Flog It! The Sanctified and Violent Art of Jusepe de Ribera.

Jusepe de Ribera lived in violent times and Jusepe de Ribera, by most accounts, was a violent man. So, it's no surprise that the Dulwich Picture Gallery's Ribera:Act of Violence should be dominated by violent imagery. It's even in the name of the show!

It comes, mostly, in the form of saints being flayed or flogged, but Ribera didn't limit himself to the Christian celebration of death and violence. He branched out to show us mere mortals being hanged, tortured, and undergoing various other humiliating and painful looking indignities, often in full view of the Venetian public.

A Venetian public who seemed so inured to the violence in their midst they barely paid attention to it. Of course, the Dulwich Picture Gallery is both an august and an orderly establishment and it would never host a show for the sole purpose of providing cheap titillation so, before you can get to that, you're treated to some history about the life, times, and art of Jusepe de Ribera.

Jusepe de Ribera - Saint Bartholomew (c.1612)

Known as Lo Spagnoletto (the Little Spaniard), Ribera was born in the province of Valencia in 1591 and by his mid-twenties he had decamped to Naples, then Spanish territory, to escape his creditors after living high on the hog for a few years in Rome. He never returned to Spain.

As a teen he'd encountered the work of Caravaggio, two decades his senior, and it is clear how the acknowledged master of chiaroscuro, and another artist who had 'issues', became Ribera's chief influence and, it would seem, role model. His chief subject, if we are to believe the curators of this show - and I see no reason not to, would become Saint Bartholomew.

Above we can see an early work, the date suggests it was carried out in Rome, that focuses not so much on Bartholomew himself but the hard looking bastard who flayed his skin off. He's still brandishing the knife in his right hand as he stares dead eyed out at us, mentally asking us if we fancy our chances. But what's that in his right hand? Oh, it's what's left of Bartholomew. His skin and his face. It really is quite a disturbing painting and it really is quite a disturbing story. Were Christians simply reflecting the violent world they lived in or were they glorifying it?

Bartholomew the Apostle is said to have travelled around Armenia and India spreading the word of Jesus, and it was in India, rumour has it near Mumbai, that he met his grisly end. Art tends to focus on the flaying but he's also said to have had his head chopped off and been hung upside down, just like Saint Peter.

Jusepe de Ribera - The Martyrdom of St Bartholomew (c.1628)

That explains how he ended up the patron saint of tanners, trappers, bookbinders, butchers, barber surgeons, and even Armenia (though does less to explain him being put in charge of cheese, salt, and, er, twitching - there's a patron saint of twitching!). At Dulwich, we can compare Ribera's incremental improvement with two Martyrdom of St Bartholomew's created roughly fifteen years apart.

Both feature the broken classical sculptural head, Ribera's way of saying his art is not an art beheld to classicist notions - but one determined to see the world as it really is, and both, as was the behest of the Roman Catholic church at the time, are intended to arouse a strong emotional sense of piety in the viewer. This works better in the later work as Bartholomew, his body twisted and torn, looks straight out to us urging us to 'contemplate our own spiritual purity'.   

Jusepe de Ribera - The Martyrdom of St Bartholomew (c.1644)

Among the etchings, ink and washes, chalk preparatory sketches, tribunal documentation, and, of course, more scenes of torture there's a whole room devoted to Ribera's rendering of skin. Skin is a big part of what we are. Our ethnicity and our features are discernible in our skin, we describe people as 'comfortable in their own skin', we say we have 'skin in the game', and we describe feelings (or wounds) as 'skin deep'. Without our skins we'd not recognise each other (especially as we'd be dead) but Bartholomew the Apostle managed to contradict that. He's now best known for not having any skin. If skin makes us, then it was the unmaking, the flaying, of Bartholomew that made him.

Oddly enough, the only full scale painting in the 'skin' room is a work Ribera has made that focuses on our sense of smell. It's suggested that not only the onion and the garlic, but even the beggar himself, would be an assault on our senses and though it's a wonderful painting, those corners are so so dark, it's hard to be offended by an onion, or even some BO, when you're looking back to an era in which torture and execution were both common and played out as public spectacle. That'd be like getting angry about a football match when there are children drowning in the Mediterranean.

Jusepe de Ribera - Sense of Smell (c.1615)

Jusepe de Ribera - Saint Sebastian Tended by the Holy Women (c.1620-3)

To give you a feel for how bloodthirsty the era was there's a selection from Jacques Callot's Miseries of War series that would go on to inspire Goya. Callot was a contemporary of Ribera and with the Thirty Years War (the deadliest war ever in Europe at that time) as his subject matter, he had quite a lot to be horrified/inspired by. 

The Thirty Years War didn't reach Naples so Ribera made do with more everyday violence, there's an astounding painting of a man on a 'strappado' outside Naples' Tribunale della Vicaria to give us a feel for how taken for granted torture was at the time, to inspire his images of suffering saints. When it wasn't Bartholomew coming to an undignified end, it was Sebastian getting it in the neck. Often, quite literally.

Sebastian was either tied to a tree, shot through the neck with arrows or clubbed to death, accounts vary, for refusing to denounce his Christian faith to the emperor Diocletian. Ribera's painting shows him being tended by holy women. One of them appears to be picking a splinter from his bare thigh and though that's hardly enough to crack one out over there are, often in this show, suggestions of a link between violence and eroticism.

Lustful satyrs, whips, randy old goats, etc; It's nothing new to suggest that the thin line between pleasure and pain can, at times, be rendered almost invisible. But the Christian idea of sex, or certain variants of sex, as sinful was only ever going to make it more appetising. We all want to bite that juicy red apple and we'd probably not even be put off by somebody in the act of defecation nearby. Certainly, these squatting shitters seem to hover in the background of many a Ribera sketch.

The final room contains just one, large painting and is, of course, suitably hushed and reverent. That's what happens when you put just one painting in a room and dim the lights. People feel they have to sit and look at it for longer than the other paintings. They almost feel they have to meditate. I've certainly heard people describe their experiences in Tate Modern's Rothko room that way.

Ribera is a very different artist to Rothko but I'm not sure their intentions were so far apart. I think they both desired quiet contemplation in front of their work and if Ribera wished to instruct more than Rothko, that's probably more a reflection of the different eras they operated in than their personalities. 1637's Apollo and Marsyas shows Apollo (the god of music) beating the satyr, Marsys, in a musical contest and flaying the skin from his 'hide' to celebrate victory.

It's not something they tend to do on X-Factor (thouugh it may be where the idea of an ass-whooping comes from). But then nor did they play lyres upside down, even Jimi Hendrix didn't do that, like Apollo does. Apollo is/was a Greek/Roman god rather than a Christian one but the message changes little with religions. Hubris should be punished and punished, of course, with violence. It's debated whether or not religion causes violence or if violence leads to religion but it certainly seems, if you look at any art or look at any particularly religious country, that wherever one is you can be certain the other won't be far away.

Jusepe de Ribera - Apollo and Marsyas (1637)

Thanks to Dan for joining me on my first of two visits to this show (we were treated to a modern dance interpretation in the mausoleum by Animalis!) and for lifting my spirits with a cup of tea and a chat.