Lot 184: JUSEPE DE RIBERA, CALLED LO SPAGNOLETTO

SAINT ONOPHRIUS
signed and dated center right: Jusepe de Ribera, espagnol, F. 1643

30 by 24 1/2 in.; 76 by 62 cm.

oil on canvas

N. Spinosa, L'opera completa del Ribera, Milan 1978, republished 1981, p. 132, cat. no. 303, reproduced (as by workshop of Ribera; judgement based on photographs);
N. Spinosa, Ribera: L'opera completa, Naples 2003, p. 328, cat. no. A258, reproduced.
N. Spinosa, Ribera: L'opera completa, second edition, Naples 2006, p. 361, cat. no. A285, reproduced;
N. Spinosa, Ribera. La Obra Completa, Madrid 2008, p. 455, cat. no. 312.

Varages Collection, Barons d'Allemagne, Provence;
With David Koetser, New York;
With Derek Johns, London, from whom acquired by the present collector.

The desert hermit par excellence, Saint Onophrius provided Jusepe de Ribera with an ideal subject with which to display his absolute mastery of startling and stark realism. Ribera had painted such holy men -- a subject that had been popularized in Rome in the early decades of the 17th century -- from the very beginning of his career. The saints he painted -- Jerome, Anthony Abbot, Paul the Hermit, and Onophrius -- were interchangeable; thin and wizened figures of great mysticism and aestheticism, all with wrinkled skin and matted hair. What Ribera did vary, however, was the compositions with which he portrayed them, and the variety and invention that he employed in their execution is exceptional. He presented these images not simply as portraits, as did so many of his contemporaries, but as icons of spirituality.

In this canvas, the artist depicts the anchorite Onophrius in a beguilingly simple manner: half-length with his hands -- and eyes -- raised in prayer. His sunken cheeks are a reminder of the holy man's deprivations, and his wrinkled and textured skin rendered with Ribera's signature overlaying and flickering brushwork, unrivaled in their depiction of soft and age-slackened skin. Dated 1643, this Saint Onophrius in fact follows directly on the heels of one of Ribera's greatest artistic triumphs in this genre; the series of fourteen canvases of Old Testament prophets painted for the church of the Certosa di San Martino, Naples (commissioned in 1638 by the abbot of the monastery, they were only finished in 1643). These pictures are amongst his most impressive and inventive, particularly given the odd shape that most of the canvases, which were used over the lateral arches of the sanctuary, required.

Paintings of the format of the Saint Onophrius, however, were intended for private galleries, and they are listed in Neapolitan collections early on, sometimes by the name of the saint depicted and sometimes generically as 'Santi Anacoreti'. They were avidly collected abroad as well; the artist's biographer De' Dominici despaired that trying to list all of the artist's easel pictures would be impossible, because having "passate per molte mani sono sparse in varie Città dell'Europe, ne sono a nostra notizia pervenute." (1) Indeed, the first provenance for the present picture is not Italian but French; it bears on the reverse of its stretcher a red wax seal with the arms of the Barons Varages d'Allemagne, a family with origins in Marseille whose most famous member, Claude d'Allemagne, or Dallemagne (1754-1813), was a general in Napoleon's army and French governor in Lombardy and then Rome. (2) The painting was unrecorded until the 20th century when it reappeared with the dealer David Koetser.

Nicola Spinosa (see 1978 and 1981 literature) knew the picture only from photographs, based upon which he thought it a studio work. He soundly reversed his opinion, however, after first hand inspection, noting in fact, that it was an 'exceptional work' by Ribera, and 'even of higher quality if compared to one of identical subject that is conserved in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg'. (3)


1. Trans. .. "passed through many hands are spread out in the various cities of Europe, and are thus lost to our knowledge": B. De' Dominici, Vite de'Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani, Naples 1742, reprint Sala Bolognese, 1979, vol. III, p. 14.
2. William Jordan was the first to identify the Varages family provenance.
3. In a letter, dated April 24, 2001.