244–51.

3 Jusepe Martínez visited Ribera in Naples in 1625, as did Diego Velázquez five years later.