TASTE and PRUDENCE in the ART of JUSEPE DE RIBERA by Hannah Joy Friedman a Dissertation Submitted to the Johns Hopkins Universit

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TASTE AND PRUDENCE IN THE ART OF JUSEPE DE RIBERA

by Hannah Joy Friedman

A dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Baltimore, Maryland May, 2016

Abstract:

Throughout his long career in southern Italy, the Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera (1591- 1652) showed a vested interest in the shifting practices and expectations that went into looking at pictures. As I argue, the artist’s evident preoccupation with sensory experience is inseparable from his attention to the ways in which people evaluated and spoke about art. Ribera’s depictions of sensory experience, in works such as the circa 1615 Five Senses, the circa 1622 Studies of Features, and the 1637 Isaac Blessing Jacob, approach the subject of the bodily senses in terms of evaluation and questioning, emphasizing the link between sensory experience and prudence. Ribera worked at a time and place when practices of connoisseurship were not, as they are today, a narrow set of preoccupations with attribution and chronology but a wide range of qualitative evaluations, and early sources describe him as a tasteful participant in a spoken connoisseurial culture. In these texts, the usage of the term “taste,” gusto, links the assessment of Ribera’s work to his own capacity to judge the works of other artists. Both taste and prudence were crucial social skills within the courtly culture that composed the upper tier of Ribera’s audience, and his pictures respond to the tensions surrounding sincerity of expression or acceptance of sensory experience in a novel and often satirical vein. Prudence, a courtly virtue enabling both judgment and dissimulation, appears in Ribera’s work as a native trait of the judgment and dissimulation that the art of painting respectively invites and carries out. Far from representing a propagandistic or anti-intellectual expression of post- Tridentine visual culture, Ribera’s oeuvre participates ambitiously in his generation’s questioning of what pictures are, what it means to look at them, and what they have authority to do and say.

ii Acknowledgments

The desire to study Jusepe de Ribera that eventually led to this dissertation was sparked on a visit to the National Gallery of Art in London, where I saw Ribera’s Pietà in the course of the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art’s winter study trip. I owe many thanks to that community of graduate students and professors, particularly Jim Ganz, Marc Simpson, and Zirka Filipczak. The collegiality of the working environment at Johns Hopkins has been an endless blessing, and several of my colleagues have read more drafts and proposals than I can count; I name here especially Jennifer Watson, María Lumbreras Corujo, Jason DiResta, Chitra Venkataramani, and Alexandra Letvin. The fieldwork for this dissertation began in shorter research trips, funded by the Art History department and by the Charles S. Singleton Center for the Study of Early Modern Europe. The bulk of the research was made possible with generous funding in the form of a Paul Mellon predoctoral fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, which allowed me to spend two years in Europe, mostly based in Rome, but with periods of residence in Naples and Madrid, and several shorter trips. The American Academy in Rome provided me with an administrative home and endless help with the paperwork related to my presence in Italy, particularly Pina Pasquantonio and Gianpaolo Battaglia. My field research was met with gracious help in too many locales to list, but I will list several anyways: the staff of the Biblioteca Corsiniana, the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, the Masaveu Collection in Oviedo, the Biblioteca del Palacio Real in Madrid, the Albertina, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art provided much gracious aid. Help and grace above and beyond all expectation were given me by Juan Várez Fisa, Javier Portús, and Gabriele Finaldi at the Museo del Prado; Carlo Capponi at the Ufficio Beni Culturali of the Archdiocese of Milan; Cordélia Hattori at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille; Mark McDonald at the British Museum; Gudrun Swoboda and Susanne Hehenberger at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; Danila Rizzi and Francesca Orobi at the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome; Almudena Pérez de Tudela at the Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial; Earle Havens and Donald Juedes at the Johns Hopkins University Libraries; Rena Hoisington at the Baltimore Museum of Art; and Jonathan Bober, Peter Parshall, Ginger Hammer, and Gregory Jecmen in the prints and drawings department of the National Gallery of Art in

iii Washington, D.C. The unstinting generosity and challenging intellectual environment provided by CASVA are overwhelming gifts, and it is difficult to know how to articulate thanks for them; especial thanks are due to Peter Lukehart for his kind mentorship, and to the intellectual community formed by my fellow predoctoral students. Michael Fried, Frances Gage, and Caroline Fowler were especially generous with their own work and expertise, and Stefania Pastore, Juan Pimentel, Sabina Brevaglieri, and Edward Payne also offered collegial help and rewarding discussions. Several very intelligent and very busy people made time they could ill spare to read drafts, to listen to ideas, and to offer generous and challenging intellectual friendship, notably Adam Jasienski, Miri Kim, Kate Cowcher, Nikolaos Drosos, David Pullins, Yoko Hara, and especially Peter Mason and Florike Egmond. Sound and encouraging advice also came from Mary Roberts, Shira Brisman, Andrea Griesebner, and Christina Narval. My parents, Joe and Nance Friedman, my spouse Alex Neroth van Vogelpoel, and in particular my lifelong friend Elizabeth Schwartz carried, encouraged, and patiently loved me through this lengthy process, and made it mostly a joy even when it wasn’t; I dedicate this final product of it to them. Last but not least, I thank my advisors, Stephen Campbell and Felipe Pereda. Your love of art history, of getting things right and saying things that matter, and the grace and dedication with which you do your jobs so well are beautiful to see, and I am very glad to have been your student.

iv Introduction: Speaking of Pictures - 1

Chapter 1: Ribera and connoisseurship, past and present. - 9 a) State of scholarship concerning Ribera - 15

Essential biographical information and state of factual research - 15 Historiography and identity: between Spain and Italy - 22 b) On the role of connoisseurship in Ribera studies - 32

Ribera and the endless task of connoisseurship - 32 Possible avenues for a broader connoisseurship? - 34 In defense of connoisseurship - 40 c) Historical connoisseurship and artistic practice - 48

Practical connoisseurship and the Roman gallery - 48 Theorizing connoisseurship: Mancini’s Considerations on Painting - 57 Copies, fakes, and the art of appreciation - 64 Artists as connoisseurs: appraisal, collaboration, citation - 75 d) Evaluation as theme and activity in Ribera's art - 80

Painting as Assay: Ribera’s Vieja Usurera - 80 Discipleship as estimate: Ribera’s 1631 Saint Andrew - 84

Chapter 2: “That Spaniard of excellent taste:” Ribera as connoisseur. - 90 a) Ribera’s practice of connoisseurship - 98

Testimonials for Ribera’s connoisseurship: Ludovico Carracci, Cosimo del Sera, and Luigi Scaramuccia - 98 De gustibus disputandum? - 106 A taste for Ribera - 112 b) Connoisseurship as competition: Mancini’s dishonorable Ribera - 114

Ne sutor ultra crepidam - 114 Mancini’s biography of Ribera - 119 Conversation versus artistic inclination in Mancini’s biographies of artists - 126 Honor & dishonor: connoisseurship as social capital - 135 Medical knowledge and the authority of pictures - 142

v c) Authority and polemic in Ribera’s Studies of Features - 148

Training in drawing as training in judgment - 148 Ribera’s studies of features and the genre of the drawing manual - 153 Invention and observation - 162 Teste Profane - 167

Chapter 3: Connoisseurship and conversation in Ribera’s Five Senses - 176 a) Context and commission of Ribera’s Five Senses: the Lincei and Oziosi Academies - 181

Identifying the Five Senses and their interpretive context - 181 Ribera’s Galilean telescope and the Accademia dei Lincei - 187 The Accademia degli Oziosi and the patronage of Ribera’s Five Senses -199 b) Connoisseurship as a mode of conversation - 207

Looking at pictures, and other sensory experiences - 208 Conversation and the gallery picture - 211 Comparison and connoisseurship - 214 Telescopes and connoisseurs: Mancini and Sagredo - 219 c) Patterns of discussion, methods of inquiry: the painting-sculpture paragone - 228

The paragone debate as a topic of conversation - 228 Beyond academic convention: Ribera’s Galilean paragone - 233 Galileo’s paragone revisited: Ribera’s Girolamini Saint Andrew - 238 d) “A spyglass to tell good from bad counsel:” prudence, politics, and the senses - 241

The shortsighted telescope - 241 Nosce te ipsum: sight, prudence, and self-knowlege - 245 The Academies of the Lincei and Oziosi as courtly social settings - 255 Escaping the court through the gallery? Ribera’s uncourtly Senses - 264

Chapter 4: Discernment and prudence in Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob - 271 a) Isaac not blessing Jacob: spurious evidence and evaluation - 275

Patronage and iconography of Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob - 275 Narrative emphasis and the pictorial tradition - 278 “The voice is the voice of Jacob:” the exception of hearing - 281

vi b) Eucharist and Engaño - 285

Painting as exegesis: Ribera’s sources and the Flos Sanctorum tradition - 285 Figurative meaning and hidden identity - 287 Genesis 27 as a figure for the Eucharist - 293 c) Dissemblance and the prudence of Rebecca - 299

Rebecca’s deception as “heavenly politics” - 299 Sins of the Fathers? Coping with deceit in the lives of the Patriarchs - 301 Figures, not lies - 306 d) Jacob’s “blessed deceptions” - 310

Discerning patrons, creative pairings: Jacob and Peter - 310 Prudence and prophetic appointment: Jacob’s princely virtues - 319

Conclusion: Blind virtue and the limits of interpretation - 328

Appendices - 334

Bibliography - 383

Curriculum vitae - 418

Illustrations - Volume 2 [not available to the public]:

- List of illustrations - 423

- Images - 433

vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The following figures appear consecutively following the text, in volume 2 of the dissertation:

1.1 - Anonymous, probably after Luca Giordano, c. 1660-1680? Private collection, dimensions unknown. Image collections, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

1.2 - Jusepe de Ribera. Don Juan José de Austria, 1638. Oil on canvas, 319 x 251 cm. Patrimonio Nacional, Palacio Real, Madrid.

1.3 - Jusepe de Ribera, The Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1646. Oil on canvas, 66 x 78 cm. Museo Civico Gaetano Filangieri, Naples.

1.4 - Jusepe de Ribera, Hecate, early 1640s. Oil on copper, 33 x 63 cm. Apsley House, Wellington Museum, London.

1.5 - Agostino Veneziano, Lo Stregozzo, 1515-1525. Engraving, 30.3 x 63.9 cm. The British Museum, London.

1.6 - Jusepe de Ribera, Saint Andrew, early 1630s. Oil on canvas, 123 x 95 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

1.7 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 1.6.

1.8 - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Amor Vincit Omnia, 1602. Oil on canvas, 156 x 113 cm. Galerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

1.9 - Giovanni Baglione, Divine Love Triumphant over Earthly Love, 1602. Oil on canvas, 240 x 143 cm. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

1.10 - Giovanni Baglione, Judith and Holofernes, 1608. Oil on canvas, 220 x 150 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

1.11 - Lodovico Cigoli, Joseph and Potiphar's wife, 1610. Oil on canvas, 270 x 152 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

1.12 - Hans Jordaens III (1595-1643), A Picture Cabinet, c. 1630. Oil on panel, 48 x 35 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

1.13 - Domenico Zampieri (Domenichino), Saint Januarius Protecting the City of Naples from Saracens, c. 1637. Fresco. Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Cathedral, Naples.

1.14 - Jusepe de Ribera, Saint Januarius unscathed by the fiery furnace, 1646. Oil on copper, 320 x 200 cm. Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Cathedral, Naples.

viii 1.15 - Domenico Zampieri (Domenichino), The Sick are Healed at the Tomb of Saint Januarius, 1638. Oil on copper, 280 x 150 cm. Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Cathedral, Naples.

1.16 - Domenico Zampieri (Domenichino), Saint Januarius Resuscitating Massima's Son, 1638-39. Oil on copper, 280 x 150 cm. Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Cathedral, Naples.

1.17 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 1.14.

1.18 - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, detail of figure 1.19.

1.19 - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600. Oil on canvas, 323 x 343 cm. Contarelli chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.

1.20 - Master of the Judgment of Solomon (Jusepe de Ribera?), The Judgment of Solomon, c. 1610. Oil on canvas, 158 x 200 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

1.21 - Domenico Zampieri, Saint Cecilia on Trial, 1612-1615. Fresco. Polet Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.

1.22 - Jusepe de Ribera, Old Usurer, 1638. Oil on canvas, 76 x 62 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

1.23 - Jan Vermeer, Woman holding a Balance, c. 1664. Oil on canvas, 40 x 35 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

1.24 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 1.6.

2.1 - Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1624. Etching, 32.4 x 23.9 cm. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

2.2 - Pietro Berettini (Pietro da Cortona), Anatomical study showing the Spinal nerves, c. 1618. Pen, ink, and wash, heightened with white, 41.5 x 27. Table 13, MS Hunter 1-658, Hunterian Collection, Glasgow University Library, Glasgow.

2.3 - Odoardo Fialetti, frontispiece: Il vero modo et ordine per dissegnar tutte le parti et membra del corpo humano (Venice: Sadeler, 1608). Etching and engraving, 11 x 14.9 cm. New York Public Library, New York.

2.4 - Odoardo Fialetti, Studies of Eyes, from Il vero modo et ordine per dissegnar tutte le parti et membra del corpo humano (Venice: Sadeler, 1608). Etching, with additions in pencil, approx. 11 x 15 cm. New York Public Library, New York.

2.5 - Luca Ciamberlano, frontispiece: Scuola perfetta per imparare a disegnare, c. 1610- 1630? Engraving, 16 x 10.5 cm. The British Museum, London.

ix 2.6 - Luca Ciamberlano, Studies of facial features, circa 1610-1630? Engraving, with additions in pen and ink, approx. 16 x 11 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

2.7 - Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of Eyes, c. 1622. First state. Etching, 14.3 x 21.6 cm. The British Musem, London.

2.8 - Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of Ears, 1622. First state. Etching, 14 x 21.6 cm. The British Museum, London.

2.9 - Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of Noses and Mouths, c. 1622. First state. Etching, 14 x 21.6 cm. The British Museum, London.

2.10 - Jusepe de Ribera, Large grotesque head, c. 1622. Etching, 21.5 x 14 cm. The British Museum, London.

2.11 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 2.10.

2.12 - Odoardo Fialetti, Three male half-figures in costume, from Il vero modo et ordine per dissegnar tutte le parti et membra del corpo humano (Venice: Sadeler, 1608). Etching, with additions in pencil, approx. 11 x 15 cm. New York Public Library, New York.

2.13 - Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of Eyes, Studies of Ears, Studies of Noses and Mouths, c. 1622. Second state. Etching, approx. 14 x 8/14 x 12 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

2.14 - Louis Ferdinand Elle, after Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of Eyes, 1630-1650? From Livre de Portraiture Recueilly des Oeuvres de Ioseph de Riuera dit l’Espagnolet et Gravé a l’eau forte par Louis Ferdinand (Paris: Nicolas Langlois, n.d.). Etching, 16 x 22 cm. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

2.15 - Anonymous, after Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of Ears, 18th century. Etching, 21.4 x 27 cm. The British Museum, London.

2.16 - Luca Ciamberlano, after Agostino Carracci, Studies of legs and feet, c. 1610-1630. Engraving, 16.8 x 11.6 cm. The British Museum, London.

2.17 - Giacomo Franco, after Giacopo Palma il Giovane, Studies of male torsos, before 1620, republished 1659. Etching and engraving, 34.7 x 24.8 cm. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

2.18 - Jusepe de Ribera, Studies of a Head in Profile, early 1620s? Red chalk on paper, 25 x 20.6 cm. Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton.

x 2.19 - Agostino Carracci, Studies of feet and an annunciation (recto). Pen and brown ink on paper, 25.8 x 16.2 cm. Collection of Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, Windsor Castle.

2.20 - Agostino Carracci, Studies of legs and feet, and figure of a youth (verso). Pen and brown ink on paper, 25.8 x 16.2 cm. Collection of Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, Windsor Castle.

2.21 - Agostino Carracci, Details of a Head and Figure Study, c. 1590-1602. Red chalk, pen, and ink on paper, 17.2 x 26.5 cm. Collection of Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, Windsor Castle.

2.22 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 2.7.

2.23 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 2.8.

2.24 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 2.9.

2.25 - Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ideal Head of a Woman, 1525-28. Drawing, black chalk on paper, 28 x 22.8 cm. The British Museum, London.

2.26 - Antonio Tempesta, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, La Marchesa di Pescara, 1613. Engraving, 21.7 x 15.5 cm. The British Museum, London.

2.27 - Roman sculptor, Severan period, Caracalla, 212-217 CE. Marble, approx. 60 x 40 cm. Museo Archeologico, Naples.

2.28 - Roman sculptor, Imperial period, Portrait of Augustus, 1st or 2nd century CE. Marble, h. 43.3 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

2.29 - Michelangelo Buonarroti, “Furia,” or “Anima Dannata,” 1520s. Black chalk and ink on paper, 29.5 x 20.3 cm. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

2.30 - Luca Ciamberlano, Furia, c. 1610-1630? Etching, approx. 17 x 12 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

2.31 - Jacopo Caraglio, after Rosso Fiorentino, Furia, c. 1520-39. Engraving, 25 x 18.4 cm. The British Museum, London.

3.1 - Jusepe de Ribera, Taste, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, 113 x 87 cm. The Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut.

3.2 - Jusepe de Ribera, Smell, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, 115 x 88 cm. Private collection, Madrid.

xi 3.3 - Jusepe de Ribera, Sight, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, 114 x 89 cm. Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City.

3.4 - Jusepe de Ribera, Touch, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, 116 x 88 cm. The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena.

3.5 - After Jusepe de Ribera, Hearing. c. 1615-1635? Oil on canvas, 96 x 76 cm. Private collection, Pully, Switzerland.

3.6 - After Jusepe de Ribera, Hearing. c. 1615-1635? Oil on canvas, 113 x 88.5 cm. Koelliker Collection, Milan.

3.7 - Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Sight, 1617. Oil on panel, 64.7 x 109.5. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

3.8 - Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Hearing, 1617-1618. Oil on panel, 64 x 109.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

3.9 - Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Smell, 1617-1618. Oil on panel, 65 x 111 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

3.10 - Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Taste, 1618. Oil on panel, 64 x 109 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

3.11 - Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Touch, 1618. Oil on panel, 64 x 111 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

3.12 - Jan Brueghel the Elder, A Landscape with a view of the Castle of Mariemont, c. 1608-1611. Oil on canvas, 84.7 x 130.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia.

3.13 - Jan Brueghel the Elder, detail of figure 3.12.

3.14 - Anonymous, Giovanni Battista Della Porta, frontispiece, Io. Baptista Portae Magiae Naturalis Libri XX (Naples: Orazio Salviano, 1589).

3.15 - Anonymous, “Naso Adunco,” in Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Della Fisonomia dell’Huomo del Sig. Gio: Battista Della Porta Napolitano Libri Sei. Tradotti di Latino in volgare, e dall’istesso Autore accresciuti di figure, & di passi necessarij a diverse parte dell’ opera (Padua: Pietro Paolo Tozzi, 1613), 63v.

3.16 - Georg Pencz, The Five Senses: Hearing, c. 1544. Engraving, 7.7 x 5.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

3.17 - Georg Pencz, The Five Senses: Sight, c. 1544. Engraving, 7.7 x 5.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

xii 3.18 - Georg Pencz, The Five Senses: Taste, c. 1544. Engraving, 7.7 x 5.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

3.19 - Georg Pencz, The Five Senses: Smell, c. 1544. Engraving, 7.7 x 5.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

3.20 - Georg Pencz, The Five Senses: Touch, c. 1544. Engraving, 7.7 x 5.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

3.21 - Emblem of the Accademia degli Oziosi, from Giovan Pietro d’Alessandro, Academiae Ociosorum libri tres (Naples: G. B. Gargano and L. Nucci, 1613).

3.22 - Cornelis Cort, after Frans Floris the Elder, Sight, 1561. Engraving, 20.7 x 27.2 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

3.23 - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, c. 1594-95. Oil on canvas, 66 x 49.5 cm. The National Gallery of Art, London.

3.24 - Abraham de Bruyn, The Sense of Smell, 1569. Engraving, 3.9 x 5.2 cm. The British Museum, London.

3.25 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 3.2.

3.26 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 3.2.

3.27 - Diagram of the arrangement of the external senses and the common sense, from Bernardo Segni, I tre libri d’Aristotile Sopra l’Anima. Trattato di Bernardo Segni Gentil’huomo, & Accademico Fiorentino (Florence: Giunti, 1607), 128.

3.28 - Diagram of the senses according to what they perceive, from Bernardo Segni, I tre libri d’Aristotile Sopra l’Anima. Trattato di Bernardo Segni Gentil’huomo, & Accademico Fiorentino (Florence: Giunti, 1607), 121.

3.29 - Jan Pietersz. Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius, The Five Senses: Sight, 1595. Engraving, 17.5 x 12.5 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

3.30 - Jan Pietersz. Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius, The Five Senses: Hearing, 1595. Engraving, 17.5 x 12.5 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

3.31 - Jan Pietersz. Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius, The Five Senses: Smell, 1595. Engraving, 17.5 x 12.5 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

3.32 - Jan Pietersz. Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius, The Five Senses: Taste, 1595. Engraving, 17.5 x 12.5 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

xiii 3.33 - Jan Pietersz. Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius, The Five Senses: Touch, 1595. Engraving, 17.5 x 12.5 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

3.34 - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Bacchus, c. 1596. Oil on canvas, 95 x 85 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

3.35 - Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Lute Player, c. 1600. Oil on canvas, 102 x 130 cm. Private collection, on long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

3.36 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 3.2.

3.37 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 3.3.

3.38 - Tiziano Vecellio, detail of Venus and Adonis, 1554. Oil on canvas, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

3.39 - Tiziano Vecellio, detail of Venus and Adonis, 1560. Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

3.40 - Livio Mehus, Blind Man with Painting and Sculpture, mid-17th century. Oil on canvas, 123 x 96 cm. Private collection, Florence.

3.41 - Jusepe de Ribera, Saint Andrew, c. 1618. Oil on canvas, 136 x 112 cm. Quadreria dei Girolamini, Naples.

3.42 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 3.41.

3.43 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 3.41.

3.44 - Jan Harmensz. Muller, after Adriaen de Vries, Prudence, c.1597. Engraving, 34.9 x 19.6 cm. The British Museum, London.

3.45 - Attributed to Jusepe de Ribera, A Philosopher Holding a Mirror, c. 1620-1640. Oil on canvas, 114.4 x 80 cm. Private collection.

3.46 - After Jusepe de Ribera, The Philosopher Socrates. Date and dimensions unknown, private collection, New York.

3.47 - Bernard Vaillant, after Jusepe de Ribera, second half of the 17th century, Socrates Looking in a Mirror. Mezzotint, 37 x 28.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

3.48 - Louise-Charlotte Soyer, after Jusepe de Ribera, Archimedes looking in a mirror, early 19th century. Engraving, approx 12 x 7 cm. Published in Charles P. Landon, Galerie Giustiniani, ou Catalogue Figuré ... (Paris: Imprimerie de Chaignieau Aîné, 1812). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

xiv 3.49 - Jusepe de Ribera, Democritus (Smiling Geographer), c. 1615-18? Oil on canvas 120 x 90 cm. Private collection, Switzerland.

3.50 - Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, Philosopher (the Sense of Sight), c. 1635-40? Oil on canvas, 103 x 75 cm. Private collection, Milan.

3.51 - Juan Do, the Sense of Sight, c. 1630-40? Oil on canvas, 75.9 x 63.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

3.52 - After Jusepe de Ribera, Three Philosophers. Date, dimensions and location unknown, 29 x 58 cm.

3.53 - Philipp Jacob Nickhl, after Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, The Sense of Sight, later 17th century (after 1659). Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Salzburger Museum, Salzburg.

3.54 - Image of a statue commemorating the prudence of the Fifth Duke of Alba, from Francesco Orilia, Il Zodiaco, over, Idea di Perfettione di Prencipi: formata dall’heroiche virtù dell’Illustriss. et Eccelentiss. Signore Don Antonio Alvarez di Toledo, Duca d’Alba, vicerè di Napoli: Rapresentata come in un Trionfo dal Fidelissimo Popolo Napoletano Per Opera del Dottore Francesco Antonio Scacciavento suo eletto. Nella Pomposissima Festa di San Gio: Battista, celebrata à 23. di Giugno 1629. per il settimo anno del suo governo. Raccolta per Francesco Orilia e dedicata all’Illustrissimo, & Eccellentissimo Signor D. Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo Contestabile di Navarra (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1630), 179.

3.55 - Emblem of Prudence, from Francesco Orilia, Il Zodiaco, over, Idea di Perfettione di Prencipi ... (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1630), 203.

3.56 - Emblem of Prudence, from Francesco Orilia, Il Zodiaco, over, Idea di Perfettione di Prencipi ... (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1630), 208.

3.57 - Emblems of Prudence, from Francesco Orilia, Il Zodiaco, over, Idea di Perfettione di Prencipi ... (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1630), 206-7.

3.58 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 3.2.

3.59 - Jusepe de Ribera, The Penitence of Saint Peter, 1621. Etching and engraving, 32.5 x 24.6 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

4.1 - Jusepe de Ribera, Isaac and Jacob, 1637. Oil on canvas, 110 x 291.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

4.2 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 4.1.

xv 4.3 - Workshop of Raphael (Gianfrancesco Penni and assistants), Isaac Blessing Jacob, c. 1518-1519. Fresco. Papal loggie, Vatican City.

4.4 - Agostino Veneziano, after Raphael and workshop, Isaac Blessing Jacob, c. 1522-24. Engraving, 23.1 x 30.9 cm. The British Museum, London.

4.5 - Agostino Veneziano, Lycaon and Jupiter, 1523. Engraving, 28.3 x 41.5 cm. The British Museum, London.

4.6 - Orazio Borgianni, after Raphael and workshop, Isaac Blessing Jacob, 1615. Etching, 18.1 x 18 cm. The British Museum, London.

4.7 - Giovanni Lanfranco, after Raphael and workshop, Isaac Blessing Jacob, 1607. Etching, 17.8 x 26.7 cm. Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome.

4.8 - After Maarten de Vos, Isaac Blessing Jacob, c. 1580. Engraving, 21.5 x 26.5 cm. The British Museum, London.

4.9 - Dirk Volkertsz Coornhert, after Maarten van Heemskerck, Isaac blessing Jacob, 1549. Etching, 24.5 x 19.1 cm. The British Museum, London.

4.10 - Cornelis Cort, after Frans Floris, Isaac blessing Jacob, 1563. Engraving, 13.3 x 21.9 cm. The British Museum, London.

4.11 - Domenico Maria Canuti, Isaac blessing Jacob, mid 17th century. Pen and ink with wash, heightened with white, 13.2 x 18.8 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

4.12 - Francesco Curradi, Isaac blessing Jacob, mid 17th century. Oil on canvas, 153 x 117 cm. Quadreria dei Girolamini, Naples.

4.13 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 4.1.

4.14 - Juan de Juanes, The Last Supper, c. 1562. Oil on panel, 116 x 191 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

4.15 - Juan de Juanes, detail of figure 4.14.

4.16 - Jusepe de Ribera, detait of figure 4.1.

4.17 - Jusepe de Ribera, Jacob and the Flocks of Laban, 1632. Oli on canvas, 174 x 219 cm. Patrimonio Nacional, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, El Escorial.

4.18 - Workshop of Jusepe de Ribera, The Liberation of Saint Peter, circa 1640-1645. Oil on canvas, 179 x 225 cm. Patrimonio Nacional, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, El Escorial.

xvi 4.19 - Jusepe de Ribera, Jacob and the Flocks of Laban, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, 132 x 118 cm. National Gallery of Art, London.

4.20 - After Jusepe de Ribera, Jacob and the Flocks of Laban, after 1638. Oil on canvas. Museo Cerralbo, Madrid.

4.21 - Jusepe de Ribera, The Dream of Jacob, 1639. Oil on canvas, 179 x 233 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

4.22 - Jusepe de Ribera, The Liberation of Saint Peter, 1639. Oil on canvas,Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

4.23 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 4.21.

4.24 - Raphael, The Madonna and Child with Raphael, Tobias, and Saint Jerome, or “The Virgin of the Fish,” 1513-1514. Oil on panel, 215 x 158 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

4.25 - Diego de Sílva Rodríguez y Velázquez, The Tunic of Joseph, 1629-1630. Oil on canvas, 213.5 x 284 cm. Patrimonio Nacional, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, El Escorial.

4.26 - Diego de Sílva Rodríguez y Velázquez, The Forge of Vulcan, 1630. Oil on canvas, 223 x 290 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

4.27 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 4.17.

4.28 - Jusepe de Ribera, detail of figure 4.17.

C.1 - Jusepe de Ribera. Studies of Two Ears and of a Bat, c. 1622. Red chalk and red wash in brush on paper, 15.9 x 27.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

C.2 - Woodcut illustration of a bat, from Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae Hoc est de Avibus Historiae Libri XII (Bologna: Francesco de Francesco Senese, 1599), 576.

xvii Introduction: Speaking of Pictures

My eighth and last point of advice and loving exhortation, to fulfil my duty in these actions, is to remind you that virtuous conversation in its time is the mother of studies, and the living source of every science and practical art.1

Romano Alberti

Nor should we wish to conceal the fact that, particularly in conversations, many letterati show themselves to be insipid and of little taste, and many idiots come off as being more amiable simply by pleasantness or by readiness of mind.2

Stefano Guazzo

If one asks an historian of early modern European painting to fill in an artist’s name prompted by the terms “taste” and “prudence,” Jusepe de Ribera’s would be the last name proposed, if indeed it came up at all. Both words seem redolent of a bookish and well-dressed realm of elegant letter-writing and Latin quotations, neither of which would appear to have been Ribera’s forte. Painters with royal patronage networks, extensive literary or diplomatic connections, and unquestioned intellectual credentials such as

Titian, Poussin, or Rubens would come to mind far more readily, or on the Spanish side, court painters such as Vicente Carducho or Eugenio Cajés. Certainly Ribera’s paintings, which often abound in pain and patched clothing, have been studied along very different lines: the devout, the grotesque, and the openly sadistic have appeared as more frequent

1 “Ottavo, & ultimo avvertimento, & amorevole essortatione, per compire il debito mio in queste attioni, è il raccordarvi, che la conversatione virtuosa alli suoi tempi, è la madre delli studij, e fonte viva d’ogni scienza, & arte prattica.” Romano Alberti, Origine et Progresso Dell’Accademia del Dissegno, De Pittori, Scultori, & Architetti di Roma (Pavia: Pietro Bartoli, 1604), 4. 2 “Né si vuol anco tacere che particolarmente nelle conversazioni molti letterati si scoprono insipidi e di poco gusto, e molti idioti riescono più amabili solamente per una o piacevolezza o prontezza d’ingegno.” Stefano Guazzo, ed. Amedeo Quondam, La Civil Conversazione, vol. 1 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2010), 151.

1 avenues of interpretation than art theory or classical mythology, although the field has been expanding to consider these rubrics as well.

Ribera’s biography and literary abilities, so far as these are known, suggest a profile that is not unfamiliar, of an artist who is literate without being as literary as some of his colleagues, subtle in his thinking, but not inclined to put that thinking down in writing; Guido Reni offers a fairly close parallel. If nobody would boggle at a study of

Reni with the title “Taste and Prudence,” it might be in part because our ideas of early modern taste and prudence are biased in favor of the well-dressed and delicate, the world of gentlemen. And whatever Ribera was, he never quite seems to fit the bill as a gentil’huomo.

Why taste and prudence? The text that follows is certainly not an attempt to present Ribera as a long-misunderstood court artist, or indeed to find fault with the topics of scholarly inquiry that have been applied to him thus far. What the courtly traits of taste and prudence share with Ribera’s work is a set of concerns that are played out largely in conversational settings, and that have to do with how sensory experiences turned into other things that had qualitative judgments attached to them: knowledge, good decisions, discernment, discrimination, perspicacity, understanding, sound judgment. Both taste and prudence were qualities that were applied to works of art, in the sense that they were terms of praise for the judiciousness and quality of a work’s execution; but they were also social virtues that could attach to the viewers and/or purchasers of art.3

3 David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 266-83; Renata Ago, Gusto for Things. A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome, trans. Bradford Bouley, Corey Tazzara, & Paula Findlen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1-40 passim, 139-58.

2 This dual application of taste and prudence, to the thing consumed or experienced and to the people consuming or experiencing it, is mirrored in the way both terms designate a transition from a “raw” sensory experience to a qualitative processing of that experience, a processing that turns sensation into something that is good, bad, or indifferent, in an act of judgment that may itself be performed well or badly. Both taste and prudence had to do with turning sensory experience into socially valuable skills; on a more disinterested level, taste and prudence were ways in which sensory experiences could “deliver the goods” and turn into understanding or knowledge. Taste and prudence were at once social and intellectual processes, fulcrums at which bodily experience underwent a transformation into something with a value attached to it.

This point of transfer was of particular concern to artists, since what they produced had to undergo just such a change in order to be worth owning or looking at in the first place. The “tension between truth and artifice,” which Maarten Delbeke has rightly identified as perhaps the central issue in early seventeenth-century artistic theory and practice, was negotiated through certain strategies of making and viewing, which could direct whether a work of art was understood as sensually pleasant, accurate, informative, misleading, heretical, or any number of other rubrics.4 Taste and prudence were not only traits d’union between the sensory and the intellectual import of art, but also between art’s mere existence and its social value. The purpose of owning or looking at art was, in large part, to acquire and exhibit the traits of taste and prudence; if paintings were poker chips, taste and prudence would be the cash for which they could be traded.

4 Maarten Delbeke, “Art as Evidence, Evidence as Art. Bernini, Pallavicino and the Paradoxes of Zeno,” in Sebastian Schütze (ed.), Estetica Barocca (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2004), 343-60, quote p. 344.

3 Artists were (in a manner of speaking) dealers in sensory experience, creating things that, in general, only “worked” if they were looked at, so the ways in which that act of looking turned into something more than a bodily act of opening one’s eyes were quite relevant to them. What would viewers look for? What experience or recognition could an artist count on from an audience? How would various artistic decisions be acknowledged and received? The horizon of expectation as to how pictures might be looked at and evaluated was always a matter of importance to artists, but several prominent collectors, patrons, and theorists of art with whom Ribera was in contact at an early stage of his career thought about these questions very deliberately.

Both taste and prudence were social virtues that tended to be exercised and displayed in conversation, at least where art was concerned. Frances Gage’s work on

Giulio Mancini, along with Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey’s work on Nicolas

Poussin, has called attention to the way looking at and collecting art in early seicento

Rome expressed new formulations of taste within a culture of civil conversazione.5 A recent study of the display of art in Rome in this period emphasizes the importance of the gallery as a designated space with particular properties and social functions attached to it, and notes the general rise of a carefully stage-managed show-and-tell in the way that art collections were acquired and curated.6 The practical ways in which pictures were put on view were quite deliberately oriented to foster and direct conversation, from which the

5 Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 88-105; Frances Gage, “Exercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” in Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2008): 1167-1207; Frances Gage, "'Some Stirring or Changing of Place': Vision, Judgement and Mobility in Pictures of Galleries," in Intellectual History Review 20, no. 1 (2010): 123-45. 6 Gail Feigenbaum and Francesco Freddolini (eds.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace 1550-1750 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center, 2014).

4 viewers’ taste and prudence could emerge either from their ownership of the art in question or from their reactions to it, or both.

The central argument of this dissertation is that this spoken environment, in which paintings acquired so much of their value, was not only a matter of general preoccupation to artists, but a particular point of interest to Ribera. What this project seeks to unpack, through a small selection of case studies, is how exactly this interest played out in

Ribera’s work. From the relatively simple premise that Ribera cared about the ways in which his pictures would be looked at and talked about, several observations proceed: the first being that Ribera expected his pictures to be looked at and talked about. A salient context surrounding Ribera’s work, I argue, was a culture of spoken evaluation, which I frequently refer to as a culture of “connoisseurship.” The emphasis of the present work is less on Rezeptionsgeschichte than on the way Ribera drew on practices of looking and discussing pictures as a creative resource, incorporating and shaping avenues of response to his works into his approach to their subjects, particularly in his depictions of sensory experience.

The first chapter of my dissertation takes stock of the central role that connoisseurship, in its contemporary sense, has played in Ribera studies, and seeks to historicize and redefine the term, looking at theoretical interventions on how pictures were looked at and evaluated (such as Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni Sulla Pittura), but also at practical aspects of display and evaluation. These could range from commissions that specifically drew out comparisons among the qualities and styles of works of art, to artists’ “connoisseurial” practices, which could include estimates but also citations and copies of other artists’ works or manners. Chapter one proposes for

5 “connoisseurship” (in the broad and neologistic sense of “how people in Ribera’s time discussed and evaluated paintings”) a function in Ribera’s art akin to the role that

Euclidian geometry played for the quattrocento artists in Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience.7 In Ribera’s generation, this kind of connoisseurship was interesting to patrons and to artists, prompting artists to invoke it in creative ways, which in turn made it even more interesting to patrons. The chapter ends with two paintings in which this early modern connoisseurship appears in Ribera’s work as both a theme and as a structural way in which the pictures ask to be considered.

Chapter two looks at evidence of Ribera’s direct participation in a culture of connoisseurship, evidence that brings the particular issue of taste or “gusto” to the fore, since Ribera was described at an early date as an especially tasteful participant in conversations about art. Early sources extend appreciative mentions of Ribera’s taste (as displayed in his ability to speak and judge well of other artists’ work) to his abilities as a painter, enacting an overlap in the usage of “gusto” to designate both the production and the reception of art. One of the most important early sources on Ribera, his first biography which was included in Mancini’s Considerazioni sulla Pittura, paints the opposite picture, and as I argue, positions Ribera as a paradigmatic example of how the roles of artist and connoisseur fundamentally do not overlap. I interpret this discrepancy

(between Ribera the connoisseur and Ribera the prime example for why artists can’t be connoisseurs) in terms of competing discourses as to who had the authority to judge works of art, discourses in which Ribera, Mancini, and at a slightly later date, the Spanish painter and theorist Vicente Carducho emerge as participants. Ribera’s own intervention

7 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Style (2nd. ed., Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 29-40 and passim.

6 on this issue is extrapolated from his etched Studies of Features and Large Grotesque

Head, in which I argue that Ribera polemically asserts his authority not only to teach drawing but to teach judgment in art, an authority that he associates with the very traits of ingegno, furia, and bizzarria that for Mancini disqualified artists from being sound judges of their own products.

Chapter three looks more closely at the issue of sensory experience and how it becomes or is subject to an act of evaluation, and focuses on prudence as an interpretive anchor for Ribera’s Five Senses, which were painted in Rome for a Spanish patron around 1615. I argue that Ribera’s approach to the subject of the five senses is predicated on early seicento practices of connoisseurship: Ribera anticipates that his paintings will be approached and evaluated in certain ways as art objects, and these strategies of evaluation become dynamic components in the way he addresses certain relevant points about the five senses. For instance, the format of the series itself, as a set of five half- figure easel paintings with consistent settings, lighting, background, and color schemes, invites rearrangement and reconfiguration of the physical objects, which can cue or act out different ideas about the hierarchy of the senses, which was a central aspect of the subject’s interpretation. The series has long been recognized as invoking the intellectual culture in Rome and Naples that centered around the Lincei and Oziosi academies; what I propose in this chapter is an exploration of this context in terms of the courtly setting it provided for Ribera’s series, a setting in which prudence (in the sense of discretion to be used in conversation) emerges as a desideratum, and also as a philosophical practice of self-knowledge. Taking a cue from Mario Biagioli’s studies of Galileo, this chapter seeks to integrate the courtly setting and its conversational culture with the interpretation of the

7 pictorial and intellectual “content” of Ribera’s series, which emerges as a refined and rather ironic fantasy of sincerity and directness in a world of dissimulation.

Dissimulation and prudence emerge again in chapter four, which moves to a later point in Ribera’s career and to a patronage context whose magnetic pole is the royal court in Madrid. I argue that Ribera’s 1637 Isaac Blessing Jacob brilliantly deploys a figural reading of Genesis 27 as a metaphor for the sensory deception of the Eucharist, and aligns the “blessed deception” of the Eucharistic species with the deception of the painting itself, associating the art of painting with the sanctifying and supernatural

“deceitfulness” of the bread and wine that conceal Christ’s flesh and blood in the sacrament. Both in the Isaac Blessing Jacob and in other treatments of Jacob’s life,

Ribera underscores the virtuous prudence of Biblical figures whose actions, on the face of it, are deceitful or even treacherous, such as Rebecca’s engineering of blind Isaac’s deception, or Jacob’s selective breeding of speckled animals from the flocks of his uncle,

Laban. Drawing on widespread strategies of exegesis from the period, such as those found in the endlessly republished Flos Sanctorum of Alonso de Villegas, I argue that

Ribera used the idea of figural interpretation to circumvent the question of whether deception was legitimate. In other words, Ribera enabled a mode of interpretation for his paintings that also legitimated the dissimulations of their protagonists. This maneuver makes perfect sense in a patronage context of career diplomats, high-ranking noblemen, and possibly even the royal court, all of which were professional settings in which dissimulation was an absolute sine qua non. Ribera’s depictions of Jacob represent an apex in his ability to incorporate creatively, into the most fundamental aspects of his painting, the strategies along which paintings could be evaluated and discussed.

Chapter 1: Ribera and connoisseurship, past and present.

a) State of scholarship concerning Ribera

b) On the role of connoisseurship in Ribera studies

c) Historical connoisseurship and artistic practice

d) Evaluation as theme and activity in Ribera's art

“But Ribera is more than anything a stepchild of tradition ...”1

Carl Justi

“It is a deficiency of at least the English language that there is no single word, applicable over all the arts, for the process of coming to understand a particular work of art.”2

Richard Wollheim

“... The aesthetic properties of a picture include not only those found by looking at it but also those that determine how it is to be looked at.”3

Nelson Goodman

Is Ribera still a stepchild of art-historical tradition? On the face of it, the answer is an unequivocal “no,” but this remains a relatively recent development. Joachim von

1 “Aber Ribera ist mehr als andere ein Stiefkind der Ueberlieferung ...” Carl Justi, Velázquez Und Sein Jahrhundert. Vol. 1 (Bonn: Max Cohen & Sohn, 1888), 320. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 2 Richard Wollheim, “Criticism as Retrieval,” in Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. with six supplementary essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 185. 3 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 111-12. Quoted in Richard Neer, "Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style," in Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (2005): 1-26, quote p. 15.

9 Sandrart, in his 1675 Academie der Bau-, Bild-, und Mahlerey-Künste, had characterized

Ribera as a painter of ugly things: "No pleasing, agreeable, joyous or fair Saints did his genius wish to bring forth, but rather harrowing, cruel stories, aged, lifeless bodies, with wrinkled skin, worn and wild faces, which he depicted all in true liveliness (warhaft lebendig), with great potency and effect (mit grossen Kräften und Wirkungen)."4 Over the next two centuries, this strange accolade nourished a misconception that Ribera's pictures were unattractive in both subject and facture, and many staggeringly bad pictures are still wrongly attributed to Lo Spagnoletto (see for instance figure 1.1). To address this state of affairs, the only possible tool was and remains connoisseurship. When Carl Justi included

Ribera in his landmark study Velázquez Und Sein Jahrhundert in 1888, it was with a conscious intent to break new ground and to rehabilitate a reputation tarnished by violence and bad workshop pictures: “Art history paints him as a naturalist, a "fist- painter," disdainer of his great predecessors; and what is worse, as the puffed-up, vain, power-hungry head of a Neapolitan criminal ring, jealously scheming and even perpetrating violence against his colleagues.”5 The author goes on to note that Ribera's oeuvre is cluttered with low-quality copies and workshop pictures, and that in Germany, where there are only two “excellent pictures” by the artist, it is little wonder that no one has yet set about to “rescue” him.6

4 “Zu denen Devotionen, Kirchen und Altaren wolte sein Genio keine gefällige, angenehme, freudige oder holdselige Heiligen herfür bringen, sondern lieber andere schreckbare, crudele Historien, alte abgelebte Cörper [sic], mit zerrümpfter Haut, bejahrte wilde Angesichter, die er alle warhaft lebendig mit grossen Kräften und Wirkungen ausgebildt.” Joachim von Sandrart, ed. A. R. Peltzer, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675: Leben der Berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, hrsg. und kommentiert von A. R. Peltzer (Munich: G. Hirt, 1925), 278. 5 "Die Kunstgeschichte malt ihn als einen Naturalisten, "Faustmaler", Verächter der grossen Vorfahren; und was noch schlimmer ist, als der eingebildetem eifer- und herrschsüchtige, neidisch-intrigante, gegen seine Kollegen sogar gewaltthätige Haupt einer Camorra." Justi, Velázquez, 320. 6 “... auch die Urkunden seiner Kunst sind in weitestem Umfang verfälscht worden: Schulbilder und Nachahmungen überschwemmen unsere Galerien, und selbst das wenige was echt ist, gehört der

10 This particular lacuna has been thoroughly rectified; the last twenty years in particular have seen an upswing of interest both in Ribera and in Spanish baroque painting more broadly; studies published since the monumental monographic exhibition of Ribera's work in 1992 often look back with a deserved sense of triumph to note how far scholarship has progressed.7 To a great extent, however, the main impetus animating

Ribera studies remains aligned with Justi’s aims: to secure Ribera’s place in the Spanish and Italian canons, and to establish the catalogue and chronology of his oeuvre.

The continuing fluidity of Ribera attributions, along with the enduring and seemingly endless supply of real and would-be Riberas on the art market, have kept issues of quality and connoisseurship at the forefront of the field, and vice-versa: the dominance of an approach that starts and ends with the artist’s catalogue has galvanized and expanded the market.8 By this standard, connoisseurship is as vital a part of Ribera studies now as it was a hundred years ago; what appears to have changed is the status of such an approach within art history. Connoisseurship straddles an awkward line between

geringwerthigeren Hälfte seines Werks an; in Deutschland giebt es von ihm nur zwei vorzügliche Bilder; da ist es kein Wunder, dass noch Niemand Lust gehabt hat, seine “Rettung” zu unternehmen, hat nur sich mit ihm zu beschäftigen.” Ibid. 7 See for instance Miguel Zugaza's preface to the Spanish edition of the catalogue for the most recent monographic exhibition of Ribera's work, José Milicua and Javier Portús (eds.), El Joven Ribera (Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2011), 13; or most recently, Nicholas Turner’s review of Viviana Farina, Al sole e all’ombra di Ribera, in Master Drawings 52, no. 4 (2014): 531-8, which starts off by asserting that “With the exception of Caravaggio, few painters of the Baroque period in Italy are as well served with books, exhibition catalogues and specialist articles as Jusepe de Ribera ...” Quote p. 531. 8 Notably, for instance, in the case of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of a Penitent Saint Peter discovered a year ago, which would not have been attributed to the young Ribera were it not for Gianni Papi’s attribution of the Master of the Judgment of Solomon corpus to the Spanish artist. The framing of the acquisition, and indeed of the larger field of inquiry into Ribera’s early work, as enabling the museum to “tell the story of Spanish painting more fully” since they are now in possession of “a link between Caravaggio and the young Velázquez” calls to mind Otto Kurz and Ernst Kris’s observation as to the tendency on the part of art historians to connect the protagonists they deem most significant. Carol Vogel, “Metropolitan Museum buys a Jusepe de Ribera painting,” The New York Times, Nov. 8, 2012 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/arts/design/metropolitan-museum-buys-a-jusepe-de-ribera- painting.html?_r=0, accessed March 12th, 2015); Otto Kurz and Ernst Kris, Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch (Vienna: Kristall Verlag, 1934), 35.

11 histories of art that take for granted the inherent worth of discussing attribution or stylistic progression, and histories that do not hesitate to dismiss such preoccupations as retrograde. What follows is an attempt to bridge the divide, first by surveying the role that connoisseurship has played in Ribera studies, secondly by historicizing the term and proposing a more dynamic way of applying it, and finally by considering

“connoisseurial” evaluation as a theme in Ribera's work.

Why connoisseurship? First, it is worth discussing simply because it is such a prominent feature of the body of scholarship to which the present work seeks to contribute, and as I shall discuss in more detail, it is a feature that ought to be expanded and rethought rather than dismissed. The first two sections of the chapter will address this point, first in a synopsis of what has been accomplished so far in studies of Ribera, and secondly in an assessment of the role of connoisseurship therein. More importantly, connoisseurship is worth thinking about because it is something that mattered to Ribera and to the artistic culture in which he participated. This point will be argued in the second part of the chapter, first by seeking to recover a more historical idea of what sort of activity it was to look at and evaluate paintings at the start of the seventeenth century.

Especially relevant in this connection is a debate as to the role of Ribera's contemporary, biographer, and probable acquaintance Giulio Mancini and his Considerations on

Painting as providing the ur-formulation of connoisseurship within the first decade of

Ribera's activity. The final section of the chapter will propose examples for how Ribera's pictures are premised on his and his audience's shared interest in practices of evaluation and consideration as these could be applied to works of art.

12 If the term 'connoisseurship' is anachronistic to apply to a moment so far anterior to its narrower and more systematic formulations by modern scholars such as Giovanni

Morelli or Bernard Berenson, all the more reason to understand the rich prehistory of the notion in Ribera's time. Faced with the inadequacy of the term, it is difficult to find an apt substitute for the word “connoisseurship” that might accommodate such a prehistory. As

Richard Wollheim points out, there is no umbrella term for whatever combination of looking, thinking, talking, evaluating, estimating, judging, enjoying, all of the above, or none of the above, might take place before a work of art. Texts from the early seicento such as Mancini's Considerations on Painting are indispensable antecedents to subsequent connoisseurship, but they are also at odds with its modern forms and values.

Early modern connoisseurship encompassed a far more variegated set of concerns, in which artists as well as cognoscenti were deeply engaged.

As I shall argue, the range of historical terms, including intendente, perito, prudente, and uomo di mediocre ingegno, which were applied to designate connoisseurs in the early seventeenth century, set a far wider scope for the meaning of the practice than the effete-sounding “connoisseur” that we use today. Correspondingly, the connoisseurship that was then practiced encompassed a far richer and broader set of questions and activities, all of which bear little resemblance to the form in which contemporary connoisseurship has been applied to Ribera studies. The locus classicus for early seicento Italy is Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni sulla Pittura, (or Considerations on Painting), which makes critically innovative use of terms like perito and uomo di mediocre ingegno, and also frequently designates the connoisseur as prudente.9 Giovanni

9 For instance in the introduction, where Mancini employs the designations “perito” and “prudente” to argue explicitly that artists do not make good connoisseurs (as I shall discuss further in chapter 2): “Onde

13 Battista Armenini’s Veri Precetti della Pittura is explicitly addresed not only to artists, but to “ciascun altra persona intendente di cosi nobile professione,” and Francesco

Scannelli’s Microcosmo della Pittura lavishes praise on the “non poco intendente” Duke of Modena whose collection he takes as paradigmatic for the connoisseurship his own book enacts.10 By the start of Ribera’s career, the words “conoscitore” and “conoscitrice” were already in use, although not necessarily attached to experts in painting.11 The

Accademia della Crusca’s definition of conoscere, however, is richly suggestive of the scope of the early seventeenth century’s connoisseurial practice: the entry begins

“apprendere con lo’ntelletto a prima giunta, per mezzo de’ sensi, l’essere degli oggetti,” to learn with the intellect, at a first encounter, by means of the senses, the essence of objects.12 The derivation of the modern term “connoisseurship” from the same root, by

Aristotile al V dell’Etica, dove parla del mutuo di simili cose, dice queste parole: “Habita ratione sui hominis et operis,” cioè del valor dell’artefice, del compratore e dell’opera fatta, che così poi nel prezzo vi sarà una certa latitudine da considerarsi da questo nostro perito, o per dir meglio prudente, come il dono dato da Iddio all’artefice per venir a tal perfettion d’arte, le fatighe fatte per li tempi a dietro per acquistar l’habito, il tempo consumato per condurre l’opera, et in ultimo li capitali di coloro od altro per condurla, che queste circostanze non possono così bene esser considerate dall’artefice....” (“Whence Aristotle, in [book] V of the Ethics, in which he speaks of the reciprocity among similar things, says these words: “Habita ratione sui hominis et operis,” that is of the value of the craftsman, of the purchaser, and of the work made, so then that in the price there will be a certain latitude to be considered by our man of sound judgment (perito), or to put it better, [our] prudent [man], as a gift given by God to the artist to reach such perfection of art, the efforts made for the times past in acquiring the skill, the time needed to make the work, and finally the capital invested by one person or another to bring it about, [we see] that these circumstances cannot be considered well by the artist ...”) Giulio Mancini, ed. Adriana Marucchi, Considerazioni sulla Pittura, 2 vols. (Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 1956), I, 10. 10 Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’Veri Precetti Della Pittura Di M. Gio. Battista Armenini da Faenza Libri Tre (Ravenna: Francesco Tebaldini, 1587); Francesco Scannelli, Il Microcosmo della Pittura, Overo Trattato diviso in due Libri (Cesena: Neri, 1657), 302. 11 That being said, the term was already employed to mean “fine appreciator of art;” Raffaello Borghini, for instance, in writing about the Madonna of the Rocks by Andrea Mantegna, adds that “the painting now belongs to the Most Serene Francesco Medici, who as a connoisseur of good things (conoscitore delle cose buone) holds it very dear;” “... e questo quadro si trova hoggi appresso al Serenissimo Francesco Medici, il quale come conoscitore delle cose buone il [sic] tiene molto caro.” Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo di Raffaello Borghini in cui della Pittura, e della Scultura si favella, de’piu illustri Pittori, e Scultori, e delle piu famose opere loro si fa mentione; e le cose principali appartenenti a dette arti s’insegnano (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1584), 357. 12 Accademia della Crusca, Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, con tre indici delle voci, locuzioni, e proverbi latini, e greci, posti per entro l’opera (Venice: Giovanni Alberti, 1617), 211-12.

14 way of the french connoitre, might prompt us (at least as a neologistic experiment) to reinject into connoisseurship the sense that it is a practice, not primarily of categorization, but of understanding.13

a) State of scholarship concerning Ribera

Essential biographical information and state of factual research

The painter, draftsman, and etcher José or Jusepe de Ribera was born in 1591 to a cobbler named Simón Ribera from the small town of Játiva, near Valencia.14 An enormous amount of scholarly toil and detective skill was required even to wring this simple fact from mistaken anecdotes and archives cluttered with misleading homonyms both in Spain, where the artist was born, and in Italy, where he spent his career.15

Between the hard-won certainty of his time and place of birth and the next earliest record

13 The etymology is cited here from the Oxford English Dictionary, “connoisseur, n.” and “connoisseurship, n.” in Oxford English Dictionary Online (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/39381?rskey=Ih5Flp&result=1,http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/39382, accessed April 9th, 2016); see also Hugh Brigstocke and Harold Osborne, “connoisseur, connoisseurship,” in The Oxford Companion to Western Art. Oxford Art Online (http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e605, accessed April 9th, 2016). Many thanks to Felipe Pereda for suggesting the idea of “neologism,” and the attention to the term itself. 14 The essential source for the documentary evidence concerning Ribera remains Gabriele Finaldi’s work, published in three languages in the catalogues produced for the Naples, Madrid, and New York installations of the 1992 monographic exhibition that belatedly commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. Finaldi’s pendant essays drew on the research for his 1995 Doctoral thesis Aspects of the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera 1591-1652 (Ph.Diss. London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 1995); my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Finaldi for allowing me to consult his dissertation. For the convenience of the anglophone reader, the English edition of the 1992 catalogue will be cited wherever possible, but as will be discussed presently, the three versions are far from interchangeable. Finaldi’s essays and their contents, in any event, are present and identical across the following volumes: Nicola Spinosa (ed.), Jusepe de Ribera 1591-1652 (exh. cat. Naples: Museo di Capodimonte, 1992); Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez (ed.), Ribera, 1591-1652 (exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1992); Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Nicola Spinosa (eds.), Jusepe de Ribera, 1591-1652 (exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), hereinafter abbreviated respectively as Naples 1992, Madrid 1992, and New York 1992. Gabriele Finaldi, “A Documentary Look at the Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera,” New York 1992, 3-8; idem, “Documentary Appendix: The Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera,” New York 1992, 231-56. 15 With regard to the particular confusion surrounding Ribera’s parentage and his place and date of birth, see José Milicua, “From Játiva to Naples,” New York 1992, 9-18, esp. 9-10, and Justus Lange, “Opere veramente di rara naturalezza” Studien zum Frühwerk Jusepe de Riberas mit Katalog der Gemälde bis 1626 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003), 17.

15 of his activity, there is a lapse of twenty years and a shift from the Iberian to the Italian peninsula; a move whose date, route, and reason all remain unknown. A relatively substantial body of evidence as to Ribera’s life and doings has survived, which is not the case for many of his colleagues, particularly in Naples.16 This documentary record contains tantalizing gaps, and the heroic research efforts of generations of art historians have often been foiled by the state of the Neapolitan archives, or by their own conditions of publication.17 The great plague that decimated Naples in 1656, four years after

Ribera’s death, has probably deprived us forever of any will or inventory that might have told us about his belongings, for instance. In the absence of external evidence as to his intellectual bent or lack thereof, it is important not to assume that the “lack thereof” is the

16 A survey of the documentary evidence that came to light in the decade following the 1992 exhibition, including an appendix with full transcriptions, is in Lange, Rara naturalezza, 10-23, and 257-97. Important subsequent publications of documents also include the following: Valentina Macro, “1613-1616. Gli Anni Romani Di Jusepe Ribera. Due Nuovi Documenti, Il Rapporto Con I Giustiniani E Una Proposta Attributiva,” in Silvia Danesi-Squarzina and Francesca Cappelletti (eds), Decorazione E Collezionismo a Roma Nel Seicento. Vicende Di Artisti, Commitenti, Mercanti (Rome: Gangemi editore, 2003), 75-80; Silvia Danesi-Squarzina, “New Documents on Ribera, ‘Pictor in Urbe,’ 1612-16,” Burlington Magazine 148, no. 1237 (2006): 244-251; Aidan Weston-Lewis, “The Early Provenance of Ribera’s ‘Drunken Silenus’,” in Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1286 (2007): 781-4; and Mariano Carbonell-Buades, “Los Ribera del poeta mallorquín Antonio Gual, secretario del duque de Medina de las Torres, virrey de Nápoles,” in Richerche sul ‘600 Napoletano (2009): 21-34. In addition to these, and to the documentary appendices compiled by Finaldi and Lange, partial compendia of references to Ribera in early sources abound; see for instance Mario Epifani, “Appendice documentaria - Le fonti sul soggiorno Romano di Ribera,” in Gianni Papi, Ribera a Roma (Soncino: Edizioni del Soncino, 2007), 241-55, and Nicola Spinosa, Ribera. La Obra Completa (Madrid: Villar Mir, 2008), 531-52. By contrast, one of the most interesting and prominent Neapolitan painters of the early seicento is still known chiefly as the Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, and practically the entirety of the literature on him is engaged with the debate as to his identity rather than substantive discussion of his works; for a synopsis of this literature and its bibliography, see Giuseppe Porzio, La Scuola di Ribera. Giovanni Dò, Bartolomeo Passante, Enrico Fiammingo (Naples: Arte'm, 2014), 20-21, 71-76; and Desirée Tommaselli, “Il Maestro dell’Annuncio ai Pastori,” in Alessandro Zuccari (ed.), I Caravaggeschi. Percorsi e Protagonisti, vol. 2 (Milan: Skira, 2010), 489-95. One can also note the predominance of anonymous masters in studies such as Ferdinando Bologna, Battistello Caracciolo e il Primo Naturalismo a Napoli (exh. cat. Naples: Castel Sant’Elmo & Chiesa della Certosa di San Martino, 1991). 17 For instance, Ulisse Prota-Giurleo’s 1953 study of Painting in Naples is the sole record for the existence of many documents that the author describes but does not transcribe or fully reproduce, and which have foiled the attempts of subsequent scholars to retrace them; Ulisse Prota-Giurleo, Pittori Napoletani del Seicento (Naples: Fausto Fiorentino, 1953), 95-120. It would not be fair, however, to characterize this endeavour as having failed, or even mostly failed; the impressive and thorough bibliography of the 1992 catalogue attests to the prodigious work done primarily by Neapolitan scholars (such as Antonio Delfino and Eduardo Nappi, for instance) over the course of several decades.

16 more plausible option. An additional onus thereby falls on Ribera's pictures to give some sense of their maker's preoccupations and engagement with the culture surrounding him.

While various art historians have tackled this question from widely different angles (and with correspondingly divergent conclusions), there is solid consensus that Ribera was almost certainly familiar with a wide range of Spanish and Italian texts; scholars have posited that Ribera's readings included standbys such as Vincenzo Cartari, Diogenes

Laertius, Euclid, and Marino, and Gabriele Finaldi has suggested that Ribera had access to a vernacular Bible.18 Lo Spagnoletto, as he was called, produced refined, ambitious, and complex classical and also religious imagery, and he was keenly aware of the intellectual cultures beyond painting in Rome and Naples (particularly the Accademia dei

Lincei and the Accademia degli Oziosi), cultures in which he must be regarded as an astute and engaged participant.19

18 Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers and Euclid's Elements are the texts that have been most persuasively connected to Ribera's so-called beggar philosophers; on the literary culture surrounding the genre, see Oreste Ferrari, “L’iconografia dei filosofi antichi nella pittura del sec. XVII in Italia,” in Storia dell’Arte 57 (1986): 103-181, esp. 105-110, 118-121, and passim; Diederik Bakhuÿs, Les Curieux Philosophes de Velázquez et de Ribera (exh. cat. Rouen: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2005); Charles Salas, “Elements of a Ribera,” in The Getty Research Journal 1 (2009), 17-26. The Madonna and Child with Saint Bruno in the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin is signed with a Plinian “Faciebat;” see Nicola Spinosa (ed.) Il Giovane Ribera tra Parma, Roma, e Napoli, 1608-1624 (Naples: Arte'm, 2011), cat. 43, 202-3. Cartari’s iconography has been plausibly linked to the Drunken Silenus in the Museo di Capodimonte in Nicola Spinosa, Ribera. La Obra Completa (Madrid: Villar Mir, 2008), 353-5; see also Denise Maria Pagano’s entry in New York 1992, cat. 16, 76-8. Giambattista Marino's Adone may or may not be correctly adduced as a source to Ribera's Venus and Adonis, as is claimed by Jeanne Chenault Porter, “Ribera, Ovid, and Marino: ‘Death of Adonis’,” in Paragone 22, no. 259 (1971), 68-77. On Ribera's putative Bible, see Gabriele Finaldi, “La Piedad de Ribera,” in Gabriele Finaldi (ed.), Ribera: La Piedad (exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2003), 12-51, p. 21. 19 This is argued with many caveats by Daniel Aragó-Strasser, “Acerca de la presencia del motivo del paragone en dos pinturas de Ribera,” in Boletin del Museo e Instituto Camón Aznar 64 (1996): 127-62 (my thanks to Felipe Pereda for calling my attention to this important essay). The issue of Ribera's level of intellectual sophistication is addressed most directly in James Clifton, “Ad Vivum Mire Depinxit: Toward a Reconstruction of Ribera's Art Theory,” in Storia dell'Arte 83 (1995): 111-32; are also explored in Paola Santucci, “La ‘Dissimulazione Onesta’ di Jusepe de Ribera. Prolegomena su Arte e Cultura nel Seicento Napoletano,” in Archivio Storico del Sannio 3, nos. 1-2 (1992): 5-89; John E. Gedo, “A Crisis of Science Recorded in Paint: A Dialogue Concerning two World Systems,” in Storia dell’Arte 113/114 (2006): 191- 204; Alessandro Tosi, “Lune e Astri Galileani,” in Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Alessandro Tosi (eds.), Il Cannocchiale e il Pennello. Nuova Scienza e nuova arte nell’età di Galileo (exh. cat. Pisa: Palazzo Blu, 2009), 174-87; Peter Mason, “El Catalejo de Ribera. Observaciones sobre La Vista de la primera serie de

17 There is no evidence as to where or with whom he trained, but we do know that he was a fast and skilled learner, as he obtained and completed a commission for an altarpiece in Parma at the age of twenty.20 We know that he was in Rome between 1612 and 1616, making good money and painting a lot of half-figure easel pictures, and that he was a dues-paying member of the Accademia di San Luca who had both the extravagant temperament and, presumably, the financial wherewithal to make a pledge of 100 scudi to the academy's restoration fund for the church of Saint Luke.21 He moved to Naples in

1616, in all likelihood after developing his most important Parthenopean contacts while he was in Rome: upon arrival in Naples, he promptly married Caterina Azzolino, the daughter of the best-connected artist in town, Giovanni Bernardo Azzolino, and began work for the newly appointed viceroy, the third Duke of Osuna, Pedro Tellez-Girón, and his wife Catalina Enríquez.22 He is reported by the reliable Giulio Mancini to have travelled at a young age around an unspecified portion of northern Italy; all that is certain about his further travels is that he went to Rome in 1626 to receive the Order of Christ from pope Urban VIII.23 Records of commissions, inventories, and early biographical accounts all indicate that Ribera managed to enjoy favor and extensive patronage under most of Osuna’s successors to the viceregal throne, but we have no specific information

Los Cinco Sentidos,” in Boletín del Museo del Prado 30, no. 48 (2012): 50-61; and Itay Sapir, “Blind Suffering: Ribera’s Non-Visual Epistemology of Martyrdom,” in Open Arts Journal 4 (2014-2015): 29-39. 20 See most recently Gabriele Finaldi, “Se è quello che dipinse un S. Martino in Parma... Más sobre la actividad del Joven Ribera en Parma,” in José Milicua and Javier Portús (eds.), El Joven Ribera (Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2011), 17-29, with further bibliography. 21 Lange, Rara naturalezza 264-5; see also Marco Gallo, “Ulteriori dati sulla chiesa dei SS. Luca e Martina e sugli esordi di Jusepe de Ribera lo Spagnoletto, Reni, Borgianni, Gentileschi, Pedro Nuñes portoghese, Alessandro Fortuna ed altri artisti in nuovi documenti dell’Accademia di San Luca,” in Storia dell’Arte 93/94 (1998): 312-36. 22 Finaldi, “Documentary Look,” 3-5; Finaldi, “Documentary Appendix,” 232-5. 23Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 249; see also Lange, Rara naturalezza, 17-21. As several scholars have remarked, the proximity of Rome to Naples make it unwise to rule out any further travel between the two cities on Ribera’s part, the lack of documentation notwithstanding.

18 as to what his role at these rulers’ ever-shifting courts might have looked like. That being said, Viceregal patronage remains one of the most fruitful arenas of Ribera scholarship.24

While some of the Viceroys appear to have paid scant attention to Ribera, he received steady and stimulating patronage from the third Duke and Duchess of Osuna, the third

Duke of Alcalá, the sixth Count of Monterrey, and the Duke of Medina de las Torres. The high status that Ribera had attained by the 1640s, and the good standing that he enjoyed at court, can be inferred from the fact that he and his family were able to take refuge in the Royal Palace from the Masaniello uprising in 1647.25 The intervention of Don Juan

José de Austria to quell the rebellion and serve as interim Viceroy of Naples in 1647-48 resulted, for Ribera, in a commission for a state portrait in a Velázquez-inspired manner that shows an up-to-the-minute awareness of Castilian painting (figure 1.2).26 Don Juan de Austria's stay in Naples also left Ribera with a tawdry anecdote that would cling for

24 For an overview, see Alfonso Pérez Sánchez, “Ribera and Spain: His Patrons in Italy and Spain; His Influence on Spanish Artists,” in New York 1992, 35-50; Gabriele Finaldi, “Ribera, the Viceroys of Naples, and the King: Some Observations on their Relations,” in José Luis Colomer and Jonathan Brown (eds.), Arte y Diplomacia de la Monarquía Hispánica en el Siglo XVII (Madrid: Fernando Villaverde, 2003), 378-387; Eduardo Nappi, “I viceré spagnoli e l’arte a Napoli. Corpus documentale,” in José Luis Colomer (ed.) España y Nápoles. Coleccionismo y mecenazgo virreinales en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2009), 95-132, and the invaluable study by María Jesús Muñoz Gonzáles, El Mercado Español de Pinturas en el Siglo XVII (Madrid: Fundación Caja Madrid, 2008). The indispensable studies of Ribera’s major viceregal patrons are Jonathan Brown and Richard Kagan, “The Duke of Aclalá: His Collection and its Evolution,” in Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 231-55; Fernando Bouza, “De Rafael a Ribera y de Nápoles a Madrid: nuevos inventarios de la colleción Medina de las Torres Stigliano (1641-1656), in Boletín del Museo del Prado 27, no. 45 (2009): 44-71; Justus Lange, “El V. Duque de Alba como mecenas de las artes durante su virreinato en Nápoles (1622-1629), y su relación con Jusepe de Ribera,” in José Luis Colomer (ed.), España y Nápoles: Colleccionismo y mecenazgo virreinales en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Villaverde, 2009), 253-66; Antonio Ernesto Denunzio, “Alcune note inedite per Ribera e il collezionismo del duca di Medina de las Torres, viceré di Napoli,” in José Martínez Millán, et. al. Centros de poder italianos en la monarquía hispánica (siglos XV-XVIII), vol. 3 (Madrid: Polifemo, 2010), 1981-2003; and Fernando Bouza, “Osuna a Napoli: Feste, dipinti, sortilegi e buffoni (Notizie dai libri contabili di Igún de la Lana),” in Encarnación Sánchez García and Caterina Ruta (eds.), Cultura de la Guerra e Arte della Pace. Il III Duca di Osuna in Sicilia e a Napoli (1611-1620) (Naples: Pironti, 2012), 209-230. 25 Spinosa, Obra Completa, 261. 26 According to Pérez Sánchez, this portrait's proximity to Velázquez's work is the result of common printed sources from the Low Countries rather than direct influence between the two Spaniards. In either case, since the portrait of Don Juan was certainly destined to be sent immediately to the Spanish court, the point remains that Ribera knew just what to do in order for his work to fit in within that setting. Madrid 1992, cat. 121, p. 388-89.

19 centuries to his biographies, setting in discussions of the artist the gossipy tone of which

Carl Justi had occasion to complain. The alleged seduction of Ribera's daughter by Don

Juan de Austria as a source of enduring shame and as a judgment on the painter's misdeeds is a staple of the earlier literature. In actuality, it seems to have been his niece who was seduced, and as Finaldi points out, “one wonders whether the social-climbing artist would really have been so ashamed of being the other grandfather to the granddaughter of the King of Spain. Or even her great-uncle.”27

A recent study by Giuseppe Porzio on La Scuola di Ribera brings much-needed order to the morass of documents and secondary sources surrounding three painters known to have worked in Ribera's studio, but the considerable advance in knowledge that

Porzio's book represents also casts into sharp relief how little we know about the exact staffage and setup of what must have been a substantial enterprise.28 From his transfer to

Naples in 1616 until his death in the same city in 1652, Ribera became the head of a large family and a large workshop, though the two did not overlap: none of his children became painters.29 His success was slowed in the 1640s by the onset of a debilitating

27 Gabriele Finaldi, "Ribera Paints the Magdalene," in Gabriele Finaldi (ed.) Jusepe de Ribera's Mary Magdalene in a New Context (exh. cat. Dallas: The Meadows Museum, 2012), 17-33, quote p. 33. 28 Giuseppe Porzio, La Scuola di Ribera. Giovanni Dò, Bartolomeo Passante, Enrico Fiammingo (Naples: Arte'm, 2014). 29 Finaldi, “Documentary Look,” 6. The most detailed early source on the subject of Ribera's workshop is the concluding section of Bernardo De’Dominici, “Vita di Giuseppe di Ribera detto lo Spagnoletto Pittore e de’suoi Discepoli,” in Andrea Zezza (ed.) Vite de’Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani vol. 3 (Naples: Paparo, 2008), 37-41. De’Dominici’s comments in this regard are generally seen as borne out by stylistic overlap between works of Ribera and the painters who are supposed to have been in his studio, although the strength of the evidence tying each artist to Ribera varies from case to case. Conversely, artists such as Bartolommeo Passante and Juan Do are certain based on documentary evidence to have trained and worked with Ribera, but their own bodies of work cannot be delineated with much assurance. Viviana Farina has also recently speculated that Ribera ran a workshop from a much earlier date than is generally assumed, although her case seems far from conclusive, and the “workshop” in question seems to consist of José Ribera’s brother Juan: Viviana Farina, Al sole e all'ombra di Ribera. Questioni di pittura e disegno a Napoli nella prima metà del Seicento vol. 1 (Castellamare di Stabia: Nicola Longobardi Editore, 2014), 198-200.

20 illness, and although the last decade of his career was marked by struggle and decline, it was also in this period that he produced his two most important public works, Saint

Januarius delivered from the fiery furnace, for the treasury chapel of Naples’ patron saint, and the Communion of the Apostles for the Charterhouse of San Martino. For the latter painting, Ribera's widow and children had to take the Carthusians to court to obtain the full balance due to the artist, whose literary Nachlass is confined to a pitiful handful of letters, written in the unhappy period of 1649-50, to plead for leniency with deadlines or for financial assistance.30

Though he appears to have been sedentary from 1616 until his death in 1652,

Ribera enjoyed wide renown and a high-level patronage network that crisscrossed Italy and Spain.31 While he never returned to his home country in person, his works found a market there while he was still in his twenties, and he filled several Spanish commissions from Naples, including a commission to paint the banners for Philip III’s ships of war in

1617, and a mysterious assignment for which he was paid 300 ducats out of a Royal discretionary fund the following year.32 Philip IV, whose collections included no fewer than 50 Riberas,33 summoned the Valencian painter to court in 1643.34 Whether due to ill- health, inertia, well-founded skepticism as to conditions in Madrid, or some combination of such factors, Ribera remained in Naples. Although he may have had several motives for declining the journey back to Spain, there is some weight to the idea that the degree of

30 Finaldi “Documentary Appendix,” 250-2. 31 His major patrons, aside from the Spanish monarchs and viceroys, are known to include an international coterie of plutocrats, including Marcantonio Doria of Genoa, Antonio Ruffo of Messina, and the Naples- based Flemish businessman Gaspar Roomer. Finaldi, “Documentary Appendix,” passim. 32 Ibid., 492. The most striking instance of Spanish patronage à distance is the high altar for the church of the Augustinas Recoletas in Salamanca; Ángela Madruga Real, “Ribera, Monterrey y las Agustinas de Salamanca,” in Madrid 1992, 107-113. 33 Finaldi, "Ribera, the Viceroys of Naples and the King," 379. 34 Denunzio "Alcune note inedite," 1991.

21 success that he was enjoying in Italy would be reason enough; Ribera had a large workshop, a large family, and owned and rented out real-estate in Naples, so there is nothing mysterious about his decision not to attempt transplanting the whole lot to a

Spanish context.35 The royal summons nonetheless speaks volumes as to the impact of his art in Spain, and of the many first-rate Riberas still in the Prado and the Escorial, many are likely to have been painted more or less directly with the King in mind.36 The wide circulation of his works and the high demand for them are also seen in the vast amounts of copies, both produced by his own studio and well outside of it, attesting to his success both in Spain and in Naples.37

Historiography and Identity: between Spain and Italy

Historians have tended to view both Ribera’s self-presentation and his success in light of his shared nationality with the ruling class in Spanish Naples, with the understandable assumption that the viceroys may have welcomed the chance to employ a

Spaniard for artistic commissions.38 In a historiography that awkwardly straddles Italian

35 Ribera's pride in both his nationality and his position in Naples are emphasized in this connection by Diane Kracht, “"Wem es gut geht, der soll sich nicht bewegen:" Der Spanier José de Ribera in Neapel,” in Uwe Fleckner, Maike Steinkamp, and Hendrik Ziegler (eds.), Der Künstler in der Fremde: Migration, Reise, Exil (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 47-64. 36 This has been argued most forcefully with regard to the Martyrdom of Saint Philip in the Prado, long misidentified as a martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, but likely intended as a gift for Philip IV. Madrid 1992, cat. 94, pp. 336-37. 37 For succinct but detailed overviews, see Pérez Sánchez, “Ribera and Spain,” and Renato Ruotolo, “La clientela napolitana de Ribera,” in Madrid 1992, 73-77. 38 See Javier Portús, El Concepto de Pintura Española: Historia de un Problema (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2012), 75-82, and a similar argument in more succinct form, Javier Portús, Ribera (Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2011), 23-26. While Portús shows a fine-grained and fairly balanced approach to the problem, the assumption that Ribera was favored on the basis of nationality often flattens out the question of Ribera's self presentation and the role of nationality therein; Craig Felton, for instance, asserts unequivocally that in Ribera’s situation, “(...) to be Spanish was simply to be the best there was.” Craig Felton, “Jusepe de Ribera, Called “lo Spagnoletto,” (1591-1652): A Spanish Painter in Baroque Italy,” in Gabriele Finaldi (ed.), Jusepe de Ribera’s Mary Magdalene in a New Context,” (exh. cat. Dallas: Meadows Museum of Art, 2011), 35-78, quote p. 52.

22 and Spanish histories of national schools, Ribera has been accused more than once of feigning (or at best, exploiting) Spanish nationality in a bid for preferential treatment.39

His name itself, whose common currency in southern Europe has made archival work more than usually fraught with red herrings, is also a marker of his embrace of Spanish expatriate status as a cultural identity, neither endeavoring to reintegrate Spain nor to fashion an Italian persona. He most often signed his works as Jusepe de Ribera, with an occasional Latin “Joseph” used instead, and a frequent addition of “español” to the name.

In a few important instances, his signatures confirm what little we know of his curriculum vitae: he announces himself to be a Spaniard, Valencian, from Játiva, yet also a fully-credentialed Italian, Neapolitan, Roman academic, Knight of the Order of Christ; no mean achievements for a cobbler’s son from an obscure town in the Valencian countryside. His signatures readily juxtapose the Spanish roots with the Italian accolades,

39 Notably by Bernardo De’Dominici, who goes out of his way to contradict Ribera’s previous biographers: “Giuseppe was born in the year 1593 in Gallipoli, city of the province of Lecce, of don Antonio Ribera, a native of Valencia, the principal city of Aragonese Spain, and an officer in that fortress. And the author of the Abecedario, Sandart and all the others are mistaken who make him out a Spaniard, and born in Valencia, insofar as the aforementioned don Antonio took for his wife in Gallipoli Dorotea Caterina Indelli, and from her had four sons, two boys and two girls, who were married, and one of these on becoming a widow went to Naples to be with her brother Giuseppe; the other boy, named Domenico, became a soldier, and we do not know what became of him in the war of Flanders. And it is true that Giuseppe was used to calling and signing himself as a Spaniard, but this he did out of conceit, thinking to better aggrandize himself, reputing himself to be from the dominant nation, to which he had been accustomed by his father, who, he too sinning through pride, held the Italians in little esteem.” (“Nacque Giuseppe l’anno 1593 in Gallipoli, città della provincia di Lecce, da don Antonio Ribera, nativo di Valenza, città principale della Spagna Tarraconese, il quale era ufficiale in quel castello. E s’ingannano l’autor dell’Abecedario, il Sandrart, e tutti gl’altri, che il fanno spagnolo, e nato in Valenza, dapoiché il detto don Antonio tolse per moglie in Galliploi Dorotea Caterina Indelli, e da lei ebbe quattro figliuoli, due maschi, e due femmine, le quali fulruono [sic.] martiate, ed una di esse fatta poi vedova se ne venne in Napoli a star col fratello Giuseppe; l’altro maschio, appellato Domenico, si applicò alla milizia, e non sappiamo che avenisse di lui nelle guerre di Fiandra. Egli è il vero che Giuseppe solea nominarsi alcuna volta e scriversi spagnolo, ma ciò egli facea per alteriggia, credendo poter meglio torreggiare, facendosi riputar della nazion dominante, al che era stato avvezzo da suo padre, il quale, peccando ancor egli di superbia, stimava poco gli uomini italiani.” De’Dominici, “Vita,” 7-8. The passage is admirably situated relative to the other biographies of Ribera in the introductory note and apparatus by Andrea Zezza, ibid., 3-8.

23 as though to call attention to the “mixed” background as an achievement in its own right.40

The quantity and variety of Ribera’s signatures have called some attention to his self-presentation, and to the role of nationality and dual citizenship therein.41 Ribera’s reputation has evolved, logically enough, along with the critical fortunes of the regional identities that he has been deemed to represent. Thus, for instance, the French nineteenth century fascinated by the idea of a dark and cruel Spain both lionized and reviled him as a dark and cruel Spanish painter.42 A revival of interest in Neapolitan painting followed the exhibitions Painting in Naples 1606-1705: From Caravaggio to Giordano and the monumental Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli in the early 1980s, and Ribera was increasingly hailed as Neapolitan caposcuola, an idea that has gained purchase on the field through the influence and sheer volume of writings by its main proponent, Nicola Spinosa.43

While even before the civil war, Spanish scholars had promoted Ribera within a

40 Portús, op. cit. note 38. For instance, in Ribera's painted Drunken Silenus of 1626, the prominent signature (on a cartellino mysteriously torn by a snake) reads, “Josephus a Ribera, Hispanus, V[torn]alentin / et academicus Romanus [torn] faciebat / partenope;” Madrid 1992, cat. 18, pp. 196-97. On this point, the signature in the etched version of the Drunken Silenus is still more explicit, adding a reference to Játiva (Setabensis): “Joseph a Ribera Hisp.s Vanenti.s / Setaben f. Partenope / 1628.” Jonathan Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings (exh. cat. Princeton: Princeton University Art Gallery, 1973), cat. 14, pp 75- 76. The aforementioned Portrait of Don Juan José de Austria similarly accentuates these two aspects of Ribera's origins, although it was surely a stretch for the painter to refer to himself as a Valencian citizen when he had been living in Naples for four solid decades: “Joseph de Ribera Español Valentinus civ... Academia Romana.” Madrid 1992, cat. 121, pp. 388-89. 41 Karin Hellwig, “Künstleridentität und Signatur in Spanien im 17. Jahrhundert Velázquez, Zurbarán, Ribera und Palominos Kommentare im Parnaso Español Pintoresco Laureado,” in Nicole Hegener (ed.), Künstlersignaturen (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013), 316-39, esp. 330-37. I regret that I have been unable to consult Lisandra Estevez’s doctoral dissertation, Jusepe de Ribera’s Artistic Identity and Self-Fashioning in Early Modern Italy and Spain (Ph.Diss. New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 2012), which is sure to shed further light on this issue when it becomes available in published form. 42 On Ribera’s critical fortune in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Pierre Rosenberg, “De Ribera a Ribot: Del naturalismo al academicismo: el destino de un pintor en pos de su nacionalidad y de su definición estilística,” in Madrid 1992, 147-63. 43 See for instance Nicola Spinosa, Pittori del Seicento a Napoli, vol. 1, Da Caravaggio a Massimo Stanzione (Naples: Arte’M, 2010); Clovis Whitfield and Jane Martineau (eds.), Painting in Naples, 1606- 1705: From Caravaggio to Luca Giordano (exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1982); Ermanno Bellucci (ed.), Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, 2 vols. (exh. cat. Naples: Museo di Capodimonte, 1984).

24 nationalistic art canon as a successful export and ur-Spaniard, Fernando Benito

Doménech in the early 1990s gave a more balanced and still pertinent view of Ribera as an essentially Valencian painter.44

Justi's particular reference to Ribera as a “stepchild” is likely rooted in a conversation that the Zaragozan painter Jusepe Martínez reports as having taken place between himself and Ribera in 1625, addressing the question of why Ribera never returned to Spain:

My dear friend, I have a strong impulse to go [back to Spain], but judging from the experience of many well-informed and truthful persons I find this drawback. During the first year, I would be received there as a great painter, but in the second year, no one would pay attention to me because when people know you are around they lose respect for you. This is confirmed because I have seen some works by excellent Spanish masters that were held in low esteem there. Thus, I judge Spain to be a very loving mother to foreigners and a very cruel stepmother to her own sons. I find myself very well accepted and admired in this city, and my works are paid to my satisfaction. Thus I will continue to follow the adage which is as true as it is commonplace: Let him not move who finds himself well.45

44 Fernando Benito Doménech, Ribera 1591-1652 (Madrid: Bancaja, 1991), see especially “Ribera y Valencia,” 15-21. The “pure Spaniard” Ribera is promoted, for example, in Elías Tormo y Monzó’s brief but pungent Ribera en el Museo del Prado (Barcelona: Edición Thomas, undated [1920s?]). 45 Quoted and translated in Jonathan Brown, Painting in Spain 1500-1700 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 4. The translation of the concluding adage is my own (amended from Brown’s more generic “Leave well enough alone.”). While the passage in question does not explicitly name Ribera, there is overwhelming consensus that he is the artist referred to. The original quote, including Martínez's prefacing question as to why Ribera never returned to Spain and Ribera's concluding statement that he is satisfied with his pay and station in Italy, is as follows: “Entre varios discursos passé a preguntarle de cómo, viéndosse [sic] tan aplaudido de todas las naciones, no tratava de venirse a España, pues tenía por cierto eran vistas sus obras con toda veneración. Respondiome: “Amigo caríssimo, de mi voluntad es la instancia grande, pero de parte de la experiencia de muchas personas bien entendidas y verdaderas hallo el impedimento que es ser el primer año recibido por gran pintor, al segundo año no hacerse caso de mí porque viendo presente la persona se le pierde el respeto, y lo confirma esto el constarme haver visto algunas obras de excelentes maestros d'essos reynos de España ser mui poco estimadas. Y assí juzgo que España es madre piadosa de forasteros y cruelísima madrastra de los proprios naturales. Yo me hallo en esta ciudad y reyno mui admitido y estimado, y pagadas mis obras a toda satisfación mía, y assí seguiré el adagio tan común como verdadero: 'Quien está bien, no se mueva.'” In Jusepe Martínez, Discursos Practicables del Nobilísimo Arte de la Pintura, ed. María Elena Manrique Ará (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2008), 51.

25 This often-cited passage from Martínez’s Discursos Practicables del Nobilísimo Arte de la Pintura, written around 1673,46 reflects a very real difference between the art markets and professional conditions of artists in Spain and Italy, although it should be added that critiques of these conditions with regard to the Iberian peninsula had been expressed as early as the fifteenth century with regard to Naples, and the money and status that were associated with important commissions in Venice, Florence, and Rome were not usually replicated even by the best conditions that Naples had to offer.47 By 1625, when this conversation between Martínez and Ribera was to have occurred, a decades-long legal battle was well underway between Spanish artists and state authorities over the alcabalá, a flat tax on manufactured goods from which painters and sculptors were desperately seeking exemption.48 This tax was not only financially onerous: it gave concrete form to the social and symbolic limitations placed on artists in Spain, giving legal and economic force to the idea that artist's works were merchandise and their activities manual and commercial labor.

46 Its first publication was over a century later; for the history and circumstances spanning the two events, see the introduction to the edition by Manrique Ará just cited, xii-xli. 47 This is already a salient feature of Pietro Summonte’s 1524 letter to Marcantonio Michiel: “I say then that in our land [Naples] this art [painting] has been but little celebrated. I am persuaded that this has been so because of our kings, who have attended only to matters of war, to jousts, to equipping of horses, to hunts, loving and rewarding only the artfulness of such things [trans. mine].” (“Dico dunque che nel paese nostro questa arte è stata poco celebrata. Persuadomi questo sia stato per causa che li nostri re, non hanno atteso se non alle cose della guerra, alle giostre, ad fornimenti di cavalli, alle cacce, amando e premiando solo li artefici di queste cose [emphasis in original].”) Transcribed in Fausto Nicolini, L’Arte napoletana del rinascimento e la lettera di Pietro Summonte a Marcantonio Michiel (Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1925), 159. For Ribera’s own time period, the particular socio-economic circumstances of Neapolitan patronage are thoroughly documented and analyzed in Gérard Labrot, Peinture Et Société À Naples (Seyssel: Champ-Vallon, 2010), see esp. 37-56; for a comparison with other Italian centers of artistic production, see Richard Spear and Philip Sohm (eds.), Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 48 For an excellent overview of this problem, see Julián Gállego, El Pintor, de Artesano a Artista (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1976); on the alcabalá in particular, 11-28; José Manuel Cruz Valdovinos, “El Fuero y el Huevo. La Liberalidad de la Pintura: Textos y Pleitos,” in José Riello (ed.), Sacar de la Sombra Lumbre: La Teoría de la Pintura en el Siglo de Oro (1560-1724) (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2012), 173-202.

26 Nevertheless, one should not be too quick to dismiss the passage just quoted as special pleading; Martínez gives us a picture of Ribera as an artist whose awareness of his own success is tempered with disillusionment, and whose evocative sense of his own potential role in society is inseparable from the economic and social realities of his trade.49 While this passage undeniably serves an agenda proper to the 1670s and to its author and ought not be taken quite literally, it seems to me overzealous rather than cautious to separate the quote too stringently from any historical interaction between

Martínez and Ribera. Without calling into question the relevance of Martínez’s text to artistic conditions in the 1670s, it would be a mistake to discount his rich testimony as to

Ribera’s sardonic self-perception as a prophet without honor in the arena of Spanish painting. By drawing a parallel between Ribera’s words and Christ’s assertion that a prophet is never honored in his home town, Martínez insists on the potential importance, inspiration, and dignity of the artist’s activity, and also acknowledges the general misrecognition of the activity and its practitioners as prosaic manual labor, as mere carpenter’s sons.50

The question of how Ribera viewed his own activity has been largely secondary to the Sisyphean task of ordering that activity's products. There are several exceptions,

49 The most sustained study of this passage of the Discursos Practicables, by Mateo Revilla Uceda, takes this quote as a starting point in a negative assessment of Spanish art theory and criticism, and reads the statement as being entirely Martínez's own, with Ribera as a rhetorically useful historical figure to ventriloquize. Revilla Uceda deserves credit for exploring Ribera's role within the development of Spanish writing on art, in which the poor conditions and lack of judgment on the part of patrons were the subject of invidious comparisons with Italy; Revilla Uceda, however, also caricatures Spanish theory and practice, presenting the working conditions for artists in Spain, Iberian stylistic traditions, and material practices (especially polychrome sculpture) as primitive and retardataire, in a manichean contrast with the more “modern” taste and practices current in Italy. Mateo Revilla Uceda, "Ribera en la la Tratadistica Española,” in Napoli Nobilissima 20 (1981): 85-101. 50 Two gospel passages discuss Christ’s chilly, skeptical reception in his hometown, where his words and deeds are met with the dismissive question, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” See Mark 6:1-6 and Luke 4:16- 30.

27 and an engaging discussion has emerged as to how Ribera's perception of his artistic practice shaped his art; the issue of violence and the often too-memorable depictions of torture and flaying in Ribera's work have most frequently brought this question into focus.51 Ribera's often brutal images and the bloody repuation that he received from his eighteenth-century biographers certainly contributed to his undeservedly poor repuation over the years. The analogy between his activity as a painter and the violence of what he often depicted was memorably expressed by Lord Byron, in a verse that generations of art historians have both decried and reiterated: “Spagnoletto tainted / His brush with the blood of all the sainted.”52 This view of Ribera as a kind of poster child for the black legend, expressing his Spanishness by painting grisly yet pious scenes of martyrdom, has rightly been met with resistance. That being said, Byron's verse also echoes renowned precedents for likening the brush to the sword, as in Giambattista Marino's ekphrasis of

Guido Reni's Massacre of the Innocents.53 This congruence is pointed out and developed in an exceptionally fruitful recent study by Nicola Suthor, which shifts the emphasis from

Ribera's art-historical reputation back to how he and his contemporaries might have

51 See Edward Payne, “Skinning the Surface: Ribera's Executions of Bartholomew, Silenus, and Marsyas,” in Mateusz Kapustka (ed.), Bild-Riss. Textile Öffnungen im ästhetischen Diskurs (Berlin: Imorde, 2014), 85-100 (my thanks to the author for his collegiality in sharing his research with me); Gabriele Finaldi, “Jusepe de Ribera: The Iconography of Pain in his Drawings,” in Francesco Solinas and Sebastian Schütze (eds.), Le Dessin Napolitain (Rome: De Luca Editori d'Arte, 2010), 75-80; Damian Dombrowski, “Die Häutung des Malers: Stil und Identität in Jusepe de Riberas Schindung des Marsyas,“ in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 72, no. 2 (2009), 215-46; Diane Kracht, Gequälte Seelen - Gequälte Körper. Gewaltinszenierung in Den Gemälden Der Antiken Unterweltsbüßer Des Jusepe De Ribera (1591-1652) (Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2005); Miguel Falomir, Las Furias: Alegoría Política y Desafío Artístico (exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2014), 99-108. 52 George Gordon Byron, “Don Juan,” in The Works of Lord Byron in 5 Volumes, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Bernh. Tauchnitz, 1842), LXXI, p. 417. A poem in similar vein by Théophile Gautier, “Sur le Prométhée du Musée de Madrid,” is discussed in Rosenberg, “De Ribera a Ribot,” 151. For examples of resistance to the “black legend” implications of such verses, see Mayer, Ribera, 18-20, 169; and Spinosa, Obra Completa, 50-51. 53 As analyzed, for instance, in Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 271-76.

28 conceived of their own practice.54 Suthor notes how art critical terms such as bravura, fierezza, and maniera gagliarda were adopted by Ribera and others as stylistic calling cards. The brush/sword simile was embraced by the painters themselves, equating the figurative violence of their enterprise with artistic daring and prowess. In Ribera's case,

Suthor gives the unassailable example of the Head of Saint John the Baptist in the Museo

Gaetano Filangieri (figure 1.3), in which the juxtaposition of Ribera's signature and the sword's blade amply vindicate Guido Reni's own earlier assessment of Ribera, as similar to Caravaggio, “ma più tento e più fiero.”55 Rather than attempt to sanitize Ribera's violent enterprise, Suthor recovers a sense of the generative potential within that violence, privileging the question of what contemporary art-critical terms meant to the artist, and how his style and choice of subject matter became a performance of a certain kind of persona.

The primary preoccupation of Ribera studies, however, has been to sort out what he did and when he did it, and the natural desire motivating this inquiry has mainly been to assert Ribera's place in the scheme of important painting produced in the first half of the seventeenth century. The greatest moment in the turnabout of Ribera's critical fortunes came in 1992, with a monographic exhibition of remarkable scope and quality, which established a sense of Ribera's significance and expertise that would brook no further denial. Held, with considerable variations, in Naples, Madrid, and New York, the exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue whose three editions remain the most indispensable scholarly works produced on Ribera. Moving forward from this watershed

54 Nicola Suthor, Bravura: Virtuosität und Mutwilligkeit in der Malerei der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 20-21. 55 Suthor, Bravura, 17-19. Guido Reni's declaration is reported in Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 249.

29 moment, studies of Ribera could build on the solid foundations of a thorough compliation of primary documents, an exhaustive bibliography, painstaking research into basic historical problems (such as the vexed questions of his birth and training), and a compendious catalogue that did not pretend to be complete, but ran the gamut of Ribera's paintings, drawings, and etchings across his substantial career.56

The program of rehabilitation for which Justi sounded the clarion call continues in many ways to characterize Ribera studies. Gianni Papi has fought to secure for the young

Ribera in his Roman years the leading role usually given to Caravaggio, as a kind of spiritual caposcuola, mentor and mascot to a key segment of the Roman art world before the mid-1630s.57 Papi’s promotion of Ribera over Caravaggio is revisionist up to a point, but it ultimately reinforces the view that the way to make sense of Ribera is by tweaking his position within the hierarchical flowchart of early seicento painting. That the apex of this hierarchy happens to be occupied by Caravaggio for most of the current generation of scholars does not change the nature of the gesture, which is to legitimize Ribera’s place in the canon through his stylistic proximity to that canon’s pole star. For earlier writers such as Justi and August L. Mayer, the same revisionist impulse was expressed by distancing Ribera from Caravaggio and asserting that he was an admirer of Raphael and

Correggio, not a “know-nothing naturalist.”58

The desire to see in Ribera the hero-protagonist of an era rather than one more follower of Caravaggio operating outside of the Rome-Florence-Bologna-Venice corridor

56 Naples 1992; Madrid 1992; New York 1992. The exhibition reviews tend to encapsulate this historiographical narrative; see for instance William B. Jordan, “Ribera. Naples, Madrid and New York,” in Burlington Magazine 134, no. 1074 (1992): 622-5. 57 To the extent of making the perhaps overblown claim that the underwhelming Langres Christ Among the Doctors (attributed to Ribera) was nothing less than “the sistine chapel for the artists of the second and third decades” of the seicento; Gianni Papi, Ribera a Roma (Cremona: Soncino, 2007), 16. 58 Justi, Velázquez, 321; Mayer, Ribera, 20.

30 was pointedly expressed by Walter Vitzthum: “the history of art, like any other story, needs heroes. And if we eliminate Caravaggio, the only possible substitute is Ribera, who occupies in the development of Neapolitan drawing the same key position that

Caravaggio has in painting.”59 Marina Causa Picone’s long view of Neapolitan baroque drawing likewise positions Ribera in the heroic role that Italian scholarship has more often assigned, where painting is concerned, to Caravgaggio, inverting Roberto Longhi’s vivid assessment of Ribera’s impact on Neapolitan painting as having been even more devastating than the massive plague of 1656.60

One of the most recent publications on Ribera is Viviana Farina’s Al sole e all’ombra di Ribera: Questioni di pittura e disegno a Napoli nella prima metà del seicento, the first instalment of a two-volume monograph that, in Farina's words, traces the arc of Ribera’s pictorial activity, moving through an enormous volume of documents and images with an emphasis on close observation and an unvarnished and generally persuasive assertion of connoisseurial authority as the defining approach.61 Farina’s book

59 “[...] la storia dell’arte, come qualisiasi altra storia, ha bisogno di eroi. E se noi eliminiamo il Caravaggio, è solo per sostituirlo con Ribera, il quale occupa nello sviluppo del disegno napoletano la stessa posizione chiave che il Caravaggio ha nella pittura.” Walter Vitzthum, Il Barocco a Napoli e nell’Italia Meridionale (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1971), 11. This quote stands in provocative contrast with the excellent assessment of the state of scholarship on Neapolitan seicento painting by Andrea Zezza, “Une Histoire de l'Art Sans Héros? Etudes récentes sur la Peinture Napolitaine du XVIIe siècle,” in Perspective 3 (2011): 435-59. The continued relevance of Vitzthum's words may be surmised from the fact that I encountered this particular quote on a promotional bookmark for Viviana Farina's 2014 monograph on Ribera, which I shall discuss presently. 60 Marina Causa Picone, Maestri Napoletani del Sei e Settecento: Caracciolo, Stanzione, Ribera, Spinelli, Rosa, Cavallino, Preti, Giordano, Solimena, De Mura, Vanvitelli, Giaquinto, Traversi, Mondo, etc. (Florence: Istituto Alinari, 1979), 11-12. 61 As is stated in the book’s glowing review by Nicholas Turner, op. cit. note 7. Farina's work represents an admirable synthesis of the enormous documentary literature relevant to Ribera, addresses longstanding shortcomings in the field, such as the lack of overlap between studies of Ribera’s graphic works and painted oeuvre, and contains many excellent observations concerning his style (Particularly compelling is the link that she draws between Ribera’s drawings and the style and practices of drawing in the Cavaliere d’Arpino’s workshop; Farina, Al sole e all'ombra, 102-3, 108-9). That her conclusions offer no toehold to anyone not already convinced of the inherent interest in the assessment, chronology, and documentary backdrop of Ribera’s pictures is a reproach or a compliment, depending precisely on the reader’s sense of belonging to that target audience.

31 is symptomatic of the field overall, in the sense that while it is well done, it is also essentially following the art historical agenda that was set in Justi’s generation: clarifying the catalogue and the documentation, asserting and reassessing Ribera's position in the scheme of the important artists of his time and place.

b) On the role of connoisseurship in Ribera studies

Ribera and the endless task of connoisseurship

As we have seen, connoisseurship was recognized as of the late nineteenth century as a fundamental desideratum for Ribera studies, and the prevalence of copies, workshop pictures, and dubious attributions has helped to ensure its continued relevance to the field. Despite its dominance within scholarship, however, the entire subsequent endeavour of fixing a definitive canon of Ribera attributions has proven oddly futile. This futility was poignantly expressed by the doyen of Ribera studies in Italy, Nicola Spinosa, in a post-script to the catalogue of Il Giovane Ribera, an exhibition that was to have settled the last major uncertainty surrounding Ribera's production by attributing a considerable group of paintings to the artist in his early Roman period.62 Spinosa had given way gradually to the exhibition's central hypothesis (recognizing in the Master of the Judgment of Solomon the hand of the young Ribera), which was formulated over a series of publications by Gianni Papi.63 At what should have been a moment of arrival and resolution, Spinosa expressed significant reservations as to Papi's thesis, and

62 Nicola Spinosa, “Sul giovane Ribera in mostra dal Prado a Capodimonte: rilievi, riflessioni e altro ancora,” in Nicola Spinosa (ed.), Il Giovane Ribera tra Roma, Parma e Napoli, 1608-1624 (Exh. cat. Naples: Museo di Capodimonte, 2011), 207-27. 63 The critical fortunes and development of this argument are detailed in Gianni Papi, “Ribera en Roma. La revelación del genio,” in José Milicua and Javier Portús (eds.), El Joven Ribera, (exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2011), 31-59.

32 questioned the entire enterprise of finalizing the catalogue of Ribera's works - an enterprise of which he himself had been the driving force for over three decades. Having co-authored the first published catalogue raisonné of Ribera’s paintings with Alfonso

Pérez Sánchez in 1978, Spinosa produced a greatly expanded version in 2003, which was followed by amended editions in 2006 and 2008.64 The field seems to be awash in catalogues, yet the lack of a cohesive catalogue is frequently lamented.65 Any scholar wishing to pass in review Ribera's known body of work will face a crippling embarrassment of riches, having to consult no fewer than four catalogues raisonnés, two further catalogues on Ribera’s early work, at least one of two exhibition catalogues on

Ribera's graphic work, two distinct editions of the 2011-2012 exhibition catalogue on

“the Young Ribera,” and of course the tripartite bible of Ribera studies, the three editions of the catalogue from the 1992 monographic exhibition, not counting substantive monographic studies such as Benito Dómenech’s and Farina’s.66 The most recent

64 Nicola Spinosa and Alfonso Pérez-Sánchez, L'Opera Completa del Ribera (Milan: Rizzoli, 1978); Nicola Spinosa, Ribera: l'Opera Completa (Naples: Electa, 2003); Nicola Spinosa, Ribera: l’Opera Completa (Naples: Electa, 2006); Spinosa, Obra Completa. 65 Justus Lange points out this lacuna, ironically at the conclusion to one of the most useful Ribera catalogues in existence. Lange, Rara naturalezza, 181. 66 In addition to the catalogues raisonnés cited in note 56 above, see Lange, Rara Naturalezza; Papi, Ribera a Roma; Brown, Prints and Drawings; Jonathan Brown, Jusepe de Ribera, grabador, 1591-1652 (exh. cat. Valencia and Madrid: Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación Caja de Pensiones, Correos, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1989); Milicua and Portús (eds.), El Joven Ribera; Spinosa (ed.), Il Giovane Ribera; Naples 1992; Madrid 1992; New York 1992; Benito Dómenech, Ribera; Farina, Al sole e all'ombra. Giuseppe Porzio has recently noted the widely discrepant approaches to attribution that can separate one such catalogue from the next: “A dispetto del sottotitolo l'Opera Completa che accomuna le varie sistemazioni monografiche di Nicola Spinosa, il catalogo di Ribera non può dirsi ancora stabilizzato: l'edizione del 1978 registrava 209 autografi, 163 copie da presunti originali e 101 espunzioni; quella del 2003 307 autografi, 30 copie, 42 quesiti; nell'aggiornamento del 2006 si contano 338 autografi, 25 copie da modelli dispersi, 47 quesiti e 10 espunzioni; nel 2008 gli autografi sono saliti a 383, le opere problematiche e quelle spurie sono scese rispettivamente a 40 e a 8. Tale squilibrio, non imputabile a sole ragioni d'interesse commerciale, è invece la conseguenza dell' oggettiva difficoltà di classificare un materiale fortemente omologato, in assenza di un più saldo quadro di riferimento ...” (“Notwithstanding the subtitle “The Complete Works” which accompanies the various monographic apparatuses of Nicola Spinosa, Ribera's catalogue cannot yet be said to have been stabilized: the 1978 edition recorded 209 autograph works, 163 copies of presumed originals and 101 expurgations; that of 2003, 307 autographs, 30 copies, 42 questionables; in the 2006 update one can count 338 autographs, 25 copies of lost originals, 47

33 catalogue raisonné of Ribera's paintings does not include a proper bibliography, and there is no full catalogue of Ribera’s drawings, although one is hopefully forthcoming from

Gabriele Finaldi.

That the catalogue and the monograph overwhelmingly outnumber more thematically structured approaches to Ribera’s work is symptomatic of an art historical approach that constructs its canon of values around the strictly defined hand of an individual.67 The undeniable utility and even urgency of sorting out the authorship of a given body of work need not imply such a narrow set of scholarly preoccupations as are sometimes found in Ribera studies. The Young Ribera exhibition in particular was an unnecessarily limiting connoisseurial exercise; designed at once as a trial for Papi's hypothesis and as a demonstration that no trial was needed, its exclusive focus on paintings attributions set aside many of the attendant questions that naturally arise from the premise of the exhibition, such as the roles of collaboration, emulation, and copying in the Roman art market, and the relationship of the proposed reassessments of Ribera's painted corpus with his graphic production.68

questionables and 10 expurgations; by 2008 the autograph works have risen to 383, while problematic and spurious works have gone down to 40 and 8, respectively. Such imbalance, which cannot be attributed solely to reasons of commercial interest, is rather the consequence of the objective difficulty of classifying such strongly sanctioned material, in the absence of a steadier frame of reference ...”[trans. mine]). Porzio, Scuola di Ribera, 15. 67 Jeremy Melius presents a sensitive analysis of this concomitant factor in Morellian and Berensonian connoisseurship in “Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood,” in Art History 34, no. 2 (2011): 289-309, esp. 290-94, and passim. See also Marieke Von Bernstorff's introduction to her excellent study of Cavarozzi and Crescenzi, Agent und Maler als Akteure im Kunstbetrieb des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts: Giovan Battista Crescenzi und Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2010), 11-14. 68 As cited earlier, some excellent proposals as to the second question are in Viviana Farina, Al Sole e all'ombra, 103-108 (passim), a book that represents a commendable effort to approach Ribera's paintings, prints, and drawings in a more holistic manner than is usually attempted. Farina advances the dating of many drawings and prints traditionally ascribed to the 1620s, and notes the relevance of Roman drawing techniques such as that of the Cavaliere d'Arpino for Ribera.

34 Possible avenues for a broader connoisseurship?

Both the undervaluation of the graphic arts and the overvaluation of the autograph are characteristics, not necessarily of connoisseurship tout court, but of a needlessly stifling sub-set of connoisseurial practice. Deanna Petherbridge in The Primacy of

Drawing defines this sub-set as follows:

The prevailing mode of connoisseurship can best be defined as forensic, with regard to the manner of collecting and testing evidence and the importance given to the opinions of expert witnesses. But because expert witnesses very seldom agree - however scrupulously trained and accredited - and there is no arbiter or judge acceptable to all parties, the drawings under scrutiny can finally be ratified only by the accumulation of learned opinions and the quotation of precedents. ... The forensic mode ... offers impediments to examining the drawing qua drawing, not just as a piece of evidence in a chain of reasoning or bearing a burden of stylistic or developmental proof.69

Note that Petherbridge does not seek to devalue connoisseurship as such - her book is dedicated to the staff of the prints and drawings department at the British Museum - but seeks instead to take stock of the “basic disjunction ... between the fixed aims and values and sometimes incoherent methodologies of connoisseurship and the diverse and unfixed dynamics of art-making.”70 Her perspicacious distinction of a forensic mode rightly singles out from within a broader field of expertise a narrow range of questions and techniques that a given work of art may or may not speak to, and beyond which it will in any case have far more to say. Gail Feigenbaum articulates a similar critique of restrictively applied connoisseurship with regard to collaborative and imitative practices in the Carracci workshop, which (as I shall discuss in the following section of this

69 Deanna Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 10. 70 Ibid., 9.

35 chapter) are fully germane to rethinking connoisseurship's applications to Ribera's work.71

The potential for connoisseurship to have a wider range of applications to Ribera studies is perhaps plainest when it comes to the fundamental issues of the autograph and the copy. Whereas in Ribera's own time, copies were not one category but could correspond to a wide variety of practices and be approached and valued in several ways

(most of them positive), the yes/no approach to the autograph and the cult of its purity within catalogues raisonnés radically flattens an important aspect of early modern artistic practice.72 The entire issue of copying, be it within or beyond the artist's own workshop, appears in Ribera studies mainly in the form of a bad apple barrel, a status to which paintings or drawings may be demoted. Yet as Antonio Ernesto Denunzio points out, copying was undoubtedly an important component of Ribera's work, and it would be worth considering how he might have felt about it.73 To answer this question, one might

71 Gail Feigenbaum, “Practice in the Carracci Academy,” in Studies in the History of Art 23 (1993): 58-76, esp. 73. Feigenbaum also cites another formulation of this argument from Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 101. 72 As many studies of early modern painting acknowledge, and as has been explored most thoroughly with regard to Rembrandt; more broadly, the majority of the literature exploring early modern connoisseurship has focused on the Low Countries and is closely linked to quantitative and socio-economic analyses of the art market; an overview of this literature is in Eric Jan Sluijter, “Determining Value on the Art Market in the Golden Age: An Introduction,” in Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere (eds.), Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 7-29; see also Anna Tummers, “’By His Hand’: The Paradox of Seventeenth-Century Connoisseurship,” in Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere (eds.), Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 31-67; and Anna Tummers, The Eye of the Connoisseur: Authenticating Paintings by Rembrandt and His Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011); the key studies of the Italian context are Jeffrey M. Muller, “Measures of Authenticity: The Detection of Copies in the Early Literature on Connoisseurship,” in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 141-9; Richard Spear, “Di Sua Mano,” in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome (2002): 79- 98; Maria Loh, “New and Improved: Repetition as Originality in Italian Baroque Practice and Theory,” in Art Bulletin 86, no. 3 (2004): 477-504; and Frances Gage, “'Some Stirring or Changing of Place': Vision, Judgement and Mobility in Pictures of Galleries,” in Intellectual History Review 20, no. 1 (2010): 123-45. 73 Denunzio, “Alcune note inedite,” 1994.

36 consider the stunning Hecate in Apsley House (figure 1.4).74 Painted on copper following

Agostino Veneziano's Lo Stregozzo (figure 1.5), the Hecate has been described as an

“early attributed work,” presumably on the grounds that as it is after a print, it must be student work, the product of a didactic exercise.75 This assumption may work against the attribution; while the Hecate is fully consistent in style with Ribera's small Saint Bruno receiving the Carthusian Rule on copper from 1643,76 its obvious dissonance with

Ribera's technique in his early period may have prejudiced the experts against it.

A richer line of inquiry might arise from the highly idiosyncratic selection of that particular print as a model. Martínez quotes Ribera as swearing by Raphael's work as the ultimate object lesson in composing an istoria;77 is the Hecate an instance of what

Ribera's admiration for Raphael looks like in practice? As Pérez Sánchez remarks,

Ribera's picture bears a “curious testimony” to his admiration of Raphael, whose authorship is specifically invoked in the painting's signature, R.V. Inventor. Joseph de

74 Madrid 1992, cat. 109, pp. 364-65. 75 Jeanne Chenault Porter, “Jusepe de Ribera and the Order of Christ: New Documents,” in Burlington Magazine 118, no. 878 (1976): 304-307, quote p. 306. As Chenault Porter mentions the painting quite in passing, I do not mean to make a federal case over her word choice, which is noted here only by way of example. The attribution was rejected by Craig Felton, Jusepe de Ribera: A Catalogue Raisonné (PhDiss. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1971), cat. X-103, p. 459; and by Spinosa, Obra Completa, cat. C33, p. 509. 76 Madrid 1992, cat. 112, p. 370. 77 “Preguntele que si tenía deseo de ir a Roma a ver de nuevo las pinturas originales de sus estudios passados; hechó un grande suspiro diciendo: “no solo tengo deseo de verlas, sino de volver de nuevo a estudiarlas, que son obras tales que quieren ser estudiadas y meditadas muchas veces.” Que, aunque aora se pinta por diferente rumbo y prática, si no se funda en esta base de estudios parará en ruina fácilmente, y en particular en sus historiados, que son el norte de la perfección que dixe, en la que nos enseñan las historias d’el [sic] inmortal Rafael pintadas en el sacro palacio. El que estudiare estas obras se hará historiador verdadero y consumado.” Martínez, Discursos Practicables, 51-2; “Then I asked him if he wanted to return to Rome to see again in the original the pictures that he had previously studied. He sighed a great sigh, saying, “Not only do I wish to see them again, but also to study them again. For these works need to be studied and meditated on over and over again. Even though we are now painting differently, anyone who does not take these works as a foundation will end in ruin, above all in history paintings, which are the acme of perfection. The paintings of the immortal Raphael in the Vatican palace teach us; he who studies these works will be a history painter tried and true.” Trans. Jonathan Brown, in Robert Enggass & Jonathan Brown (eds.), Italy and Spain 1600-1750: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), 180.

37 Ribera pingit / 16.78 Gravitating away from the many lucid, famously graceful scenes that he explicitly praises in the Vatican, is Ribera deliberately planting his flag on the most dark, chaotic, dangerous and altogether un-Raphael-ish scene that the Raphael canon can be stretched to accommodate? A stimulating comparison in this connection is with

Stephen Campbell's discussion of Lo Stregozzo and other cinquecento works in a similar vein by Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino as agonistic and subversive imitations of the already canonical models of Raphael and (especially) of the “divine” Michelangelo.79

Skeptics of the Hecate attribution are free to disregard such questions, but these seem no less worthy of consideration than the attribution itself, for which Pérez Sánchez has presented a solid case based on provenance.80 Most importantly, the brushwork in

Ribera's Hecate is characterized by lightness and speed, conveying both the motion of the strange assembly and the rustle of wind through hair and tall grass with dashing and delicate lines. This quick and assertive execution can be seen as a polemical counterweight to the painting's overtly acknowledged act of copying, as these qualities of

“resolve and frankness” are precisely those that distinguish an original from a copy, according to Mancini.81

78 Madrid 1992, cat. 109, 364-65. 79 Stehpen J. Campbell, “Fare una cosa morta parer viva: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)divinity of Art,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (Dec. 2002): 596-620. 80 Madrid 1992, cat. 109, 364-65. 81 “Con tutto ciò, chi ha la prattica, scopre tutti questi inganni: prima se nella pittura proposta vi sia quella perfettione con la quale operava l'artefice sotto nome del quale vien proposta e venduta; di più se vi si veda quella franchezza del mastro, et in particolare in quelle parti che di necessità si fanno di resolutione nè si posson ben condurre con l'immitatione, come sono in particolare i capelli, la barba, gl'occhi. Che l'anellar de' capelli, quando si han da imitare, si fanno con stento, che nella copia poi apparisce, et, se il copiatore non li vuol imitare, allhora non hanno la perfettione di mastro [sic]. E queste parti nella pittura sono come i tratti e gruppi nella scrittura, che voglion quella franchezza e resolutione di mastro.” (“Despite all this [i.e., the ways of passing off a copy for an original], whoever has the practice may detect all these deceptions: first, whether in the painting under advisement there be that perfection with which the artist worked under whose name the painting is to be seen and sold; what is more, [one may detect] whether there be visible that frankness of the master, and especially in those parts which, of necessity, must be carried out with resolve and cannot be executed well by imitation, as are in particular the hair, the beards, and the eyes.

38 In a similar vein, the applications of connoisseurship might fruitfully be broadened in dealing with written reports about Ribera's style and how these might line up against the observable corpus of pictures that we attribute to him. Luigi Scaramuccia and Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi both claim in no uncertain terms that Ribera could emulate Correggio's style to perfection.82 Such chameleon-like assumption of another painter's manner was recognized and valued as its own skill, and when carried to the logical extreme of passing for the work of the imtated artist, it was a signal performance of bravura, not a timid or deferential emulation (I shall provide examples in the following section), and could also be construed as a declaration of alignment or at least sympathy with a certain approach, most notably perfected by the Carracci. Searches for examples of Ribera's maniera Correggesca have had inconclusive results, which are just as likely to indicate the truthfulness of Orlandi and Scaramuccia's claims as their possible error or historical licence.83 Beyond looking for Correggio among the Ribera attributions or vice-versa, a further line of questioning might usefully consider what value Ribera and

[One thus sees] That the curling of the hair, when it is to be imitated, is done laboriously, which then appears in the copy, and, if the copyist should not wish to imitate this, then the perfection of the master is lacking. And such parts of painting are like the lines and groupings in writing, which require the frankness and resolve of the master.”). Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 134. A lucid and pertinent discussion of this passage in the context of “autograph” painting as it was perceived at the time is in Spear, “Di Sua Mano,” 96; see also Muller, “Measures of Authenticity,” 143. 82 Luigi Scaramuccia, Le finezze de’pennelli italiani ammirate e studiate da Girupeno sotto la scorta e disciplina del Genio di Raffaello d’Urbino, facsimile ed. Guido Giubbini (Milan: Edizioni Labor, 1965[1674]), 68-9; Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi’s Abecedario goes so far as to assert that the Parma master’s hand and the Spaniard’s are indistinguishable: “Gioseffo Ribera, detto lo Spagnoletto, perchè nativo di Valenza; studiò sopra l’opere del Correggio in Parma, ed in fatti, chi vede il quadro dipinto nella Chiesa di S. Maria Bianca di Napoli, lo stimerà del Correggio, e non dello Spagnoletto.” (“Joseph Ribera, called Lo Spagnoletto, because [he was] a native of Valencia; studied the works of Correggio in Parma, and indeed, whoever sees the picture he painted in the church of Santa Maria la Bianca of Naples, will judge it to be by Correggio, and not by Spagnoletto.”) Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi, L’abecedario pittorico. Dall’autore ristampato corretto et accresciuto di molti professori e di altre notizie spettanti alla pittura ... (Bologna: Costantino Pisarri all’Insegna di S. Michele, 1719), 203. 83 For recent searches for Correggesque style in Ribera’s early work (in the context of wider searches for historical evidence that would speak to Ribera’s activity in Parma) see Lange, Rara naturalezza, 69-76, and Finaldi, “Ribera a Parma,” 24-26.

39 his patrons might have ascribed to the Spaniard's capacity to internalize a manner so peculiarly at odds with his own. Assuming that Ribera first cultivated this skill in direct study of Correggio's paintings during his stay in Parma, he may have done so initially as a bid to out-Correggio local painters such as Bartolommeo Schedoni, who may have been among those who (according to Mancini) unpleasantly induced Ribera to remove himself before the Spaniard could garner any further attention from the Farnese Ducal court.84

Both within and beyond Ribera's brief activity in Parma, however, his reported ability to give a pitch-perfect performance of Correggio's manner speaks to much more than the exact roster within the catalogue raisonné. Orlandi and Scaramuccia's testimony, to the extent that it is reliable, presents us with a Spanish artist intimately attuned to Italian market trends and canons of taste, sympathetic to developments in artistic practice emerging from Bologna, and endowed with the skill, ambition, and self-awareness to silence and pre-empt anyone who might presumptively categorize or belittle him based on his nationality or manner of painting. There is less reason to suppose that a

Correggesque style would correspond to a category of juvenilia than to see it as a specific prestation, a tool for self-promotion all the more sharp and effective for its appearance of self-effacement.

In defense of connoisseurship

84 According to Mancini, Ribera in Parma “put such jealousy in those who served [the Duke], lest he should put [Ribera] in his service and thus relieve them of that service, that they obliged him to leave.” (“... capitando in Parma, messe gelosia in quelli che servivan quell'Altezza che, venendo questo suggetto a notitia di quel Prencipe, lo pigliasse al suo servitio et così fusser levati da quella servitù, onde lo necessitorno [sic] a partirsene.”). Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 249. For the suggestion that it was Schedoni in particular who was the main agent of this intimidation scheme, see Finaldi, “La Piedad,” 14-16; see also Finaldi, “Ribera a Parma,” 18-22.

40 The role that connoisseurship has played in studies of Ribera cannot be merely reduced to a negative, and the term deserves some reassessment. Its advocates tend to be those who practice it in its most tiresome form, while the opposing tendency is frequently to throw out a very important baby with its political bathwater.85 In a recent discussion of

“Details” in the Art Bulletin, I would argue that much of what is at stake is the role of connoisseurship both in art history's past and future.86 This is particularly evident in the contrast between the interventions of two Renaissance specialists, Carlo Ginzburg and

Robert Williams, who respectively embrace connoisseurship as “art history in a nutshell” and roundly condemn it as a snobbish and retardataire “visual fetishism” whose thinly- veiled purpose is to shore up financial and institutional capital.87 Rather than standing for a practice of visual analysis or for a branch of historical criticism, connoisseurship - or euphemisms for it such as “close looking,” or “close reading” - has become a rallying cry for both factions in a politically polarized art history.88

This tension is directly addressed in Richard Neer's essay on “Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style,” which begins with the intent to “defend the study of style in general, and of connoisseurship in particular, from its friends as well as its enemies.”89

85 As occurs for instance in James Elkins' essay “On the Impossibility of Close Reading: The Case of Alexander Marshack,” in Current Anthropology 37, no. 2 (1996): 185-226. 86 Susan Hiller, Spike Bucklow, Johannes Endres, Carlo Ginzburg, Joan Kee, Spyros Papapetros, Adrian Rifkin, Joanna Roche, Nina Rowe, Alain Schnapp, Blake Stimson, and Robert Williams, “Notes from the Field: Detail,” in Art Bulletin 94, no. 4 (2012): 490-515. 87 Ibid.; for Ginzburg, see pp. 496-99, quote p. 496; for Williams, see pp. 513-14. 88 As the renaissance and baroque periods have become such a battleground in the divergence between progressive and conservative art-historical approaches, I find it intriguing, if hardly surprising, that Timothy J. Clark's remarkable study of Poussin, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), continues to bring into focus so much of the larger controversy, and has become a kind of placeholder for the connoisseurship conflict as it is approached from both sides. Within this same issue of the Art Bulletin, Rebecca Zorach turns to Clark's book as a hopeful model in an unexpectedly touching expression of desire for a history of art that can speak against the same morally bankrupt instrumentality of which Williams explicitly accuses it a few pages later. Rebecca Zorach, “Regarding Art and Art History,” Art Bulletin 94, no. 4 (2012): 487-9. 89 Neer, “Connoisseurship,” 2.

41 Neer structures this defense around the indispensable necessity of connoisseurship, both in terms of philosophy and of historical method, in order even to recognize the existence of historical artifacts, let alone to place them in any kind of cogent category: “At issue are not the criteria invoked to justify any particular attribution, but the criteria invoked to justify the application of any standards of evidence whatsoever to an attribution.”90 While no art-historical business can usefully be transacted without connoisseurship as a core practice, connoisseurship itself becomes useless unless it remains supple, always a bit in doubt. One must be able at once to take for granted its validity overall and to question its pronouncements in particular: as Neer puts it, “Connoisseurship as a foreclosure of possibility or doubt - connoisseurship taken as perfected - amounts to a debasement of its own best intuitions.”91 Connoisseurship is as much about assuming the authority to pass judgment as it is a discursive, rhetorical, and persuasive endeavor. It must not only enact recognition (“this drawing is by Ribera”), but enable others to experience recognition also (“here is how you too can see that this drawing is by Ribera”).

It is in this persuasive and descriptive operation that connoisseurship, in Ribera studies at least, represents a vital form of art-critical expertise designed to serve rather than merely categorize the work of art, and can translate into an enlivening rather than stultifying mode of art-historical writing. Many of the best moments in the scholarship on

Ribera are of this sort, as when August Mayer writes, “his figures, whether they look

90 Ibid. The same point is rephrased more forcefully near the end of the essay: "[...] it is not really possible to argue for or against the idea that we can attribute some things to "the style of (particular humans)" and other things to the natural world. For we invoke this capacity whenever we talk about artifacts at all, and such talk is not something we can just leave off at will. We cannot distinguish between archaeology and geology without this language-game; it is the precondition of historical thinking because it is the precondition of evidence." Ibid., 24. 91 Ibid.

42 lovely or less so, never feel empty.”92 Paul Kristeller gives an analysis of Ribera's brushwork that is worth quoting at length:

Ribera at first tries to use the accidents of the brush stroke for the characterization of materials; to let the marks of the hairs in the brush serve in the masses of colour as ridges on the skin, or as texture on the cloth. With loose brush strokes he models the forms, weaving the strands of colour in and out, so that they seem to move like skin over the plastic masses of flesh and bone. For that reason one can almost always look at Ribera's pictures close at hand without losing the illusion of reality.93

One can quibble as to the distinction between descriptive writing and connoisseurship proper; yet both Mayer and Kristeller were writing within an art historical tradition that took for granted that connoisseurial assessment of an artist's work was one of the central purposes of writing. In any case, the point is that one should not be too quick to dismiss as retrograde or politically incorrect an art-historical approach that concerns itself with things like brushwork, nor should one feel obliged to consider it only as skilled labor mutely participating in social history. It is precisely of brush work that most of Ribera's professional activity was made up, and it is safe to presume that the painter himself took it seriously and put a good deal of thought and effort into it. By the same token, we should expect and allow the brushwork to say more than whether or not it was really

Ribera's.

The historical pertinence and richness of Kristeller's observations could tempt one to argue that there is no bad connoisseurship, only bad connoisseurs. Rather than leading

92 “... ob auch seine Gestalten schön oder weniger schön erscheinen, niemals wirken sie leer.” August L. Mayer, Jusepe de Ribera (Lo Spagnoletto) (Leipzig: K. W. Hiersemann, 1908), 163. 93 Quoted and translated by Elizabeth Du Gué Trapier, Ribera (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1952), 11-15. “Ribera zuerst sucht die Zufälligkeiten der Pinselführung zur Charakterisierung der Stoffe auszunützen, die Furchen der Pinselhaare in der Farbenmasse mitwirken zu lassen als Runzeln der Haut oder als Fäden des Stoffgewebes. Mit lockeren Pinselstrichen zieht er, die Formen modellierend und beleuchtend die durchsichtigen Farbenschichten über- und ineinander, so dass sie sich wie Haut über den plastischen Fleisch- und Knochenmasse zu bewegen scheinen. Man kann deshalb Riberas bilder fast immer auch in der Nähe betrachten, ohne die Illusion der Natürlichkeit zu verlieren.” Paul Kristeller, “Giuseppe Ribera,” in Das Museum 8, no. 14 (1903): 53-56, quote p. 56.

43 the reader into the dead-end of a declarative statement on stylistic pedigree, Kristeller has given us a visual analysis worthy of the name, one which forges a verbal link between the marks painted on canvases and the historical ways in which those marks and their making assumed meaning. His remark about skin, for instance, taps into the deliberately cultivated poetics of tactility that can be found not only across Ribera's painting, but in that of other artists with whom he would have seen himself in conversation, from

Guercino and Caravaggio to the Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds. As Itay

Sapir rightly insists, Ribera’s art consistently conveys experience in terms other than sight, a point for which Kristeller's brief analysis of the painter's technique is an ironclad argument.94 Ribera's use of the brushstroke's physical properties to signify both illusion and painterliness (see his 1631 Saint Andrew, figures 1.6 and 1.7, by way of example) is a rare and hard-won ability and a crucial point of intersection between the artist's manual labor and the social, representational, and intellectual work of the finished painting. Far from being mere verbal froth addressed to a coterie of well-heeled gentlemen experts,

Kristeller's observation speaks directly to what Maarten Delbeke has described as “the tension between artifice and truth [which] is an essential problem in seventeenth-century practice and theory.”95

Kristeller's analysis also raises the issue of what one might call historical connoisseurship. How did artists, patrons, poets, critics, and theorists perform various kinds of art-critical expertise, and how did these connoisseurial activities in turn shape artistic practice? Few passages of art-historical writing seem so likely to make the artist

94 Itay Sapir, “Blind Suffering: Ribera’s Non-Visual Epistemology of Martyrdom,” in Open Arts Journal 4 (2014-2015): 29-39. 95 Maarten Delbeke, “Art as Evidence, Evidence as Art. Bernini, Pallavicino and the Paradoxes of Zeno,” in Sebastian Schütze (ed.), Estetica Barocca (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2004), 343-60, quote p. 344.

44 nod approvingly as Kristeller's concluding observation that “one can almost always look at Ribera's pictures close at hand without losing the illusion of reality.”96 Nothing could be more germane to seventeenth-century art theory than the achievement of this sort of effect, discussed exhaustively with regard to Caravaggio but practiced very differently by

Ribera. The latter would have thought of himself as working within a strategic relation to colorito and in overt competition with artists such as Raphael, Rubens, Titian, and his colleagues closer at hand, both in Rome and Naples.

Kristeller's praise of Ribera’s color takes on an added level of historical force when we consider Vasari's observation that the illusionism and lifelikeness of Titian's paintings for the King of Spain, unlike the artist's early works, fell into macchie close up, but were perfect when seen from afar:

All these pictures are in the possession of the Catholic King, held very dear for the vivacity that Tiziano has given to the figures with his colours, making them natural and as if alive. It is true, however, that the method of work which he employed in these last pictures is no little different from the method of his youth, for the reason that the early works are executed with a certain delicacy and a diligence that are incredible, and they can be seen both from near and from a distance, and these last works are executed with bold strokes and dashed off with a broad and even coarse sweep of the brush, insomuch that from near little can be seen, but from a distance they appear perfect. This method has been the reason that many, wishing to imitate him therein and to play the practised master, have painted clumsy pictures; and this happens because, although many believe that they are done without effort, in truth it is not so, and they deceive themselves, for it is known that they are painted over and over again, and that he returned to them with his colours so many times, that the labour may be perceived. And this method, so used, is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, because it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but conceals the labour.97

96 Kristeller, "Giuseppe Ribera," 56. 97 Giorgio Vasari, ed. and trans. Gaston du C. De Vere, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors & Architects by Giorgio Vasari, vol. 9 (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1915), 173-74. “Le quali pitture sono appresso al Re catolico tenute molto care, per la vivacità che ha dato Tiziano alle figure con i colori in farle quasi vive e naturali. Ma è ben vero che il modo di fare che tenne in queste ultime è assai diferente dal fare suo da giovane. Conciò sia che le prime son condotte con una certa finezza e diligenza incredibile e da essere vedute da presso e da lontano, e queste ultime, condotte di colpi, tirate via di grosso e con macchie, di maniera che da presso non si possono vedere e di lontano appariscono perfette; e questo modo è stato cagione che molti, volendo in ciò immitare e mostrare di fare il pratico, hanno fatto di goffe pitture, e ciò adiviene perché se bene a molti pare che elle siano fatte senza fatica, non è così il vero e s’ingannano, perché si conosce che sono rifatte e che si è ritornato loro addosso con i colori tante volte, che la fatica vi si

The pertinence of Vasari’s remarks is even greater given the centrality of Titian’s late manner to Spanish debates about art theory that were unfolding in the seventeenth century: the “borrones” that Vicente Carducho and Francisco Pacheco would each address in their treatises would have consituted a key point of stylistic comparison and competition, particularly for an artist like Ribera whose works were collected by the

Kings of Spain during his lifetime.98 The wit and virtuosity with which Ribera resolves the distinction between tight and painterly techniques bespeak a conscious and well thought-out intervention in a wider discussion about style and its value.

Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey’s 1987 assessment of the state of research in seicento painting retains a great deal of pertinence to Ribera studies, though one could equally argue that enormous progress has taken place in the field of Italian baroque art history overall.99 In their assertion that “a desire exists for a more universal synthesis ... able to give a coherent account that is both critically revealing and historically valid of the work of art as an aesthetic object, a cultural phenomenon, a social artifact - in short, all its richness and possibilities,” they express in positive terms the very hope that Robert Williams had derided in Timothy Clark's work as “visual fetishism” looking too hungrily to the work of art as “an object of magic plenitude, an investment that keeps paying dividends.”100 Like Neer, Cropper and Dempsey argue for the necessity

vede. E questo modo sì fatto è giudizioso, bello e stupendo, perché fa parere vive le pitture e fatte con grande arte, nascondendo le fatiche.” Giorgio Vasari, Delle Vite de' piu eccelenti pittori, scultori e architetti [1568], vol. 2 (Bologna, 1649), 228. 98 On the polemics surrounding “a borrones” and “acabado” manners of painting in Spain, see Chiara Gauna, “Giudizi e Polemiche intorno a Caravaggio e Tiziano nei Trattati d'arte spagnoli del XVII secolo: Carducho, Pacheco e la tradizione artistica italiana,” in Ricerche di Storia dell'Arte 64 (1998): 57-78. 99 Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, “The State of Research in Italian Painting of the Seventeenth Century,” in Art Bulletin 69, no. 4 (1987): 494-509. 100 Williams, “Notes from the Field: Detail,” 513.

46 of an historical rather than merely esthetic approach to style, which all three authors think of as endowed with quite definite “stakes” for the artists and interpreters alike. They thus begin with a discussion of the term ‘baroque,’ which both in its bounty and insufficiency has been emblematic of the field at large in its desire to tap into an impossible critical fulfillment. Instead, they argue, “a breakdown in criticism” has come about in which

This desire is sharpened by the sense of a critical vacuum accompanying the current generation of information, the very information necessary to arrive at a synthesis. In this vacuum the old methods are perpetuated; the connoisseur fights his battles with the iconographer or “theorist,” the expert with the cultural or social historian, and all mechanically apply the skills they have been taught in forgetfulness of the questions that led to their skills being developed in the first place. One interpretation seems as good as another, and will be as quickly replaced, and the sense has been lost of knowledge being increased through the exercise of interpretation.101

The solution that their essay proposes to the critical impasse is to take more seriously the art criticism of the seventeenth century itself. The texts of Malvasia, Bellori, Mancini and

Giustiniani are invoked not as theoretical regimes that art historians can take sides with or against, but as the most relevant and competent guideposts that we have to the works of art and the horizons of expectation and reception within which they were produced.

This emphatic embrace of seventeenth century art criticism characterizes much useful and energizing work done in the field since they assessed it. Beyond the many studies that focus on the texts themselves (and in this connection, Philip Sohm’s work is exemplary), the studies of individual artists and their works that show the dynamic interplay between criticism and artistic practice are so numerous that even pointing out their existence seems silly and redundant. Excellent recent work such as Stephen

Ostrow’s study of a “discourse of failure” in early seicento Roman criticism,102 Suthor’s

101 Cropper and Dempsey, “State of Research,” 494. 102 Stephen F. Ostrow, “The Discourse of Failure in Seventeenth-Century Rome: Prospero Bresciano’s “Moses”,” in Art Bulletin 88, no. 2 (2006): 267-91.

47 work on “bravura” as both a critical term and a stylistic performance of ferocity and virtuosity,103 Delbeke’s analysis of visual and textual interplays of rhetoric between

Bernini, Baldinucci, and Sforza Pallavicino,104 or Frances Gage’s work on Giulio

Mancini105 (to cite only a small selection) all share an earnest respect for the historical potency of the art criticism of the time period. Gage in particular has demonstrated the powerful synergy that existed in the early decades of the seicento between emerging discourses and practices of connoisseurship (in the broad sense) and the way artists conceived of and executed their own professional activity; in a word, the way people looked at pictures and the way people made pictures were of extreme mutual relevance.106 The common premise across the studies just cited is that writings about art were not merely a contextual apparatus or factual parergon surrounding the works of art, but historical forces in dynamic interaction with the artists and their works.

c) Historical connoisseurship and artistic practice

Practical connoisseurship and the Roman gallery

103 Suthor, Bravura; see also the review by Andreas Beyer, Art Bulletin 94, no. 4 (2012): 648-50. 104 Maarten Delbeke, The Art of Religion: Sforza Pallavicino and art theory in Bernini’s Rome (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012). 105 Frances Gage, Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni Sulla Pittura: Recreation, Manners, and Decorum in Seventeenth-century Roman Picture Galleries (PhDiss. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2000); Frances Gage, “Exercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” in Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2008): 1167-1207; Frances Gage, “Giulio Mancini and Artist-Amateur Relations in Seventeenth-Century Roman Academies,” in Peter M. Lukehart (ed.) The Accademia Seminars: The accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590-1635 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), 247-88; Frances Gage, “Teaching them to serve and obey: Giulio Mancini on Collecting Religious Art in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” in Gail Feigenbaum, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, et. al. (eds.), Sacred Possessions: Collecting Italian Religious Art, 1500-1900 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 68-82; Frances Gage, “Invention, Wit and Melancholy in the Art of Annibale Carracci,” in Intellectual History Review 24, no. 3 (2014): 389-413. Many thanks to Frances Gage for her collegial help and for her generosity with her time and expertise. 106 Beyond the works just cited, this question, as it applies to my discussion of Ribera, is addressed most directly in Gage, “Stirring or Changing of Place,” passim.

48 For the purposes of connoisseurship's applications to Ribera studies, what stands to be recovered is the sense of its historical and conceptual richness, not as a narrow expertise external to the creation of art, but as a set of intellectual, physical, and social practices in which artists as well as their audiences were deeply invested. Historical practices of connoisseurship were not only relevant to artists generally as a matter of principle, but were of especial pertinence to Ribera, given the circles and times in which he operated in Rome and Naples. Across the examples that this dissertation considers, we see on Ribera's part a consistent and attentive pursuit of subtle and theoretically pregnant pictorial and painterly effects; the qualities of his brushwork noted by Kristeller are only one example. From such effects, not only can one infer Ribera's dedication to practising his trade at the highest possible level of skill, but one may also safely surmise that the artist counted on having an audience that would be at once capable of and interested in recognizing such quality, thereby making the effort pay off, literally and figuratively.

Of what did such recognition of quality consist in the seventeenth century?

Refined evaluations of art that could broadly be deemed connoisseurial are of course by no means an invention of Ribera's time period. That time period, however, does demonstrate an unprecedented interest in connoisseurship itself. Ribera cut his professional teeth in Rome in an open, shop- and dealer-driven art market that held great potential to reward creative and well-executed takes on generic subjects in modestly- sized easel pictures.107 Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Bernardo De'Dominici, associating him with Caravaggio, emphasize his production of half-figure easel paintings;

107 See Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008), especially chapter 4, “The Market,” 119-51.

49 De'Dominici even reports that he was called “lo spagnolo delle mezze figure.”108 One can think of Ribera's large production of easel paintings not only as a faute de mieux alternative to larger commissions, but as an expertise in itself, a deliberately cultivated specialty that presented specific challenges and opportunities of its own.109 Such an hypothesis has been seriously pursued in Michael Fried's The Moment of Caravaggio, which is largely premised on a pictorial poetics native to the gallery picture, something that Fried also discusses with explicit reference to Ribera in his forthcoming work, After

Caravaggio.110 The nature of the Lombard master's “influence” on those, including

108 “Giuseppe di Ribera detto "lo Spagnoletto", di miserabile condizione, per genio di pittura se ne fuggì dal padre e se n'andò a Roma a dirittura, dove si diede a disegnare opere di maestri buoni e particolarmente a copiar cose di Guido, dal quale apprese il modo di colorir fino. Faceva qualche figuraccia di sua mano; la vendeva per campar la vita miseramente. Perchè disegnava sì bene, fu più volte fatto Principe dell'Accademia. Il suo disegno però non eccedeva il fare in pittura mezze figure, il perchè si chiamava “lo spagnolo delle mezze figure.”” (“Joseph Ribera called "lo Spagnoletto," of miserable condition, by the genius of painting ran away from his father and even went all the way to Rome, where he set himself to drawing the works of good masters and particularly to copying those of Guido [Reni], from whom he learned the fine way of coloring. He made some poor figures by his own hand, which he sold, to then scrape miserably by. Because he drew so well, he was several times made Principe of the academy. His disegno, however, never went beyond working in half-figures, whence he was called "the Spaniard of the half-figures."”). Bernardo De'Dominici, “Notizie per il Signor Luca Giordano, a 17 marzo 1681,” in Bruno Santi, Zibaldone Baldinucciano, vol. I (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1980-1981), 392. As has been noted by Finaldi and others, there is no evidence to indicate that Ribera was ever “Prencipe” of the Accademia di San Luca, though he is recorded as a member as of 1613. Justus Lange remarks on this at the start of his comments on Ribera’s Five Senses, and also notes the emphasis on Ribera's half-figures in Giovanni Pietro Bellori: “Giuseppe Ribera Valentiano detto lo Spagnoletto tirato dal genio del Caravaggio si diede anch'egli ad imitare il naturale dipingendo mezze figure.” (“The Valencian Joseph Ribera, called Lo Spagnoletto, drawn from the genius of Caravaggio, also gave himself to imitating from nature, painting half-figures.”); Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de' Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni, scritte da Gio: Pietro Bellori, parte prima (Rome: Successore al Mascardi, 1672), 215; quoted in Lange, 80-81, 295. 109 Viviana Farina has emphasized the deprecation of Ribera that is implied in this emphasis on half- figures, overlooking the larger works that can also be attributed to him; Farina, Al sole e all'ombra, 37-38. Nonetheless, De’Dominici’s characterization corresponds (with regard to the formats of Ribera’s pictures, at least) to the other evidence that we have of Ribera's early activity, of which easel paintings were the cornerstone. The artist's early catalogue remains a matter of some dispute, but regardless of the exact selection of pictures that one accepts as autograph works, Ribera's production in this period remains firmly centered on easel painting, of a sort that Valeria Macro has perceptively described as “laico, non profano;” Macro, “Anni Romani,” 76. There is no record of Ribera having received a single public commission in Rome of the sort that had made his reputation in Parma. 110 Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 151-78 and passim; Michael Fried, “Notes Toward a Caravaggist Visual Poetics,” in David Franklin and Sebastian Schütze (eds.), Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome (exh. cat. Fort Worth and Ottawa: Kimbell Art Museum and National Gallery of Canada, 2011), 102-127; this discussion is applied directly to Ribera in Chapter 1, “Singularities,” of Michael Fried, After Caravaggio (New Haven and London: Yale University

50 Ribera, who then took up and adapted aspects of his approach is one of the dominant discussions in the field. As Fried contends, basic parameters of format such as the single figure “made possible, or ... actively promoted, a new kind and degree of pictorial intensity,” having to do with effects of presence and convincing bodily or sensory awareness, effects that will be key features of my own discussion of Ribera.111

Chief among the challenges and opportunities proper to the gallery picture was connoisseurship itself, within the context of the speculative and competitive easel picture market that had brought renown, prosperity, and top-tier patronage to Caravaggio and several others.112 While there is no evidence that Ribera obtained the sort of patronage that Caravaggio had enjoyed in Rome (residing with high-ranking patrons such as

Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte), we do know that Ribera’s work was collected by the same elite set of clerics and noblemen at an early date.113 Francesco Scannelli praises

Ribera's pictures indirectly based on the caliber of the gentlemen who collected them, noting their presence in the collections of Vincenzo Giustiniani and Cardinal Pietro

Campori.114 Ribera's works can also be traced at an early date to several prestigious

Press, 2016). My heartfelt thanks to Professor Fried for generously allowing me to read his still unpublished work on this subject, and for stimulating discussions of the topic. On the gallery picture, see also the fundamental study by Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early-Modern Metapainting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 111 Fried, “Singularities,” passim, quote p.19. 112 As Todd Olson has recently suggested, the speculative character of the art market represents for individual paintings an anticipation of competition with other works of art for attention and admiration, a specific pressure to stand out before a connoisseurial gaze. Todd Olson, Caravaggio's Pitiful Relics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 16, 28-29. 113 Silvia Danesi Squarzina even posits (though without any proof beyond his extensive work for Benedetto and Vincenzo) that Ribera “was a member of the Giustiniani household,” and notes that he also had access to and works in Scipione Borghese's collection. Silvia Danesi Squarzina, “New Documents on Ribera, 'Pictor in Urbe,' 1612-16,” in Burlington Magazine 148, no. 1237 (2006): 244-51, quote p. 244. 114 “In Roma dipinse anco a quei tempi soggetto assai manieroso, detto lo Spagnoletto, il quale nell'imitatione del vero riuscì qualificato, ancorche debole nella pratica, ed invenzione, i cui dipinti sono appresso particolari della Città di Roma, massime nel Palazzo del Prencipe Giustiniani alcuni Quadri, & appresso a Monsignor Campori, opere veramente di rara naturalezza.” (“In Rome there also painted in those days a fairly mannered fellow, called lo Spagnoletto, who in the imitation of truth (imitatione del

51 collections in Rome, including those of Cardinals Scipione Borghese, Benedetto

Giustiniani, Scipione Cobelluzzi, and Francesco Maria del Monte.115 Even though it is possible that Ribera's paintings may have entered these particular collections after he himself had left Rome, these were the sorts of venues that he would have had in mind as the most desirable, short of coming under the protection of such a prince or obtaining a public commission.

What is notable about these patrons is not only their social prestige per se, but their proactive channelling and cultivation of that prestige through their collecting practices. Renata Ago's “history of objects in seventeenth-century Rome,” Il Gusto delle

Cose, characterizes the acquisition of pictures as an exchange of (not necessarily liquid) monetary capital into a form of social capital whose currency is taste.116 The issue of taste will be the subject of further discussion in chapter two, but it was certainly a demonstration of connoisseurial skill and a point of pride for high-end collectors to negotiate the wide, crowded, and relatively inexpensive market to which Ribera's Roman pictures belonged. Most recently, Feigenbaum has argued that the display of such works of art was not fixed but lent itself to successive recombinations and installations, each of

vero) succeeded in qualifying himself, though he was weak in practice and invention; [and his] paintings are in private collections in the city of Rome, especially in the Palazzo of the Prince Giustiniani there are a few pictures, and in that of Monsignor Campori, works truly of rare naturalness (rara naturalezza).” [n.b. The label “soggetto manieroso” comes up several times in Scannelli (applied notably to Lorenzo Lotto and to Andrea Schiavone), and seems completely untranslateable. I read it as a designation of something like distinctiveness of manner, neither overwhelmingly positive in itself, nor by any means derogatory.]). Scannelli, Microcosmo, 202. The evidence for Ribera's presence in Roman collections varies a great deal from case to case: Lange, for instance, has found no trace of any work by Ribera in Pietro Campori's inventories, while Danesi Squarzina's research on Benedetto and Vincenzo Giustiniani’s inventories reveals an important set of Ribera pictures in those two joint collections - 14 in all. Silvia Danesi Squarzina, La Collezione Giustiniani, vol. I (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 393-94. 115 Papi, “Ribera en Roma,” 37. 116 Renata Ago, Gusto for Things. A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome, trans. Bradford Bouley, Corey Tazzara, & Paula Findlen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 128 and passim.

52 which could give individual works a different inflection or value, noting that display could also function as a performance of discernment.117 The performative and carefully stage-managed character that such display could acquire is plain from the famous example of Vincenzo Giustiniani's dark green silk curtain, with which, on the advice and by the account of Joachim von Sandrart, the Marquis could hold in reserve Caravaggio's

Amor vincit omnia (figure 1.8), so that “only when everything else had been seen to the full, [was it to be] shown at last, for it would otherwise make all the other rarities appear unsightly, so that it could with perfect justice be described as an eclipse to all other paintings.”118 The extremely well-documented collections of the Marquis Vincenzo

Giustiniani (1564-1637) and his brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani (1554-1621), who were among Ribera’s most prominent early collectors, exemplify approaches to collecting art that privilege taste and personal inclination, which are expressed as much through combination and comparison in the display of the objects as in their ownership or acquisition.119

117 Gail Feigenbaum, “Introduction: Art and Display in Principle and in Practice,” in Gail Feigenbaum and Francesco Freddolini (eds.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace 1550-1750 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 1-24, esp. 4-5, 17. 118 “Nachmalen mahlte er für unsere Kunst Vatter Marches Justinian einen Cupido in Lebensgrösse nach Gestalt eines ohngefehr zwölffjährigen Jünglings, sitzend auf der Weltkugel und in der Rechten seinen Bogen über sich haltend, zur Linken allerley Kunstinstrumenta, auch Bücher zu Studien und ein Lorbeerkranz auf den Büchern; Cupido hatte nach seiner Gestalt große braune Adlersflügel, alles zusammen in Corectura gezeichnet, mit starker colorit, Sauberheit und solcher Rundirung, daß es dem Leben wenig nachgegeben. Dieses Stuck ware neben andern hundert und zwanzigen, von den fürtreflichsten Künstlern gemacht, in einem Zimmer und offentlich zu sehen, aber es wurde auf mein Einrathen mit einem dunkelgrün seidenen Vorhang bedekt und erst, wann alles andere zu Genüge gesehen worden, zuletzt gezeigt, weil es sonsten alle andere Raritäten unansehlich gemacht, so daß es mit guten Fug eine Verfinsterung aller Gemälden mag genennt werden.” Sandrart, Academie, 276. 119 As argued by Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, “Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Galleria: A Taste for Style and an Inclination to Pleasure,” in Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 64-108. See also Silvia Danesi Squarzina, “Benedetto, Vincenzo, Andrea: neue Forschungsergebnisse zur Geschichte der Sammlung Giustiniani,” in Silvia Danesi Squarzina (ed.), Caravaggio in Preußen: Die Sammlung Giustiniani und die Berliner Gemäldegalerie (exh. cat. Berlin: Altes Museum, 2001), 15-45; Francesco Solinas, “Museo o Galeria? Cassiano dal Pozzo e Vincenzo Giustiniani,” in Giulia Fusconi (ed.), I Giustiniani e l’antico (exh. cat. Rome: Palazzo Fontana di Trevi, 2001), 151-74; Rudolf Preimesberger, “Liebe zu Skulptur und Malerei: Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1637):

53 The audience for which Ribera learned to paint in his early Roman years was directly and demonstrably engaged in the evaluation of paintings in a way that explicitly read style and execution as part and parcel of the way the picture's subject and its meaning were conveyed. Informal but deliberately staged contests between paintings of commensurate but contrasting subjects were made to hinge on the comparison between the artists who executed the paintings. Consider for example Benedetto Giustiniani's acquisition of Giovanni Baglione's Divine Love Triumphant over Earthly Love (figure

1.9) as a witty antithetical pendant to the aforementioned Amor vincit omnia owned by his brother: Baglione's painting acts out the contest with Caravaggio's picture, harnessing the artistic contest to the triumph of Divine love over earthly Eros, accompanied by a figure of Satan who bears a marked resemblance to Caravaggio.120 The artistic contest, likely conducted in all good humor on the part of the Giustiniani brothers, was at the root of the famous clash between Baglione and Caravaggio: Baglione's Triumph of Divine

Love over Earthly Love garnered him the conspicuous social and financial honorific of a

ein Sammler und seine Sammlung, in Ekkehard Mai and Kurt Wettengl (eds.), Wettstreit der Künste: Malerei und Skulptur von Dürer bis Daumier (exh. cat. Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2002), 98-109; Silvia Danesi Squarzina, “Introduzione,” in La Collezione Giustiniani vol. 1 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2003), xxxix- cxxiii; Simona Feci and Luca Bartolotti, “Benedetto Giustiniani,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/benedetto-giustiniani_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ (accessed August 15th, 2014); and Simona Feci, Luca Bartolotti, and Franco Bruni, “Vincenzo Giustiniani,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/vincenzo- giustiniani_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, (accessed August 15th, 2014). Benedetto Giustiniani’s connoisseurial practice and its intersection with Ribera’s early activity are the focus of Felipe Pereda’s forthcoming article on the Strasbourg Saints Peter and Paul, which introduces and poetically frames a discussion of the painting's highly original treatment of spiritual sight and blindness in the disputa between Peter and Paul by quoting Giovanni Morelli, who had used Pauline metaphors of veiled sight and revelation in his foundational defense of connoisseurial practice. Felipe Pereda, “Ribera's Peter and Paul: One, maybe Two Notes on Blindness,” in Henri de Riedmatten, Nicolas Galley, et. al. (eds.), Senses of Sight: Towards a Multisensorial Approach of the Image. Essays in Honor of Victor I. Stoichita (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 2015), 227-44. My warmest thanks to Professor Pereda for sharing this essay with me before its publication. 120 Silvia Danesi Squarzina (ed.), Caravaggio in Preußen. Die Sammlung Giustiniani und die Berliner Gemäldegalerie (exh. cat. Berlin and Rome: Altes Museum and Galleria Giustiniani, 2001), cat. D3, pp. 282-87, cat. D7, and cat. D8, 298-301.

54 gold chain, bestowed as a gift by Benedetto Giustiniani, and resented by Caravaggio,

Orazio Gentileschi, Onorio Longhi, and Filippo Trisegni, who wrote defamatory poems about Baglione, who in turn took them to court for libel.121 The bawdy and mean-spirited verses produced by Caravaggio and his fellow mockers of Baglione represent one extremity of what one might broadly term the culture of connoisseurship in Rome, and sophisticated critical acumen could underlie even the most insalubrious ad hominem attacks.122 Artists in such cases not only took upon themselves the role of critic but reacted with acute awareness of their vulnerability to comparisons with their fellows and to the criticism of others, for good or ill.

Ribera's early practice as a painter took place in a setting minutely attuned to comparison and evaluation, activities that artists both carried out themselves and expected from their viewers and patrons, who took pleasure in demonstrating their ability to evaluate art as well as in the art objects themselves. The Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani famously grouped pictures according to twelve categories of ways (both means and manners) in which they could be produced, ordering them qualitatively in terms of increasing merit, and including Ribera among the exemplary practitioners of the penultimate category.123 The idea of comparative ekphrasis as a form of polite

121 Maryvelma Smith O'Neil, Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapter 1, esp. 27-30; Michele di Silvio, “Uomini valenti. Il processo di Giovanni Baglione contro Caravaggio,” in Michele di Silvio and Orietta Verdi (eds.), Caravaggio a Roma: una vita dal vero (exh. cat. Rome: Archivio di Stato, 2011), 90-108, esp. 94; see also Olson, Pitiful Relics, 118. 122 Two excellent case studies are Anthony Colantuono, “Caravaggio's Literary Culture,” in Genevieve Warwick (ed.), Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 57-68; and Maddalena Spagnolo, “Barn-Owl Painters in St. Peter's in the Vatican, 1604. Three Mocking Poems for Roncalli, Vanni and Passignano (and a note on the breeches-maker),” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 73 (2011): 257-96. 123 “Undecimo modo, è di dipingere con avere gli oggetti naturali d'avanti. S'avverta però che non basta farne il semplice ritratto; ma è necessario che sia fatto con buon disegno, e con buoni e proporzionati contorni, e vago colorito e proprio, che dipende dalla pratica di sapere maneggiare i colori, e quasi d'istinto di natura, e grazia a pochi conceduta; e sopratutto con saper dare il lume conveniente al colore di

55 conversation is also rehearsed, as is frequently acknowledged, in Giovanni Battista

Marino's Galeria of 1621, whose main poetic conceit is the slippage between the qualities and effects of a given work of art as an art object and those proper to the scene or figure depicted.124

The ability to appreciate the virtuosity of a given subject’s artistic rendering was the mark of viewers who already understood the image’s “content” so well that they could evaluate the efficacy of the picture as a work of art, and not merely as a conveyance for depictions of stories, things, or ideas. Frances Gage provides the example of Scipione Francucci’s unpublished “Galleria,” a poem modeled on Marino’s, and praising the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1576-1633): while describing most visitors to the collection as powerfully moved by the heroic and pious actions in the stories depicted, Francucci presents Cardinal Borghese as already steeped in such virtues,

ciascheduna parte, e che i sucidi non sieno crudi, ma farli con dolcezza ed unione; distinte però le parti oscure, e le illuminate, in modo che l'occhio resti sodisfatto dell'unione del chiaro e scuro senza alterazione del proprio colore, e senza pregiudicare allo spirito che si deve alla pittura, come ai tempi nostri, lasciando gli antichi, hanno dipinto il Rubens, Gris Spagnuolo, Gherardo, Enrico, Teodoro, ed altri simili, la maggior parte Fiamminghi esercitati in Roma, che hanno saputo ben colorire.” Vincenzo Giustiniani, “Discorso sopra la pittura,” in Vincenzo Giustiniani, ed. Anna Banti, Discorsi sulle Arti e sui Mestieri (Florence: Sansoni, 1981), 41-45, quote pp. 43-44. (“Eleventh: to paint from the natural object. Notice, however, that it is not enough to make a simple portrait; it is necessary that the work be done with good design, with good and proportionate contours and with lovely and proper color, which depends on practical experience in handling colors, and almost, too, on natural instinct - a gift granted to few. Above all it depends on knowing how to give the suitable light to the color of each part so that the smudgy tones are not so crude, but sweetly made and smoothly joined. Yet the dark parts must be differentiated from the lighted ones in such a way that the eye remains pleased by the blending of light and dark, that to be achieved without altering the local color and without violating the spirit of the painting. In our times, excluding the ancients, Rubens, Gius. Spagnuolo, Gherardo [Van Honthorst], Enrico [Terbrugghen], and Teodoro [Van Baburen], and others like them, have painted in this way. For the most part, they are the Flemish artists trained in Rome who have known how to use color.” Vincenzo Giustiniani, “Letter to Signor Teodoro Amideni,” in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (ed. and trans.), Literary Sources of Art History: An Anthology of Texts from Theophilus to Goethe (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1947), 329-333, quote pp. 331-32.) 124 See for instance Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino's Poetry and Caravaggio,” in Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193-212; and Frank Fehrenbach, “Marinos lebendige Bilder,” in Rainer Stillers and Christiane Kruse (eds.), Barocke Bildkulturen. Dialog der Künste in Giovan Battista Marinos "Galeria." (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz Verlag, 2013), 203-22; see also note 53 above.

56 and delighting rather in the virtuosity of the depictions.125 Gage also gives examples of pictures commissioned expressly in order to facilitate an esthetic contest, specifically likening the comparison of artistic manners to “various types of feminine beauty.”126

Francucci’s “Galleria” brings together the physical installation, subject, content, and execution of paintings as overlapping categories in a staged comparison between the virtuous beauty of Judith in Giovanni Baglione's Judith and Holofernes (figure 1.10) and the lascivious and corrupting attractions of Potiphar's wife as she tries to seduce Joseph in

Lodovico Cigoli's Joseph and Potiphar's wife (figure 1.11).127 That the latter painting was commissioned expressly in order to serve as foil and pendant to the former, matching its dimensions and overall scale, demonstrates how overtly artists could be made to participate in this sort of connoisseurial exercise.128 The tendency to detailed,

125 I am paraphrasing Gage’s own analysis of her source, which she bases on the following quote: “E quindi avviene, che hora mostrandone celesti oggietti ci rinfiammano alla Religione, hora figurandone tragici avvenimenti ci riempiono di pietade, hora imitando guerriere imprese, di bellicose ardimento, ci fanno bollire il core, et hora avviandone gli spenti esempi di ben mille heroiche operationi, di magnanimo desio, e di generosa emulation ci fanno avvampare il petto. … E se bene la mente di V.S. Ill.me R.ma non ha bisogna di cosi fatti stimoli per superare con speditissimo corso il faticosa [sic] sentiero, che no conduce a la Virtù . . . ad ogni modo mi persuade, che non poco diletto ella si prenda, quando nel passaggiar tal’hora le spatiosissime sale, e le ornatissime camera del suo regal Palagio, hora puo vedere per mille famose mani in mille tele vivamente espresso quelle sacre e pietose Istorie, le quali con pia contemplation, e con devote pensiero ella del continuo si porta altamente scolpite, et impresse nel cuore . . . .” Scipione Francucci, “La Galleria,” Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Fondo Borghese, II, 401, fol. 7v-8r. Quoted and transcribed in Frances Gage, Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni Sulla Pittura: Recreation, Manners, and Decorum in Seventeenth-century Roman Picture Galleries (PhDiss. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2000), 387-8; see also her discussion of this passage, p. 357. 126 Ibid., 444-5. Beyond the Francucci example discussed presently, Gage also gives another illustration from Federico Borromeo’s Museum, and his comparison therein of depictions of Mary Magdalene by Titian and Bernardino Luini, respectively. 127 “Both paintings represent women who use their beauty to seduce and to deceive, but whereas Judith’s feigned sensuality masks her just objective, the lasciviousness of Potiphar’s wife reveals her treacherous character. With her beauty, Judith, a widowed Jewess, entrapped the captain of the enemy army, killing him. In contrast to Judith’s noble motive, Potiphar’s wife used her beauty to attempt to seduce Joseph, who was in the service of her husband, an officer of Pharaoh. The force of these images, so the two painters and the poet recognized, depended upon the beholders of the paintings finding their female protagonists as beautiful as the historical beholders who were tempted by them. Since both women appear partially disrobed to carry out their seductions, Judith exposing even more of her body than does her lascivious counterpart, the comparison demonstrates the subtle judgment required to distinguish Judith’s true beauty from the false beauty of Potiphar’s wife.” Ibid., 456. 128 Ibid., 455.

57 comparative evaluation, and to conflating pictorial qualities with those native to the fiction of a depicted scene, reveals a horizon of expectation within which artists of

Ribera's generation operated.

Theorizing connoisseurship: Mancini’s Considerations on Painting

The extent to which the evaluation of pictures was codified as an edifying activity in its own right is plainest in the writings of Ribera's sometime collector and first biographer, the Sienese physician Giulio Mancini (1559-1630). Having moved to Rome in 1592, Mancini moved nimbly up the social ladder, adding to a salaried position as a consulting physician at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito a bespoke private practice with a clientele often drawn from the Tuscan ranks of the Roman curia. This clientele included

Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, whose election to the papacy as Urban VIII in 1623 brought

Mancini to the apogee of his career with an appointment as private physician to his holiness.129 An avid collector who ran a small sideline as an art dealer, Mancini was personally acquainted with several prominent artists in Rome and Siena, doubtless including Ribera, whose work he also bought and prized.130 Within no more than a year of Ribera's departure for Naples in 1616, Mancini began to produce a series of closely interrelated treatises, a central group of which concerned painting; these circulated, with variations great and small, in several manuscript copies, and were compiled and published for the first time in 1956 by Adriana Marucchi under the umbrella title

129 Silvia De Renzi and Donatella Livia Sparti, “Giulio Mancini,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giulio-mancini_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ (accessed 7 November, 2015); Michele Maccherini, “Ritratto di Giulio Mancini,” in Olivier Bonfait and Anna Coliva (eds), Bernini dal Borghese ai Barberini. La Cultura a Roma intorno agli anni venti (Rome: De Luca, 2004), 47-57. 130 Michele Maccherini, “Caravaggio nel Carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini,” in Prospettiva 86 (1997): 71-92.

58 Considerazioni Sulla Pittura, or Considerations on Painting.131 The Considerations, written primarily between 1617 and 1621 but continuously amended throughout

Mancini's lifetime, provide guidelines on acquiring, viewing, and displaying pictures, and address specifically the issue of a collection's arrangement within a domestic setting.132

While the Considerations are often mined for the early and quite accurate biographical information that they provide on artists, their richness as a factual source should never overshadow the character of Mancini's overall endeavor, which is also manifest in a larger set of writings on art and comportment that include guidebooks to

Rome and Siena on the one hand, and treatises on honor, love, dancing, and gymnastics on the other, as Gage consistently argues.133 A similar breadth of vision characterizes the

Considerations internally: what Mancini “considers” therein covers a wide range of times and topics, and the text functions simultaneously as a theoretical treatise, a practical manual, a storybook, and a breezy yet refined conversation piece. From a compendious history of the “nations that have painted” to biographies of artists arranged chronologically and expanding as they approach the contemporary period, the

Considerations present a sharp sense of historical awareness, which is applied with cutting-edge scholarly method: Gabriele Bickendorf has made particular note of

Mancini's comparison of connoisseurship, as it applies to distinguishing the period in which a picture was made - and if possible, the identity of the individual author - to the

131 Op. cit. note 9. 132 See notes 105 and 106 above; on Mancini's specific advice concerning the purchase and display of pictures, see also Cristina de Benedictis and Roberta Roani, Riflessioni Sulle “Regole Per Comprare Collocare E Conservare Le Pitture” Di Giulio Mancini (Florence: Edifir, 2005). 133 On Mancini's other writings, see also Mancini, Considerazioni, lvii-lvix; Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London: Warburg Institute, 1947), 279-331; and Silvia De Renzi, “A Career in Manuscripts: Genres and Purposes of a Physician's Writing in Rome, 1600-1630,” in Italian Studies 66, no. 2 (2011): 234-248.

59 burgeoning science of paleography.134 Mancini offers rigorous definitions of painting, which he also orders into “various species” according to the things depicted, which in turn dictate the parameters for the success or failure of the depiction. These definitions are offered in part as correctives to Lomazzo and Vasari, both of whom he takes to task point by point. The central endeavour, however, is to define, promote, and teach the consideration of paintings as a practice that is edifying, appropriate, and delightful to a gentleman: the first section of the Considerations bears the full title “Alcune considerazioni appartenenti alla pittura come di diletto di un gentilhuomo nobile e come introduttione a quello si deve dire,” or “a few considerations pertaining to painting as delightful to a noble gentleman and as an introduction to that which one ought to say.”

That which one ought to say about painting is the heart of Mancini's treatise, which was defined, by one of its very first commentators, Julius Von Schlosser, as the cradle of connoisseurship.135 On this point, a debate has arisen within art historical assessments of Mancini's writings. On the one hand, Carlo Ginzburg, Alberto Frigo,

Gabriele Bickendorf and Frances Gage have accentuated the departure that Mancini's writings mark from the previous century's general concession that the best judges of art were artists.136 On the other hand, Donatella Livia Sparti has contested the

134 Gabriele Bickendorf, "Kennerschaft und frühe paläographische Konzepte: "Cognizione della pittura" und "Ricognizione della scrittura"," in Die Historisierung der Italienischen Kunstbetrachtung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1998), 35-64. 135 "Der anregendste Teil [des Traktats] ist aber der, so viel wir wissen, älteste versuch, die Grundsätze der Kennerschaft und Bilderkritik zu erfassen (...)." ("The most exciting part [of the treatise], though, is, so far as we are aware, the oldest attempt to formulate the principles of connoisseurship and art criticism."). Julius Von Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur. Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: Kunstverlag Anton Schroll & Co., 1924, repr. 1985), 536. 136 Carlo Ginzburg, . “Der Jäger Entziffert Die Fährte, Sherlock Holmes Nimmt Die Lupe, Freud Liest Morelli - Die Wissenschaft Auf Der Suche Nach Sich Selbst.” In Spurensicherungen. Über Verborgene Geschichte, Kunst Und Soziales Gedächtnis (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1983), 61-96; Gage, Recreation, Manners, and Decorum; Bickedorf, Historisierung; and Alberto Frigo, “Can One Speak of Painting if One Cannot Hold a Brush?: Giulio Mancini, Medicine, and the Birth of the Connoisseur,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 3 (2012): 417-36.

60 characterization of Mancini's Considerazioni and the activities they address as

“connoisseurship.”137 Whereas Carlo Ginzburg famously positioned Mancini as a precursor to the nineteenth-century physician and conoscitore Giovanni Morelli, Sparti distinguishes between modern-day connoisseurship, which she defines strictly as a concern with attribution, and the activities that Mancini describes as the preserve of the amateur intenditore, which have to do with an estimate of quality rather than a factual identification of authorship. For Sparti, then, Mancini still recognizes “connoisseurship,” i.e., the attribution of pictures, as an activity best left to the professionals.138

Sparti's point is well taken that Mancini's Considerazioni propose advice on a range of approaches to pictures that are not principally concerned with - and certainly are not limited to - attribution of authorship. Mancini's status as the father of modern connoisseurship is at once undeniable and potentially misleading, and Sparti's critique of

Ginzburg is justified insofar as Morelli's agenda with regard to the examination of pictures was far narrower than Mancini's.139 Nevertheless, Ginzburg's main point is not to present a sustained historical interpretation of Mancini's text, but to include it in a suggestive and ambitiously interpretive intellectual history. Sparti's essay throws into sharp relief the contrast between the wide variety of activities that are included under the broad heading of “considerations” in Mancini and the narrow definition that she applies to modern and contemporary connoisseurship.140 Frigo has rightly underscored the

137 Donatella Livia Sparti, “Novità su Giulio Mancini: Medicina, arte e presunta “Connoisseurship”,” in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 52, no. 1 (2008): 53-72. 138 Ibid., 59-65. 139 Ibid. 63-4. 140 “... è poco credibile ritenere, come ci viene suggerito da Salerno o da Ginzburg, e da altri in seguito, che vi fossero individui, non artisti cioè, desiderosi di imparare ad attribuire gli autori di opere d’arte e che a tal scopo leggessero le “Considerazioni” ... La connoisseurship, poi, lo si sa, nacque in seno all’espansione del mercato artistico settecentesco ... ed il suo scopo principale era, ed è, l’identificazione della paternità di un’opera d’arte antica, non cioè contemporanea. Tale problematica ... è del tutto assente in Mancini, i cui

61 importance of “peritia” in Mancini’s text, and has offered his own critique of Sparti based on the interdependence of the term's medical and connoisseurial applications.141 Unlike

Ginzburg, who used the analogy with medicine to coin a broad definition for an

“indexical” approach to the interpretation of signs across a huge span of times and cultures, Frigo's analogy is rooted in the precise historical contexts of Padua and Rome during Mancini's lifetime, and locates the premise of Mancini's approach to connoisseurship in epistemological debates about peritia and scientia with which leading medical theorists and practitioners of the age were engaged. Both of these approaches have their own merits, but whereas Sparti's critique of Ginzburg seems to expect an apple to be an orange, Frigo's critique of Sparti has the virtue of dealing with the source material on the same terms.

precetti sull’acquisto di opere sono rivolti specificamente all’arte moderna e contemporanea. Per quanto possa essere accattivante voler leggere le sue avvertenze come un preambolo (isolato) di quanto sarebbe accaduto oltre un secolo più tardi - per poi svilupparsi in pieno nel corso dell’Ottocento - è necessario sottolineare che farlo è storicamente fuorivante.” (“... it is thus implausible to deem, as Salerno, Ginzburg, and others after them suggest, that there should have been individuals, that is to say, non-artists, desirous of learning to attribute authorship to works of art, and who would have read the “Considerations” with such a goal in mind ... Connoisseurship, as is well known, was born from the expansion of the art market in the eighteenth century ... and its principal scope was and is the identification of the paternity of an ancient work of art, that is to say, not a contemporary one. Such a line of inquiry ... is generally absent in Mancini, whose precepts on the acquisition of works [of art] are directed specifically towards modern and contemporary art. As attractive as it may be to try to read his precepts as an (isolated) preamble of what was to occur over a century later - to then develop fully over the course of the nineteenth century - it is necessary to underline that to do so is historically misleading.”) Sparti, “Mancini,” 59. 141 For Frigo’s critique of Sparti, see “Can one speak of painting,” 419-21, for his discussion of peritia, ibid. 424-32. For very different applications of Mancini's diagnostic skills to his connoisseurial practice, see Todd Olson, “Caravaggio's Coroner: Forensic Medicine in Giulio Mancini’s Art Criticism,” in Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 1 (2005): 83-98; Gage, “Invention, Wit, and Melancholy;” and Gage, “Exercise for Mind and Body.” On Mancini's medical background, see Silvia De Renzi, “La natura in tribunale. Conoscenze e pratice medico-legali a Roma nel XVII secolo,” in Quaderni Storici 36, no. 3 (2001): 799-822; Silvia De Renzi, “Witnesses of the Body: Medico-Legal Cases in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002): 219-42; Silvia De Renzi, “Medical Competence, Anatomy and the Polity in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” in Renaissance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 551-67; and Nancy G. Sirasi, “History, Antiquarianism, and Medicine: The Case of Girolamo Mercuriale,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 2 (2003): 231-51.

62 There remain, of course, significant differences among the approaches of these scholars (Gage, Frigo, Ginzburg, Bickendorf) whom I have described rather coarsely as inhabiting one “camp.” Broadly speaking, Frances Gage and Alberto Frigo are both pursuing close investigations of Mancini and the nature of his participation in the cultural and intellectual history of his time and place, paying particular attention to his use of language, his professional practice, and the various social networks to which he belonged. In contrast, Bickendorf and Ginzburg are less concerned with Mancini as an actor within a set of historical situations in seventeenth century Italy, and they position him instead as a catalyst within an intellectual history with a much wider angle that considers how western cutlure has invested certain ways of looking with certain kinds of authority. For Bickendorf, Mancini is interesting for being more historian than art critic, and for what she sees as an ability to consider works of art as having a historical value apart from their esthetic merits.

The broader idea of expertise suggested in Frigo's analysis of the terms peritia and peritus corresponds to the range of topics addressed in the Considerazioni: how to tell in what era a painting was produced, judgment of how that era painted, what to base the price of a painting on (in philosophical as well as practical terms), what makes a painting meritorious, what the difference between different types and styles of painting consists of, what makes the great painters great and the lesser painters lesser, how the setting in which a picture is seen affects its evaluation, what materials and techniques are used in painting and their respective merits, what has been said about important artists and their works that one should know before approaching other works, and what makes a painting beautiful, are all examined in turn. What emerges in no uncertain terms from

63 Mancini's Considerations is a cultural preoccupation with what it meant to look at pictures, what pictures had the authority to put into the world, and what authority in turn could order them, both as esthetic objects and as vessels for knowledge, ideas, stories, and emotions. I suspect that the greater attention that has come to focus on Mancini's advice for discerning fakes and on the relative value of copies may have to do precisely with the continued relevance of these issues to modern approaches to the value of art.

Copies, fakes, and the art of appreciation

The fakes and copies issue is at once a feature of contiguity between seventeenth- and twenty-first-century notions of connoisseurship and a vivid instance of the disjuncture between them. The frequently impoverishing effect of much modern connoisseurship on art history stands to be reversed with a recovery of historical understandings of such categories; the potential richness of such recoveries is exemplified in Elizabeth Cropper's study of Giovanni Lanfranco's pursuit of legal action against Domenichino for plagiarism of a Last Communion of Saint Jerome by Agostino

Carracci, or in Maria Loh's study of Padovanino's revisitations of Titian as deriving their appeal and pleasure for the viewer from their intertextuality and dense play of references.142 Early modern viewers and makers of art held diverse and often contradictory views of copying; Jeffrey Muller has grouped these loosely into pro and contra camps whose respective concerns were to safeguard the status and quality of

142 Elizabeth Cropper, The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Maria Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007); see also Paul Joannides, “Titian's Repetitions,” in Joanna Woods-Marsden (ed.), Titian: Materiality, Likeness, "Istoria" (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 37-51.

64 autograph works, and to acknowledge the value of copies, both as end products and as pedagogical necessities.143

Mancini is most often characterized as an opponent of copying, but one could make just as strong a case for his support of the practice. His seeming paranoia, expressed in letters to his brother Diefebo, about potential copyists “deflowering” the pictures in his own collection did not translate into scruples about acquiring or enabling the creation of such copies himself.144 If his instructions on acquiring paintings contain a detailed caveat emptor concerning spurious pictures painted on old supports and purporting to be the work of some great cinquecento master, Mancini also considers and praises copies produced in precisely this fashion. Within the Considerations, the fraudulent production of an image by a lesser artist in the guise of a great master's work is in stark contrast with the virtuous inganno that is the mark of success for a deliberate imitation. In the chapter that he dedicates to the “recognition of paintings,” Mancini repeats an anecdote about the discomfiture of a nameless ecclesiastical patron of

Annibale Carracci's, a “Monsignore ilustrissimo” who is deceived by a Flagellation of

Christ that Annibale paints in the manner of Sebastiano del Piombo.145 The context in which this anecdote appears is the appreciation of good copies, of which Annibale's

“Sebastiano” is an example, made out of a great painter's pleasure in the imitation of another master's manner rather than for gain:

In any event, it often occurs that some painters have such felicity in making paintings after the manner of some master of great fame and renown, that these deceive the most intelligent and come to be sold as being by the hand of said painter of renown, which is yet done with a different end than sale, and thus, in a certain way, [than in order] to deceive; rather, [it is

143 Jeffrey M. Muller, “Measures of Authenticity: The Detection of Copies in the Early Literature on Connoisseurship,” in Studies in the History of Art 20 (1989): 141-9. 144 Maccherini “Caravaggio,” 80. 145 Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 135.

65 done] out of a striving for honor (per zelo d’honore), as in order to gain for oneself reputation and renown. As was done by Annibale Carracci when he first came to Rome: on the newly adorned canvas of some old ornament, he painted Christ beaten and pulled by the hair by his tormentors, in the manner of fra' Bastiano [Sebastiano del Piombo]; [Annibale] sold it as it was hung on the walls of that [Monsignor] his [patron] of little benevolence, who praised it and added that the like of such masters was no longer to be found. Then Annibale, who was present, said with a smile, “Most illustrious Monsignor, by the grace of God I live, and have no wish to die.”146

If anything, Mancini seems to prize copies all the more for their capacity to function as litmus tests for the taste and perspicacity of the connoisseur. If Annibale appears to advantage in Mancini's anecdote, still more does Mancini himself, who separates the discerning connoisseurs (a group in which he himself holds company with the Grand

Duke of Tuscany) from the vain, gullible, and in any event “poco benevolo” Monsignore:

And by such eminent men I too should like to be deceived, and of such manner of copies as these I believe it to be true which the Grand Duke Cosimo of Tuscany said, that in these are two arts, one of the author and the other of the copyist who simulates him, and truly they are gems among paintings.147

Mancini distinguishes between deception with a profit motive and per zelo d'honore, and uses the passage as a whole to show his own appreciation, in overt emulation of that expressed by Grand Duke Cosimo II, for such good copies and their makers. That

Annibale's actions in creating the painting on an old support and selling it as a Sebastiano are the very procedures Mancini warns prospective buyers of art against is secondary to

146 “Inoltre avviene spesse volte che alcuni pittori habbian tanta felicità di condur pitture secondo la maniera di qualche mastro [sic] di fama e grido che ingannino i più intelligenti e faccino sì che le lor cose sian vendute per mano di quel tal pittore di grido, il che per altro fine che per vendere, e così ad un certo modo per ingannare, ma per zelo d'honore, come per farsi conoscere e reputare. Come fece Annibal Caracci [sic] nel principio che venne a Roma: condusse in una tela nuova adornata d'un ornamento vecchio un Cristo flagellato e tirato per i capelli da manigoldi di maniera di fra' Bastiano, lo fece vendere appiccato al muro dal quel suo poco benevolo, quale lo lodò e soggiunse che di quei mastri se n'era persa la forma. Allora Annibale, che era presente, sorridendo disse: 'Monsignore illustrissimo, per gratia di Dio vivo nè ho voglia di morire.'” Ibid. 147 “Et io da simil huomini così eminenti vorrei esser ingannato, e di queste tali copie credo sia vero quello che diceva il granduca Cosmo di Toscana, che in esse siano due arti, una dell'autore e l'altra del copiatore simulato, e sono veramente gioie fra le pitture.” Ibid.

66 the intent of both making and sale. Counterintuitively, the temporary effacement of the markers of Annibale's individuality under the outer garment of Sebastiano's manner becomes a calling card for Annibale, a deliberate announcement of his skill made expressly per farsi conoscere e reputare, to seal his own fame.

Mancini's story about Annibale and the Monsignore has a rich afterlife in a long line of even more pointed anecdotes in Carlo Cesare Malvasia's Felsina Pittrice, for which Mancini's manuscript was used as a source.148 In Malvasia's Lives of the Carracci, the wit and ingegno of the painters is revealed in their ability to confound the critical skills even of virtuosi, both painters and princes. The issue of the detection of fakes, which Mancini addresses in the Considerazioni in order to save would-be collectors from becoming the victims of fraud, is given a social rather than a market emphasis in

Malvasia. The same forgery techniques come up in both sources, such as painting in the manner of a famous master over an cheap image on an old support. When deployed by the Carracci, however, the sting of the deception lies in social victory rather than financial gain: Annibale's freshly-painted "Titian" on an old support is painted “as a test - just for the fun of it,” and presented as “an instance where the lack of discernment of a great personage was exposed and chastened.”149

148 See Lionello Venturi's preface to Mancini, Considerazioni, x-xii. 149 “Therefore the following jokes, which did not deceive mindless beasts, but men of the finest judgment, should also be mentioned. There is the instance where the lack of discernment of a great personage was exposed and chastened. This person, who had a very good understanding of painting, made a practice of visiting Annibale's rooms to examine his works, and on complimenting Annibale, he would always conclude with some words of praise for Titian and Correggio, as if to imply that in taking them as his models, Annibale had not yet matched them. Annibale, having found a worn-out, worm-eaten panel from an old chest at a secondhand dealer's, painted a Virgin and Child on it in the style of Titian, and put it in a corner of the room that was far from the window, so that it would not be directly in the light. On his next visit, after nosing around as usual among the pictures including those that were still turned to the wall, this Roman lord came across the panel, and utterly astonished, stopped to examine it in a transport of delight. “Good heavens,” he exclaimed, “where on earth did this lovely picture come from, Signor Annibale? Either it's a Titian, or it will be taken to be one.” And while proceeding to ask who it was by, why it was painted on a panel, and wheter it was for sale, he bent down to pick it up and take it to where there was good light,

67 While there is an obvious abundance of financial motives for copying pictures or assuming another artist's manner, the reputation motive just described deserves greater consideration, especially in Ribera's case, as I have argued with the example of his

Hecate. The association of such imitations with student work, or with the lesser productions of generally mediocre artists, is historically well-founded, but should not eclipse the extensive and often ambitious copying practices in which the Carracci in particular became experts, as numerous studies attest.150 Malvasia's biographies of

Lodovico, Annibale, and Agostino are rife with anecdotes similar to the one just quoted from Mancini, whose Considerations, as just noted, were one of Malvasia's primary sources. The three artists' control over their projection of style applies to their individual works and to their collaborations, in which they could melt into a seamless trinity or else accentuate their distinct personalities. Such control is at its most visible, however, in the way Malvasia rhetorically accentuates their mastery and complete internalization of their own particular canon of cinquecento masters, whose manners they could dial up or down

at which Annibale thrust himself in front of him and said, “Stop, for God's sake, Your Excellency, or the picture will get smudged and you will get your hands dirty. It's a mere trifle I painted yesterday alla prima as a test - just for the fun of it.” The effect this had on his visitor can be easily imagined by any gentleman who has ever found himself in such a disconcerting situation.” Carlo Cesare Malvasia, ed. and trans. Anne Summerscale, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci: Commentary and Translation (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), 278-79. 150 On practices of copying by the Carracci and their pupils, see Hugh Brigstocke, “Domenichino Copies after Annibale Carracci,” in Burlington Magazine 115, no. 845 (1973): 520, 523-26; Diane De Grazia Bohlin, Prints and Related Drawings by the Carracci Family: a Catalogue Raisonné (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1979), 54-57; Feigenbaum, “Practice”; Elizabeth Cropper, “Tuscan History and Emilian Style,” in Henry A. Millon, et. al., Emilian Painting of the 16th and 17th Centuries: A Symposium (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987), 49-62; Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (2nd ed. Florence: Edizioni Cadmo, 2000), 53-68 and passim; Stephen J. Campbell, “The Carracci, Visual Narrative, and Heroic Poetry after Ariosto: the 'Story of Jason' in Palazzo Fava,” in Word & Image 18, no. 2 (2002): 210-30; Spear, “Di Sua Mano”; Cropper, Domenichino Affair, 98-127 and passim; Clare Robertson, The Invention of Annibale Carracci (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2008), 45-67; Elisabeth Oy-Marra, “Innovation als kritische Revision des Alten: Lanfrancos Römische Kuppelfresken,” in Ulrich Pfisterer and Gabriele Wimböck (eds.), “Novità”: Neuheitskonzepte in den Bildkünsten um 1600 (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011), 263-94; Clare Robertson, “Late Annibale and His Workshop: Invention, Imitation and Patronage,” in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz 54, no. 2 (2012): 267- 94, esp. 278-88.

68 at will, often to the embarrassed confusion of patrons, whose arrogant connoisseurial gushing the Carracci shut down with freshly-minted Titians and Parmigianino drawings.

Speculations as to the Bolognese school's potential influence on Ribera, however well- or ill-founded, are not my concern; rather, the Carracci practice of imitation, and the ambition that seventeenth century commentators recognized therein, cannot be neglected when approaching any connoisseurial problem surrounding Ribera. The Hecate at Apsley house and the Correggesque works reported by Orlandi and Scaramuccia correspond perfectly to the ethos of bravura “copying” exemplified by the Carracci. To be sure, the fact that Ribera verifiably engaged in this manner of copying shows a degree of chutzpah, but it is arguably no less indicative of the artist's attention to connoisseurship itself. As Richard Spear points out, “it is less consequential ... to sort out who in seventeenth-century Italy liked or disliked copies than it is to emphasize the growing sensitivity to them.”151

The Sevillian painter, theorist, academician, and theologian Francisco Pacheco, who was a personal friend of one of Ribera's most avid patrons, the third Duke of Alcalá, presents connoisseurship as a shared arena between patrons and painters in his treatise El

Arte de la Pintura, of which he devotes chapter 9 of book III to discussing “how painting illustrates and sharpens the understanding, tempers the furor and hardness of the spirit, makes a man mild and communicative, and on the difficulty of understanding and judging it [painting].”152 This difficulty becomes a litmus test for the quality of artists and

151 Spear, “Di Sua Mano,” 94. 152 “Como la pintura ilustra y adelgaza el entendimiento, tiempla el furor y dureza del ánimo, hace al hombre blando y comunicativo, y de la dificultad de conocerla y jusgarla.” Francisco Pacheco, ed. Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, El Arte de la Pintura (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), 533-49. Many thanks to Felipe Pereda for calling this passage to my attention.

69 viewers alike, and Pacheco includes “painters in name only” in his condemnation of ignorant viewers.153 The best judges of painting are “those who exercise the profession most nobly,” and the rule is confirmed in a “rare case,” in which Pacheco, called upon to restore a crucifixion by Pedro de Campaña, recalls having seen a painting very like it before in the household of a Caballero. The second painting is brought in, and the comparison on the spot between the two works reveals the Duke's to be the more recent, and Pacheco judges it to be both a copy and the better of the two paintings.154 The

153 “Habiendo visto las ignorancias de algunos que no son pintores, y las de los que lo son de sólo nombre, sacaremos en limpido a quién se le debe conceder el jusgar por entero de lo dificultoso y misterioso de la pintura; porque, en mi opinión, no sólo a los que no la profesan, pero a muchos que la exercitan, se les debe negar esta honra ...” (“Having seen the ignorance of some who are not painters, and that of many who are in name only, we will sort out once and for all to whom it should be conceded to judge in its entirety of the difficulty and mystery of painting; for in my opinion, not only to those who do not profess [this art], but also to many who exercise it, should this honor be denied.”). Ibid., 548. 154 “... El año 1605 me entregó el Exmo. Sr. D. Fernando Enríquez de Ribera, tercero Duque de Alcalá, una famosa tabla de mano de Mase Pedro Campaña que había hallado, venturosamente, en esta Ciudad en poder de Pedro de Yévenes, mercader curioso y rico y, a mucha costa y ruegos, se la había sacado, porque hacía gran estimación de ella: era un Crucificamiento de Cristo entre los dos ladrones, la Virgen y S. Juan al pie de la Cruz, y muchas figuras pequeñas por lexos; de lo mejor y más estudiado deste gran artífice. Yo se la reparé, y restituí el azul del manto de Nuestra Señora, los colores del cielo, que estaban gastados, y le doré la guarnición y, llevándosela, me dixo: que había visto otra de la misma manera y tamaño en casa de cierto Caballero desta Ciudad, que le afirmó que la había heredado de sus abuelos. Hice instancia con su Excelencia la mandase traer; tráxose, luego, y estando juntas, con mucha atención y dificultad se pudo conocer entre ellas diferencia alguna, porque, cabalmente, contenía la una lo que la otra y era una mesma cosa el debuxo y el colorido, salvo que parecía la del Duque menos antigua, y yo la califiqué por copia de la otra; si bien, jusgué por mejor la copia, cosa que sucede pocas veces; y, si me dieran a escoger, escogiera, sin duda, la del Duque y, así, le supliqué pusiéramos el nombre de Mase Pedro en su tabla, de que él quedó satisfecho; porque era copiada de mano de valiente maestro, que en el colorido tenía más hermosa manera y más suave que Mase Pedro, y le pegó al buen debuxo mayor gracia. Esta es la cosa más dificultosa de jusgar de cuantas se me han ofrecido en mi vida, donde temblara cualquiera en conocer las pinceladas originales del primer maestro y, así, concluyo este capítulo dexando esta gloriosa empresa en manos de los mayores pintores, a quien se debe de justicia.” ("... In the year 1605, the most excellent Lord Don Fernando Enríquez de Ribera, third Duke of Alcalá, consigned to me a famous panel by the hand of Master Pedro de Campaña, which he had found, by happenstance, in this city in the hands of Pedro de Yévenes, a wealthy and curious merchant, from whom he [the Duke] had obtained it with great cost and supplication, for he esteemed it greatly: it was a Crucifixion of Christ between the two thieves, [with] the Virgin and Saint John at the foot of the cross, and many small figures far away; of the best and most studious [works] of this great artist. I repaired it, and restored the blue of the mantle of Our Lady, the colors of the sky, which were spent, and I gilded the frame, and, taking it away, said to myself that I had seen another of the same manner and size in the house of a certain Knight of this city, who had asserted to me that he had inherited it from his grandparents. I put in a request to his Excellency that he should have it brought; afterwards, it having been brought, and [both panels] being together, [only] with great attention and difficulty could one tell any difference whatsoever between them, for, quite precisely, the one contained that which [was in] the other and was one and the same in drawing and coloring, save that the Duke's appeared to be less old, and I qualified it as a copy of the other; although I judged the copy to be the

70 difficulty surmounted by the “valiente maestro” who made the copy is the benchmark for the connoisseurial challenge met by Pacheco, who is able to discern the copy, and thus also to appreciate its great merit.

As in Pacheco's anecdote, copies and paintings in the manner of another artist

(overlapping though far from identical categories) are often held up as the crucible in which a viewer may prove his (nearly always his) connoisseurial worth. Francesco

Scannelli prefaces his 1657 Microcosmo della Pittura with an assertion of connoisseurial pedigree: stating that he can “testify from sight” (testificare di vista) to most of the works he discusses, Scannelli is careful to declare his awareness that many copies falsely wear the names of great masters, cheapening and eclipsing their reputations and gaining acceptance through habit and repetition.155 The preface to the Microcosmo also praises its

better, a thing which occurs but rarely; and if it were up to me to choose, I would, without doubt, choose that of the Duke, and thus, I begged him that we should put the name of Mase Pedro on his panel, with which he [the Duke] remained satisfied; for it was copied by the hand of a worthy master [valiente maestro], who in coloring had a more beautiful and softer manner than Mase Pedro, and gave to the good drawing more grace. This is the thing that was the most difficult to judge of all those that have been presented to me in my life, and [in this matter] anyone would tremble to know the original brushstrokes of the first master, and, thus, I conclude this chapter leaving this glorious enterprise in the hands of the best painters, to whom this justice is due.”) Ibid., 549. 155 “Sò (ed è vero) che in varj luoghi publici si ritrovano Pitture di rara bellezza, ed anco appresso a particolari opere molto eccellenti, e pregiate, potendo pure della maggior parte testificare di vista, come appresso Prencipi grandi d'Italia, e Signori di vaglia; essendomi parimente noto quello, che talhora palesa la stessa sperienza, mentre bene spesso le copie de'Quadri sortiscono indebitamente il nome d'originale, servendo ad esse l'oscurità, che portano seco annessi per lo più sù l'asse Dipinti di qualificato carattere per passare francamente al nome di buom [sic] Maestro; e le copie dal tempo, e diligenza accreditate, e per haver alle volte stinto il primario originale, ò trasportato in parti lontane, ottengono il primo posto, ed anco ritrovarsi gli studj per lo più ripieni coll'opere di certi Maestri, l'attività de' quali per non haver occupato in alcun tempo luogo fuori della circonferenza delle proprie parti, in esse similmente il loro nome, come mal nato se ne muore.” (“I know (and it is true) that in various public places there are pictures of rare beauty, and also in private homes there are very excellent and valuable works; and to most of these I can testify as an eyewitness [testificare di vista], as in the homes of great Princes of Italy, and Lords of great worth; and I am equally aware of that which experience itself then discloses, whereas quite often the copies of paintings unduly pass for originals, being served by obscurity; which pictures of modest character mostly bear upon the panel the name of a good master so as to pass frankly for their work; and the copies gaining credibility through time and diligence, and by having at times extinguished [through greater prominence] the original, which may have been carried off to some faraway place, [the copies] obtain the foremost place; and though the studios are filled with works of certain Masters, whose activities, never having occupied at any time a place beyond the circumference of certain parts, hereby their works, and similarly their names, as though

71 dedicatee, the Duke of Modena Francesco I D'Este, not only for his magnanimity and protection of the art that is noblest and most virtuous, but for “discerning ... with extraordinary taste the true beauties and most recondite perfections” therein.156 Scannelli contrasts the many practitioners of art, and the many copyists and imitators of great masters such as Raphael, Titian, and Correggio, with the singularity and great worth of those artists and their works, setting a high premium on the A-list and the autograph that serves to showcase the author's pride in knowing the difference. No less than in Mancini's example of Cosimo II praising Annibale's “Sebastiano” Flagellation of Christ, or in

Pacheco's preference for the Duke of Alcalá's copy over Pedro de Campaña's original, even Scannelli's disparagements of fakes and copies uphold the inherent and obvious

ill-born, die thereof.”). Francesco Scannelli, Il Microcosmo della Pittura, Overo Trattato diviso in due Libri (Cesena: Neri, 1657), iii (unnumbered, preface to the reader). 156 The quotation is from a long passage singling out from among the innumerable practitioners of the art of painting the special excellence of Titian, Raphael, and Correggio, and noting the presence of all three masters' works in the Duke's collection: “Molti al certo vengono osservati gl'imitatori, e varj sono gli artefici degni in questa professione; ma trà quantità quasi innumerabile s'additano soli in essenza, e come singolari nella virtù, così impareggiabili nel merito Rafaello da Urbino, Titiano da Cadoro, & Antonio da Correggio, e successivi ad un tal numero altri chiari, e qualificati Maestri, l'opere de'quali in buona parte svanite, ed altre pur tuttavia se ne corrono del continuo alla total rovina, e perciò le più belle, e ben conservate operationi de' migliori, che alla giornata si rappresentano all' occhio del riguardante, si riducono infatti altrettanto diminute di numero, quanto accresciute di pregio; ed opere di tal sorte appaiono poi sempre le rare, e più pregiate maraviglie della Pittura, e frà le più qualificate dell'Italia quelle, che al presente possiede il Serenissimo Duca di Modana [sic], Prencipe singolarmente magnanimo, e virtuoso, diligentissimo custode, e primo Protettore di questa nobilissima virtù, che per aggiungere continuamente al gran cumulo qualificata operatione, discernendo in occorrenza con straordinario gusto le vere bellezze, e le più recondite perfettioni, non tralascia mezo d'ogni maggior riconoscenza per ottenere l'eroico intento: onde non sia maraviglia, se in un tal luogo si vedono campeggiare l'opere de'maggiori Maestri della professione, ed anco le più esquisite ....” (“Certainly there may be observed many imitators, and varied artists are worthy in this profession; but from among an almost innumerable quantity, there reveal themselves to be unique in essence, and as though singular in virtue, almost peerless in merit, Raphael of Urbino, Titian of Cadoro, and Antonio da Correggio, and beyond this number other famous and qualified Masters, whose works have largely vanished, and others still continuously run to total ruin, and thus the most beautiful, and well-preserved works of the best [artists], which daily show themselves to the eye of the beholder, are reduced and indeed as diminished in number as they are increased in price; and works of this sort appear ever to be the rarest and most prized marvels of Painting, and among the most expert of Italy [are] those which the most Serene Duke of Modena possesses, a singularly magnanimous and virtuous prince, a most diligent steward, and the first protector of this most noble virtue, that by continually adding expert works to his great store, discerning therein with extraordinary taste the true beauties, and the most recondite perfections, does not omit the means of [gaining] all the greater recognition for this heroic endeavor: whence it is not to be marvelled at, if in such a place one sees standing out the works of the best Masters of the profession, and also the most exquisite ...”) Ibid, unnumbered, iii/iv.

72 interest of fakes and copies for the activity of connoisseurship. Even a bad fake has the merit of providing an opportunity to exercise and demonstrate its detection, while a good fake is the occasion to show taste, both in the discernment of the copy and of its quality.

One thing that is missing from current connoisseurial discussions of pictures like

Ribera's Hecate (let alone from less accomplished or prestigious imitations of other artists) is a sense of the seicento's appreciation for the value and interest of such pictures as proving grounds for artists and viewers alike. By functioning as litmus tests, both for the artist's ability to assume or assimilate another's manner, and for viewers (especially patrons) to detect the intervention and correctly judge of its quality, copies and imitations catered to a “period eye” that was attuned to connoisseurship just as the quattrocento patrons in Michael Baxandall's paradigmatic coining of the term were attuned to

Euclidian geometry.157 The particular period eye for which such imitations are produced is a connoisseurial one, whether one expects the imitated style to be recognized or misrecognized. The drawing out of “recognition” of the sort described by Mancini is premised on the expectation that a great part of the picture's pleasure and worth will be bound up in its function as a kind of connoisseurial toy, a Rubik's cube for the eye. The core preoccupation that the present project aspires to share with Baxandall's landmark

157 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Style (2nd. ed., Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 29-40; many thanks to Stephen Campbell for helpful impetus towards thinking about Baxandall's work in terms of art historical method. Discussions of Baxandall by Stephen Campbell, Richard Neer, and Michael Fried in the context of the conference, “Does History Still Matter?” organized by Felipe Pereda and held at the Johns Hopkins University October 16th and 17th, 2015, were also helpful, as were the book reviews of Michael Baxandall's Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism by Stephen Campbell, in Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (2006): 178-81; and Paul Hills, “Art History Reviewed XIII: Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, 1972,” in Burlington Magazine 153, no. 1299 (2011): 404-8. A similar methodological deference to Baxandall is well expressed in J. Nicholas Napoli, “The Art of the Appraisal: Measuring, Evaluating, and Valuing Architecture in Early Modern Europe,” in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 54 (2009): 201-41, p. 204.

73 “Primer in the social history of pictorial style” is with the mutually formative interests shared and exchanged between the makers and consumers of art: what was it within the activity of looking at pictures that held the interest of artists and patrons, and how did artistic practice and tastes in art criticism and consumption mutually reinforce and shape these interests? As the few examples just noted should demonstrate, seicento viewers expected art to provide them, among other things, with an occasion and a demand to exercise their taste and judgment. In considering bodies of work such as Ribera's, our own current practices of connoisseurship cannot stand in for serious consideration of the historical practices of visual analysis and discussion that these works of art expected to elicit.

Nor is this seicento interest in connoisseurship a one-sided desideratum, dictated by patrons and slavishly indulged by artists. Rather, as with Baxandall's Euclidian geometry, the ways in which artistic practice was prompting or thematizing connoisseurship also helped to make it interesting to patrons and viewers in the first place. By the 1630s, this had taken the form of literal depictions of connoisseurship, in which paintings of collectors in and with their collections stage a mise en abîme of the viewer's own situation of contemplating and discussing the same collection of objects and images. An example of such painting, the 1630 Picture Cabinet by Hans Jordaens III

(figure 1.12), depicts an attentiveness towards pictures that it also demands, and as Gage describes, the abundance of such depictions must be read alongside other symptoms of

74 the flourishing interest in connoisseurship, notably in written works such as Franciscus

Junius's De pictura veterum of 1637.158

Artists as connoisseurs: appraisal, collaboration, citation

The fact that connoisseurship as an activity was of sufficient interest to art's buyers and viewers to prompt anything like Mancini's Considerations or Hans Jordaens'

Picture Cabinet should be sufficient grounds for considering that connoisseurship was also of at least potential interest to artists. Not only was this practice something of which to be aware on the grounds that it was known to interest patrons, but the key practitioners of the activity were artists themselves. This is most obvious within the specific context of the estimate, an adjunct to many artists' professional activity in both Spain and Italy.159

An exemplary study of Italian practices of appraisal is J. Nicholas Napoli's work on sculpture and architecture, particularly at the Certosa di San Martino in Naples; tying estimates to Mancini's formulation of connoisseurial practice, Napoli considers how appraisal hinged on symbolic currencies of trust and social credit, and how self-conscious reflections on and shifts in its practice were themselves the catalysts of change in architectural practice and theory.160 Performing estimates could occur in a wide variety of

158 Gage, “Picture Galleries,” 123-24 and passim; Franciscus Junius, ed. and trans. Keith Aldrich, Philip Fehl, and Raina Fehl, The Literature of Classical Art, vol. I: The Painting of the Ancients (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 159 The most thorough study has been made of the situation in Spain: María Jesús Gonzáles Muñoz, La Estimación y el Valor de la Pintura en España. 1600-1700 (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2006). On Italy, a short but excellent primer is in Deborah Krohn, “Taking Stock: Evaluation of Works of Art in Renaissance Italy,” in Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthew, and Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (eds._ The Art Market in Italy, 15th-17th Centuries / Il Mercato dell'Arte in Italia, secc. XV-XVII (Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini Editore, 2003), 203-12; for a broader study and full bibliography on the subject, see Guido Guerzoni, “Prezzi, valori e stime delle opere d'arte in epoca moderna,” in Quaderni Storici 45 (2010): 723- 52. 160 Napoli, “Art of the Appraisal”; J. Nicholas Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament in Early Modern Naples (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), especially chapters 3 and 4, 143-238.

75 situations, and could apparently be embraced as a full-time career, but it was certainly practiced on the side by many artists including Ribera. For his two most important public commissions, the series of paintings he produced between 1637 and 1651 for the Certosa di San Martino, and the Saint Januarius unscathed by the fiery furnace for the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Ribera's first involvement with each project was as an estimator of his colleagues' works.161 This is not necessarily to imply that his subsequent hiring at the Certosa or the Cappella del Tesoro was a result of these interventions as an appriaser, but his estimates are an aspect of his engagement in each project no less than his paintings.162

The seamless integration of Ribera's contributions within complex decorative wholes involving several different artists has been noted as a salient feature of his works for both the Certosa and the Cappella del Tesoro.163 Ribera's Saint Januarius unscathed in particular expresses his much-publicized rivalry with Domenichino in terms of respect and ambitious one-upmanship, not disdain, echoing and incorporating postures and expressions from Domenichino's frescoes and from his large paintings on copper alike, and completing the chapel's panoramic set of images in a visually collaborative vein. It is commonly speculated that Ribera and Stanzione both used drawings by their Bolognese

161 Ribera and Stanzione together performed an estimate on 18 works by Paolo Finoglia in the Certosa di San Martino sometime shortly after 1630, while Ribera's own work for the Carthusians begins with the 1637 Pietà; Finaldi, “Documentary Appendix,” 242. For the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Ribera and Stanzione were chosen by the Deputies to perform an estimate on Domenichino's unfinished work on April 25th, 1641, and Ribera was hired to paint the Saint Januarius unscathed by the fiery furnace just two weeks later, on May 6th; ibid., 246. See Richard Spear, Domenichino, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 286-90; Denise Maria Pagano, “Domenichino alla cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro,” in Richard Spear (ed.), Domenichino, 1581-1641 (exh. cat. Rome: Palazzo Venezia, 1996), 349- 68. 162 As argued in Napoli, Ethics, 147-152. 163 Napoli, Ethics, 5; Nicola Spinosa, "Ribera en San Martino," in Madrid 1992, 56-71, esp. 58-65; Spinosa, Obra Completa, 247-58.

76 predecessor, and Ribera's deference to Domenichino's stylistic choices has been generally characterized as a more or less reluctant submission to a combination of influence

(bowing to the demands of fashion) and business obligation to the Deputies of the

Chapel.164 Spear, however, perceptively notes that Ribera's famous indictment of

Domenichino as an incompetent colorist and no more than an “ordinary good draftsman” was likely a business move rather than a sincere esthetic judgment.165 As in

Domenichino's frescoed lunette directly above it, Ribera's Saint Januarius shows a crowd pressing outward and inward simultaneously, soldiers off balance with hands upraised and flung forward, and figures pressed into the ground as though flattened by the miraculous rush of events, their necks bent and their heads nearly upside down (figures

1.13 and 1.14). In the altarpieces on either side of Ribera's, Domenichino placed the focal points respectively on the recumbent figure in the foreground of The Curing of the Sick at the Tomb of Saint Januarius (figure 1.15) and on the open-mouthed rush outward of the miraculously resuscitated protagonist in Saint Januarius Resuscitating Massima's Son

(figure 1.16), each of which finds a memorable counterpart in Saint Januarius unscathed by the fiery furnace.166

164 Spinosa, Obra Completa, 242-43. The adaptation of Bolognese models has been deemed more congenial to Stanzione; Sebastian Schütze, “L'opera della maturità 1630-1656,” in Sebastian Schütze and Thomas Willette, Massimo Stanzione. L'opera completa (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1992), 69-120, esp. 76, 105-111. 165 “Whatever disagreements they possibly had on stylistic grounds ..., the history of the commission makes it perfectly clear that politics as much or more than aesthetics led Ribera to charge "that Domenichino was not a painter, because he did not paint (non coloriva) from nature, but was only an ordinary good draftsman."” Spear, Domenichino, 288-89; the quote in question attributed to Spagnoletto - in Italian: “... che il Domenichino non era pittore, perche non coloriva dal naturale, ma solo un semplice buon disegnatore,” - is cited from Giovanni Battista Passeri, ed. Jacob Hess, Die Künstlerbiographien von Giovanni Battista Passeri, 2 vols. (Leipzig and Vienna, 1934), I, 60. Angela Cerasuolo also rightly notes that Ribera approached the task of continuing where Domenichino left off as a challenge that goaded him to work to his highest ability; Angela Cerasuolo, “I rami della Cappella del Tesoro. Note sulla tecnica esecutiva e sulle vicende conservative,” in Andrea Zezza (ed.), Napoli e l'Emilia: Studi sulle relazioni artistiche (Naples: Luciano Editore, 2010), 105-30, quote p. 110. 166 Spear, Domenichino, cat. 109.xxii, p. I, 298; cat. 109.vii, p. I, 293-94; Ribera, Obra Completa, cat. A336, p. 466-67.

77 One might even see a humorous coda here to William Wallace's persuasive notion of Domenichino having “corrected” Caravaggio's Saint Matthew paintings in San Luigi dei Francesi with his Saint Cecilia frescoes for the Polet chapel in the same church.167

Ribera's open-mouthed boy, the most arresting figure in his Saint Januarius (figure 1.17), inverts this process of correction, overlaying the clear reference to Domenichino's adjacent altarpiece with a nagging resemblance to the boy fleeing at the right of

Caravaggio's Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (figures 1.18 and 1.19), the very picture to which Domenichino had already painted a retort in Rome. With reference to this same figure of Caravaggio's, Neer argues that Poussin's free reworking, in The Plague at

Ashdod, of the fleeing boy in the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew was a polemical gloss on what Poussin saw as Caravaggio's slavish, unthinking “copying” of nature; Poussin's quotation functions as a pointed anti-copy.168 If one accepts - and my inclination is not to do so - the attribution to Ribera of the Borghese Judgment of Solomon (figure 1.20), the

Spaniard's participation in this economy of corrective appropriation can be traced all the way back to his earliest activity in Rome, and indeed brought to bear on the same paintings. The most salient pictorial reference in the Judgment of Solomon is not to anything in Caravaggio's repertoire (although the lighting is also a clear nod to the

Contarelli Calling of Matthew), but to Domenichino's Trial of Saint Cecilia in the Polet

Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi (figure 1.21). Whether this Caravaggesque makeover of

Domenichino's riposte to Caravaggio was already Ribera's work or not, the Saint

Januarius unscathed by the Fiery Furnace is a continuation of the same conversation,

167 William Wallace, “Caravaggio is Not Great; Or, How Domenichino Made Improvements,” in Source: Notes in the History of Art 30, no. 4 (2011): 33-36. 168 Richard Neer, “Poussin and the Ethics of Imitation,” in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 51/52 (2006-2007): 297-344, esp. 305-309.

78 and should be treated with all the seriousness that Neer rightly accords to Poussin's citations of ancient and modern artistic precedents in The Plague at Ashdod.

Between the Certosa di San Martino and the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro,

Ribera conducted three estimates in total, all in collaboration with Massimo Stanzione, and the selection of these two painters to perform assessments of the best-financed and most ambitious artistic undertakings in the city is symptomatic of their joint preeminence in Neapolitan painting at the time. If this expression of confidence in Ribera extended to the greater trust placed in him with subsequent commissions, the same can be said of

Stanzione, who also followed his appraisals with commissions in both sites, for which he too produced works characterized by integration within collaborative ensemble performances.169 If one aspect of their evaluative practice can be seen in their painted responses to the work of their colleagues, the more obvious feature of Ribera's and

Stanzione's appraisals was that they were entrusted with conveying an assessment of artistic value in monetary terms. While their estimates of Paolo Finoglia's work at the

Certosa di San Martino and of Domenichino's copper altarpieces for the Cappella del

Tesoro are straightforward matters of pricing, their assessment of June 13th, 1641 of the vault frescoes for the cupola of the chapel of San Gennaro begins with a crisp deattribution, stating that the fresco in question is “not by the aforementioned Domenico” but “by others, and poorly executed” (mal posta in opra).170 While this may have been a

169 Sebastian Schütze and Thomas Willette, Massimo Stanzione. L'opera completa (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1992), cat. A24, pp. 196-97; cat. A46, p. 209; cat. A52, pp. 211-12; cat. A68, pp. 222-23. 170 “Inteso in sessione la relatione fatta dalli Signori Gioseffo Ribera et Massimo Statione che la pittura fatta nela Cupola del Thesoro del glorioso S. Gennaro non è di mano del quondam Domenico Zampei [sic] (conforme l'obligo che vi tenea) ma di altri, et mal posta in opra; et constando la Deputatione che detta pittura corrisponda ala [sic] spesa fatta in la detta Cappella, che richiede magisterio di persona eminente, havendo mira ala perpetuità, per lo che è necessario far buttare a terra la pittura soddetta et farla rifar d'altri [emphasis in original], s'è perciò concluso che si compari avanti il Delegato perchè s'habbia dechiaratione che sia lecito fare al detta diroccatione con bonificarsi ala Deputatione tutti danni spese et

79 simple effort to discredit Domenichino by presenting him as negligent and over-reliant on his assistants, the fact remains that judging other pictures' authorship and quality was something Stanzione and Ribera fully expected to do, and felt competent in carrying out.

The multifaceted expressions of their assessments in these sites offer a revision to Sparti's contrasted view of the connoisseurship practiced by artists and the purportedly richer and more variegated set of appreciations in which Mancini invited gentlemen-dilettantes to engage.

d) Evaluation as theme and activity in Ribera's art

Painting as Assay: Ribera’s Vieja Usurera

Ribera's own literal practice of connoisseurship will be discussed further in chapter two, and precise examples of how he shaped and responded to his viewers' interest in connoisseurial practice will be explored at length in chapters three and four.

The central case studies for the latter two chapters, Ribera's Five Senses painted in Rome circa 1615, and his Isaac Blessing Jacob of 1637, are both key instances of Ribera's repeated treatment of the theme of the bodily senses. Yet as I shall argue throughout this dissertation, the five senses are only one among several subjects and themes through which Ribera pursued a more fundamental interest in evaluation, not only as a kind of

interessi che per tal causa patisce.” (“Being understood in this session the report made by Messrs. Joseph Ribera and Massimo Stanzione, that the painting done in the Cupola of the Treasury of the glorious St. Januarius is not by the hand of the aforementioned Domenico Zampei [sic] (as per his obligations) but by others, and poorly carried out; and the Deputation further noting that said painting should correspond to the expenditure made in said Chapel, which requires the mastery of an eminent person, having regard to perpetuity, whence it is necessary to have the aforementioned picture cast to the ground and have it redone by others [emphasis in original], it is therefore concluded that [they] should appear before the delegates so that it be declared legitimate to make for the aforementioned an exception and to exempt the deputation from all damages expenses and interest that it may suffer thereby.”) Franco Strazzullo, La Real Cappella del Tesoro di S. Gennaro (Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana), no. 266, p. 85.

80 social exercise, but as an articulation of how pictures could generate truth and knowledge, or how they could pretend, fail, or threaten to do so. On the one hand, this interest often takes the literal form of a theme or subject, as many of the figures in

Ribera's paintings are engaged in performing a kind of evaluation or appraisal (a striking instance being Isaac in Isaac Blessing Jacob, as we shall see in chapter four). On the other hand, Ribera also prompts and instantiates evaluation of his pictures, painting them in such a way that they disclose their themes as though in response to being closely inspected and judged by an ideal viewer, whose prudence in estimating works of art is posited as the key to understanding the value of what is depicted.

Perhaps the most self-evident example of evaluation as theme and activity in

Ribera's work is the so-called Vieja Usurera of 1638 (figure 1.22).171 Discernible as a woman more by the headscarf than by her features, the elderly figure is engaged in a literal act of estimation, as she holds aloft a pair of balances and considers the seemingly empty yet uneven brass trays with a sneer that shows off the furrows of bitter frown wrinkles that pinch her eyes and mouth. There is nothing else in the painting, just the figure and the balance, both of which seem suspended from her left arm, as it spans and sustains the composition, held aloft with the elbow toward the picture plane yet seemingly congruent with it. This visual trick of the arm, which flickers between an up- and-down appearance, as though it were parallel to the picture plane, and the suggestion of a massive and foreshortened arm jutting outward at a slanting angle, extends to the balance, whose arm follows the angle of the woman's. Depending on how one construes this angle within this “duck-rabbit” effect of parallel versus angled outward, the balance

171 Madrid 1992, cat. 92, pp. 332-33.

81 can be read as virtually even or as heavily tilted, with the leftmost arm further back in space or else parallel to and much lighter than its counterpart.172 In other words, the

“weighing” that the viewer conducts on the same balance directly inflects the results of the fictive weighing carried out by the old woman.

Scrupulous readers at this point might legitimately object that such an ambiguity in handling a foreshortened limb is more likely to be involuntary than a key thematic element. This might be the case, were it not for the consistency with which Ribera links the viewer's approach to the painting with the person and action depicted. Absent any single other component to the picture besides the figure, the balance, and Ribera's signature, the only way to determine just what sort of scene or person one is looking at is by careful scrutiny of the figure's face. In labelling the picture as that of an usurious old woman, the Prado's curators have effectively followed the prompts set out in the picture and rehearsed an early modern physiognomic assessment of the woman, assigning to her the unlovely profession of money-lending based as much on her hard eyes and tight, disdainful mouth as on her use of a pair of scales. As in the more famous example of Jan

Vermeer's Woman with a Balance of around 1664 (figure 1.23), the act of weighing is connected with moral judgment. In Vermeer's painting, this judgment even takes on an eschatological dimension, as the woman's poised contemplation of the balance takes place before a painting in which the Last Judgment is clearly discernible, pairing and

172 On the “duck-rabbit,” a drawing that flickers between appearing to be of one animal or the other, see Neer, “Connoisseurship,” 16-17, and Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 4-6.

82 contrasting the weighing with earthly stuff and standards with the weighing of souls at the end of time.173

As in most pictorial treatments of usury and usurers, the moral pointe of Ribera's image hinges on just such a contrast between temporal and heavenly systems of value, finding in the worldly wealth of the miser and the moneylender the cause of their poverty of character and spirit. In Ribera’s painting, the weighing of the woman's character by scrutinizing her face takes place simultaneously with the woman's preoccupation with weighing, and the contrast between the worldly values in which she is so unsmilingly absorbed and the immaterial ones that reveal her bitten and pinched expression are themselves balanced against one another like two items on a scale. Rounding out this metapictorial act of weighing, the Vieja Usurera is in fact one of a pair of pendant half- figures, the other of which has been lost but is known to have represented a male figure.

The old woman's action of weighing in scales with two trays becomes a variant on, and a comparison with, the ideal viewer's consideration of the two paintings. While we have no way of knowing what the Vieja Usurera's male counterpart was like, the very fact that the paintings are known to have been pendants, each with a figure of a different gender, bears out the comparative motif. The weighing of gold in particular, and the use of a bilancia such as the woman holds, bore a designation closely related to taste as well as to moral judgment: assaggiare, or in Spanish, ensayar.174 The Italian “saggio” famously applied

173 Arthur Wheelock, Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995), cat. 693, pp. 371-77. 174 For instance, Sebastiano de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua Castellana renders “ensayar” as follows: “vale hazer prueva, y dixose del verbo Toscano, assaggiare per acuratamente sentire, onde si dize assaggiare el vino. Esto dize Fra[n]cisco Alumno de Ferrara, en su diccionario llamado Fabrica d[e]l mu[n]do. En España usamos deste termino, en el exame[n] que hazemos del oro, y plata, y los demas metales: y es termino muy usado: y ay oficio en las casas de la moneda de ensayador.” (“is equal to proving, and comes from the Tuscan verb, assaggiare, for accurately sensing, whence one is said to try [assaggiare] wine. This is stated by Francisco Alumno of Ferrara, in his dictionary entitled Fabrica del

83 the act of weighing with fine scales to the application of superior judgment and understanding in Galileo’s Assayer of 1623, or to be more precise, “The Assayer, in which are pondered with exquisite and right scales (bilancia esquisita e giusta) the things contained in the Astronomical and Philosophical Scale (“libra”).”175 I do not mean to suggest that we try to look at the Vieja Usurera as any sort of Galilean Saggiatore, but the richly figurative and widely-known application of saggio is something of which

Ribera and his viewers would have been well aware.176

Discipleship as estimate: Ribera’s 1631 Saint Andrew

The pairing of visual assessment with moral, intellectual, and spiritual evaluation is a device that Ribera employs even in pictures whose subjects appear completely separate from the sorts of evaluative practice just described. Whereas the Vieja Usurera depicts an act of evaluation while also inviting one, the same themes and strategies undergird several of Ribera's religious images in a more subtle way. As a final example, let us return to the 1631 Saint Andrew mentioned earlier in connection with Kristeller's account of Ribera's brushwork (figure 1.6).177 As in the Vieja Usurera, Ribera's lush, exquisite handling of the paint is made all the more prominent by the overall sparseness

Mundo. In Spain, we use this term in the examination that we conduct of gold, silver, and other metals; and it is a much-used term, and there is an office of assayer [ensayador] in the mints [casas de la moneda].”) Sebastiano de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lingua Castellana o Española. Compuesto por el licenciado Don Sebastian de Cobarruvias Orozco, Capellan de Su Magestad; Mastrescuela y Canonigo de la Santa Yglesia de Cuenca y Consultor del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1611), 353v. 175 Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore Nel quale con bilancia esquisita e giusta si ponderano le cose contenute nella libra astronomica e filosofica di Lotario Sarsi Sigensano, Scritto in forma di lettera all’Ill.mo et Rever.mo Mons.re D. Virginio Cesarini Acc.o Linceo M.o di Camera di N. S. Dal Sig.r Galileo Galilei Acc.o Linceo Nobile Fiorentino Filosofo e Matematico Primario del Ser.mo Gran Duca di Toscana (Rome: Giacomo Mascardi, 1623). 176 Further discussion of Ribera’s ties to the intellectual culture surrounding the Accademia dei Lincei is in chapter 3, passim. 177 Madrid 1992, cat. 41, pp. 246-47.

84 of the image. The palette is as ascetic and as finely articulated as the saint himself, its minute gradations of rose flesh and gray-white hair running in a tight but finely-tuned gamut from lead white to the inky sepia of the dark space around the figure. Naked to the waist, Andrew's wrinkled and softly sagging skin is caught around the navel into folds that are repeated and paraphrased in those of his white loincloth. Over this, and draped over his proper left arm, Andrew wears a robe that makes the viewer question whether it is really black in color, or merely concealing its local color in the gloom, as though the darkness of the picture's fictional space required a delay for the viewer's eyes to adjust.

Saint Andrew stands not quite parallel to the picture plane, and perpendicular to the X- shaped cross of his martyrdom, which he holds up with his left hand, clasping it towards himself with his arm tucked around it. While his body leans towards the cross, his head is turned in the opposite direction, and one can follow his abstracted gaze along his right arm to a fish that rests on a stone surface at the painting's lower left corner, cutting across the picture plane to jut into the depicted space. The action in the scene, such as it is, can be summed up as “Andrew looks at a fish and holds a cross.” The ways in which these simple non-events are staged, however, prompt a comparison with the ideal viewer's activities of contemplation and figurative embrace, as I shall try to demonstrate.

The angles of Andrew's body conspire with the direction of his gaze to pull the picture's focus onto the fish in the extreme foreground. Having once joined the saint in contemplating this fish, it becomes almost impossible to stop, as Ribera pins the attention to a nagging and uncanny similarity between the head of the creature and the saint's hand next to it (figure 1.24). Supremely deliberate from an artistic standpoint, the weird and slightly monstrous mimicry of the gaping mouth and its spiky teeth by the dark opening,

85 ringed with sharp wrinkles, between Andrew's thumb and forefinger, reads as a narrative coincidence, a serendipitous resemblance that taunts the mind with an expectation that it should mean something. There is a quality of rudderless focus to the attention that the hand and fish elicit, which finds counterparts in the Saint's faraway gaze and in his precise yet aimless pinching of the hook that links the hand and the fish physically. The curve of the fish's jaw is repeated verbatim in the silhouette of Andrew's thumb. Held together pictorially within the image as well as fictionally within the scene depicted, the similar shapes and proportions of hand and fish are bound to one another by subtle yet deliberate actions on the part of the Saint and the painter alike. In emulating Andrew's contemplation of the fish, one cannot separate the purely visual and esthetic stocktaking of a fish that looks just like the figure's hand from the deeper imaginative work that

Andrew is carrying out.

The superficially pointless congruence of appearance between the hand and the fish tethers the viewer's focus to the narrative force of the fish, which stands at once for the worldly pursuits that Andrew renounced at Christ's invitation, and for the apostolic calling itself, through which Andrew and his brother Simon were made “fishers of men,” piscatores hominum (Matthew 4:19, Mark 1:17).178 As Andrew grasps the cross of his martyrdom, he turns his body towards it and his gaze back to the fish that represents the decision and calling whose final outcome is a violent death. The ideal beholder's simple

178 “Ambulans autem Iesus iuxta mare Galilae, vidit duos fratres, SImonem, qui vocatur Petrus, & Andream fratrem eius, mittentes rete in mare (erant enim piscatores) & ait illis: Venite post me, & faciam vos fieri piscatores hominum.” (Matt. 4:18-19); “Et preteritens secus Mare Galilaeae, vidit Simonem, & Andream fratrem eius, mittentes retia in mare, (erant enim piscatores) & dixit eis Iesus: Venite post me, & faciam vos fieri piscatores hominum.” (Mk. 1:16-17) Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis Sixti Quinti Pont. Max. Iussu recognita, atque edita (Venice: Evangelista Deuchino & Giovanni Battista Pulciani, 1608), 489, 511. Giovanni Diodati’s 1608 Italian vernacular Bible renders the phrase as “pescatori d’huomini” in both verses.

86 emulation of Andrew's gaze at the fish evokes in shorthand the costlier emulation that was the ostensible purpose of such images of the Saints: looking at the martyrs was an exhortation to martyrdom; pictures of the saints existed to promote saintliness. To cite only the most famous source to this effect, the Bolognese Archbishop Gabriele Paleotti's treatise on the purpose of sacred images expanded on the premise of the Council of

Trent's ruling, to the effect that depictions of the saints were edifying to the faithful as they moved the emotions, prompting the pursuit of holiness and the emulation of the virtues of action and character depicted.179 Thus, to an audience attuned to looking to depictions of the Saints for emotional prompts and virtuous actions and attitudes intended for imitation, Ribera presents a figure whose “action” one can imitate quite literally, and which leads, at least figuratively, to a more profound emulation, as Andrew's real action is to contemplate and embrace his martyrdom.180 From joining Andrew in gazing at the fish, one progresses to joining Andrew in thinking of all that the fish represents, and linking the fish with the cross. While less plainly than in the Vieja Usurera, evaluation is nonetheless the central theme of Ribera's 1631 Saint Andrew, which invokes the widely- used language of reckoning and cost-assessment with which the New Testament discusses sacrificial discipleship: as, for instance, Paul writes in Romans 8:18, “For I reckon (existimo) that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the

179 Gabriele Paleotti, trans. William McCuaig, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 48, 110-11, 118-20. 180 As Pérez-Sánchez points out: “La expresión de profunda melancolía meditativa, como presintiendo la realidad inmediata de su martirio, contrasta con la expresión de apasionado fervor con que el proprio Ribera lo ha interpretado en otras ocasiones ...” (“The expression of profound, meditative melancholy, as though experiencing a premonition of the immediate reality of his martyrdom, contrasts with the expression of passionate fervor with which Ribera himself had interpreted [the Saint] on other occasions.”). Madrid 1992, 246.

87 glory to come, that shall be revealed in us,”181 and James 1:2 exhorts the faithful to

“count it all joy (gaudium existimate)” when they encounter trials and temptations. The

Latin verb used in the Vulgate for both verses, existimare, corresponds to the Italian term for estimates, stima/stimare; the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca renders it as

“giudicare, pensare, immaginare,” and includes the technical sense of an appraisal resulting in a determination of both price (concretely) and value (more broadly).182 The reckoning that the painting evokes is semantically related to the reckoning of paintings.183

In the Saint Andrew, then, a painting that is not, on the face of it, “about” anything beyond showing an individual saint offers an exercise of reckoning, assessment. The assessment of the picture's visual properties, in turn, becomes the motor for an assessment of deeper values, enabling the viewer to join the saint in weighing the world's goals against the apostolic calling, or estimating the sufferings of martyrdom against eternal glory. What Ribera formulates in the Saint Andrew and the Vieja Usurera - and indeed, in paintings across his career, several of which will be discussed in the chapters that follow - is an artistic strategy that presses into visual terms the ways in which viewers needed to judge, both in the gallery and in their lives more generally, of true and false, fair and foul. The visual and conversational evaluations into which Ribera's paintings invite their beholders always seem to have more serious discussions attached to them, latent in the estimations of style and subject. As Neer brilliantly adduces to

Poussin's approach, Ribera “constitutes looking at pictures as an ethical concern in its

181 “Existimo enim quod non sunt condignae passiones huius temporis ad futuram gloriam, quae revelabitur in nobis.” (Rm. 8:18); “Omne gaudium existimate fratres, mei cum in tentationes varias incideritis ...” (Jm. 1:2) Biblia Sacra Vulgatae, 592, 633. 182 Accademia della Crusca, Vocabolario, 849. 183 My thanks to Stephen Campbell for pointing out this possibility.

88 own right. Looking at pictures models looking at the world; and the pictures themselves narrate the pitfalls and rewards of such beholding.”184

How people looked at pictures is the most plausible thing in the world for an artist to care about, and Ribera’s inevitable professional investment in this question prompted the artist to advance innovative and highly intelligent proposals as to what pictures might claim to do and be. The preoccupation is not strictly a metapictorial one: I do not claim that Ribera’s art is really all about art. Rather, there is a theme at work in Ribera’s pictures that is both broader and narrower, which is that of considering and evaluating what one experiences. That what Ribera’s viewers are experiencing is always a two- dimensional image, is not an incidental material condition of his pictures, but a factor that

Ribera exploits creatively to bring the entire categories of experience and the sensory parameters of his works into new avenues of discussion. The specific conditions of such discussions, and Ribera's participation therein, are the subject of chapter two.

184 Neer, “Poussin,” 337-38. My thanks to Felipe Pereda for remarking on the relevance of this particular passage to the present project.

89 Chapter 2: “That Spaniard of excellent taste:” Ribera as connoisseur

a) Ribera’s practice of connoisseurship

b) Connoisseurship as competition: Mancini’s dishonorable Ribera

c) Authority and polemic in Ribera’s Studies of Features

For with painting as in other matters, it is one thing to make it and another to use it, as with the bit with respect to the horse, who judges it very well without making it. Thus Caro taught the composition of the history, decorum, and costumes for the paintings of Caprarola to Taddeo Zuccaro, as one sees in the letter written to him on this subject; Aretino [instructed] Titian for the painting of Fame that was to be made for his majesty Charles V, and Bembo [instructed] Raphael for the Vatican. One might add that color, perspective, the expression of affect, and other similar things represented and expressed by the painter are objects of common knowledge, which are recognized and judged without the training of painting and its mode of operating; all that is needed is good judgment trained by having seen many paintings and in and of itself both with the judgment of the perspicacious (giuditio di più intendenti), and through similitude, [one] may judge the equality or inequality of the other things.1

Giulio Mancini

Disciple - Master, can an intelligent spirit (buen ingenio), without being a painter, perfectly understand and judge painting?

Master - Not for certain, nor yet sufficiently. In the past few days, a person spoke of painting with such erudition and energy, with such propriety of precepts and fundamentals, both of the theoretical and of the practical, that I was filled with admiration, and there was born in me the notion that he was a great painter, according to the essential principles on which he held forth, and cited authorities and authors, not only painters but philosophers and poets, distinguishing the substances of drawing from those of materials and of colors, giving to each thing its place and estimation, so that he left nothing to amend or dispute to those who listened. He then offered to enter the study of a

1 “Perchè della pittura avviene come l’altre cose che altro è il farle altro è l’usarle, come del freno rispetto al cavallo, questo lo giudica benissimo senza farlo. Onde il Caro insegnò la composition dell’historia, decoro e costume per le pitture di Caprarola a Taddeo Zuccharo, come si vede nella littera [sic] scrittagli in simil proposito, l’Aretino a Titiano per la pittura della Fama da farsi per la Maestà di Carlo V, et il Bembo a Raffaello per il Vaticano. S’aggiunge che il colore, la prospettiva, l’espression dell’affetto, et altre cose simili rappresentate et espresse dal pittore, son oggetti communi che si riconoscono e giudicano senza l’abito della pittura et suo modo d’operare, e basta solo un buon giuditio ammaestrato con aver visto più pitture e da per sé e col giuditio di più intendenti, e con la similitudine poi, equalità o inequalità giudicar dell’altre.” Giulio Mancini, ed. Adriana Marucchi, Considerazioni sulla Pittura, 2 vols. (Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 1956), I, 6-7.

90 collector (un camarín de un curioso), where there were paintings, prints, drawings, and statues: a proper occasion, and a touchstone for proving the worth of all that his rhetoric had pointed out; and those of us who attended to his approval or censure, within the first few words that he spoke, were made to see that it was all a sham (oropel), and he was wide of the mark in what he said; thus with great self-satisfaction and presumption he praised and condemned, with the greatest smugness that I have seen in my life. Cicero in the second book of Academic questions says: The painters see many things that we, though we should observe them more attentively, do not.2

Vicente Carducho

GOLD, spun gold, gold quill. Oropel, a very thin leaf of brass. Gold leaf; those who thin out the gold with a hammer, commonly called batihojas. They place between two sheets a small grain of gold, and this is extended to the quantity of a hand’s breadth. And this is the gold that is used by gilders and painters. Proverb: all that glitters is not gold. Suited to the exterior appearances of hypocrites. To promise mountains of gold is to offer much and give nothing.3

Sebastiano de Covarrubias Horozco

Who had the proper right to evaluate paintings, and what was at stake in doing so?

As we have seen in chapter one, estimates and attributions (activities that we might today

2 “Dicip. - Maestro, puede un buen ingenio sin ser Pintor entender y juzgar la Pintura perfectamente? Maest. - No por cierto, ni aun suficientemente. Habló los dias pasados una persona de la Pintura con tanta erudicion y energia, con tanta propiedad de preceptos y fundamentos, asi de lo teorico, como de lo practico, que me admiró, y hizo en mi un concepto, de que era grande Pintor, segun fundamentalmente lo discurria, y alegava autoridades, y Autores, asi de Pintores como de Filosofos y Poetas, distinguiendo lo sustancial del dibujo, de lo material, del colorido, dando a cada cosa su lugar y estimacion, que no dexó nada que emendar, ni arguir a los que oiamos. Ofreciose luego entrar en un camarin de un curioso, donde avia pinturas, estampas, dibujos y estatuas: ocasion propia, y piedra de toque en que diese los quilates que su Retorica avia señalado; y los que estavamos atentos a su aprovacion ó censura, a pocas palabras que dixo, echamos de ver, que todo era oropel, y que no acertó en cosa de quanto dixo; si bien muy satisfecho y presumido alabava, y condenava con la mayor satisfacion que vi en mi vida. Ciceron en el 2 lib. de las questiones Academicas dize: Muchas cosas ven los Pintores, que nosotros aunque mas atentos las miramos, no las vemos.” Vicente Carducho, ed. Francisco Calvo Serraller, Diálogos de la Pintura. Su defensa, origen, esencia, definición, modos y diferencias (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1979 [1633]), 318-19. 3 “ORO hilado, oro de cañutillo. Oropel, una hojuela mui delgada de Laton. Panecillos de oro, los que adelgazan el oro golpeando, que llaman comunemente batihojas. Ponen entre hoja y hoja un granito de oro, y este se viene a estender en tanta cantidad como la palma de la mano. Y este es el oro que gastan los doradores y los pintores. Proverbio, No es oro todo lo que reluze. Acomodado a las apariencias esteriores de los hipocritas. Prometer montes de oro, es ofrecer mucho y dar nada.” Sebastiano de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lingua Castellana o Española. Compuesto por el licenciado Don Sebastian de Cobarruvias Orozco, Capellan de Su Magestad; Mastrescuela y Canonigo de la Santa Yglesia de Cuenca y Consultor del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1611), 571v.

91 refer to as “connoisseurship”) were only two specific categories of evaluation among many others that formed the seicento’s practices of connoisseurship. Alongside estimates and attributions, pictures could and did undergo a much more profound and wide-ranging set of assessments, which were not primarily about their financial value (even if that never completely ceased to matter). When Vicente Carducho asserts the exclusive prerogative of painters to “perfectly judge and understand painting,” he sidesteps the economic aspect of the question, although the social and financial status of art and artists had kept him inveigled in a legal battle over the value of art for the preceding decade.4

Rather, Carducho describes a prerogative of evaluation that is based in understanding,

“distinguishing the substances of drawing from those of materials and of colors, giving to each thing its place and estimation,” and put to the test in conversation, in on-the-spot evaluations of art. While some level of understanding may be faked with enough book- learning, only an artist can show the deeper knowledge that is demonstrated in connoisseurship: an appraisal that takes shape in speaking about and in front of works of art, and results more in social ascendancy than in financial control over an object’s price.

Carducho was anything but indifferent to the economic disenfranchisement of artists in

Spain; yet he addresses the question of whether a non-painter might judge of paintings by focusing on the problem of social control of art via connoisseurship in conversation.

4 Julián Gállego, El Pintor, de Artesano a Artista (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1976), 119-48; Francisco Calvo Serraller, “Vida, Obra, Personalidad, y Fortuna Histórica de Vicente Carducho,” in Vicente Carducho, ed. Francisco Calvo Serraller, Diálogos de la Pintura: Su Defensa, Origen, Esencia, Definición, Modos y Diferencias (Madrid: Ediciones Turner), xiii-xliv, esp. xvi; José Manuel Cruz Valdovinos, “El Fuero y el Huevo. La Liberalidad de la Pintura: Textos y Pleitos,” in José Riello (ed.), Sacar de la Sombra Lumbre: La Teoría de la Pintura en el Siglo de Oro (1560-1724) (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2012), 173-202, esp. 191-96. Many thanks to Felipe Pereda for directing me to the latter source in particular.

92 The first thing that Carducho’s text tells us about this spoken culture of connoisseurship is that it is the site and object of competition for authority between painters and men of “buen ingenio.” Connoisseurship, in the broad sense in which I have been applying the term to the seventeenth century, took place primarily in the arena of conversation, and was a social performance of taste rather than a kind of clinical intervention to determine price or authorship. In Carducho’s example of the encounter between painter and gentleman dilettante, the point at issue is not whether the works of art will be correctly identified (as to authorship, period, etc.) or what they will cost, but whether the painter or the non-painter will better understand and appreciate them. The estimation in question does not take the form of an affidavit or written document, but of a conversation in a collector’s cabinet, in the “camarín de un curioso.”

This historical practice of speaking about works of art, which belongs to oral culture and is therefore elusive to historians, was of extraordinary relevance to artists, including Ribera. Early sources on Ribera’s activity, either positively or negatively, formulate their appraisals of him as a painter in conjunction with assessments of him as a connoisseur, tying the quality of his pictures to his assessments of other artists and to his bearing as a conversationalist. Chapter three, which studies the early series that Ribera produced on the subject of the Five Senses, will look in detail at how Ribera anticipated, activated, and directed such conversation, making it a salient theme of his pictures. What the present chapter will look at is how he behaved in the kind of gathering that Carducho describes, going into a room full of works of art and participating intelligently in the conversation that they generate. We will look in turn at positive and negative testimonies as to Ribera’s bearing in such a social setting, from around 1618-22. In a final section,

93 this chapter will also argue that his works from the same period, like the two opposing points of view just quoted from Carducho and Mancini, espoused a distinct and even polemical position on the question of whether artists or non-artists made the best connoisseurs.

In Carducho’s anecdote, the conversation in front of the works of art is the proving ground for a prior claim to knowledge, as the unnamed gentleman has already shown impressive command of the principles of art in theory. Confronted with the objects in a collection, his words fail the litmus test of a true knowledge based on practice and taste, and what had earlier made him seem knowledgeable now revealed him to be merely smug and presumptuous (“satisfecho y presumido”). When Carducho and his companions see that this man’s erudition was all “oropel,” fool’s gold, they are subjecting the would- be connoisseur to a kind of scrutiny normally applied to objects. The man is a fake, a mere hammered plate of brass trying to pass for gold, a shiny exterior devoid of real value. Carducho has successfully done to the hypocrite what the hypocrite should have done to the works of art: discerned the dross from the gold, known and understood the real value and nature of what was before him. The anecdote raises and inverts the question of who is the connoisseur and who or what is the fake. For Carducho, the question of who has the prerogative to judge in matters of art gives rise to a reversal of connoisseurship: the well-spoken gentleman’s fine talk is revealed to be a mere veneer of understanding, and it is the deeper knowledge of the artist that enables this recognition.

The visit to the camarín de un curioso becomes the occasion for proving the true quality, not of the objects under discussion, but of the people discussing them.

94 Carducho’s tale, in which the well-spoken gentleman maintains the veneer of knowledge until he comes up against real works of art and exposes his ignorance, stands in stark contrast to Giulio Mancini’s approach to connoisseurship, which is premised on

“the right of the non-painter to judge a work of painting” (“Diritto di chi non è pittore a giudicare un’opera di pittura”).5 While Carducho is advocating for painters, who had been disenfranchised from authority over their own works and were perpetually vulnerable to the stinginess and philistinism of patrons and critics, Mancini is attempting to carve out an intellectual basis on which to build a practice of connoisseurship, which as a non-painter he goes out of his way to legitimate by segregating the judgment of paintings from expertise in producing them. These two opposed stances (Carducho’s and

Mancini’s) illustrate the wide spectrum of opinions that were held between Madrid and

Rome on the subject of what it meant to evaluate works of art, a subject that as we saw in the last chapter, was of increasing interest to makers and consumers of art alike.6 Beyond the contrast in their conclusions, Carducho and Mancini both associate the ability to judge paintings with qualities of insight and authority: the common premise is that some degree of respect will attach to those who are able to pronounce aright on artistic quality.

The Florentine-born artist Vicente Carducho had moved to Spain at a young age with his brother Bartolomé, who was summoned to work at San Lorenzo de El Escorial as he belonged to Federico Zuccaro’s workshop. Vicente Carducho was perhaps the most visible advocate for the advancement of the status of art and artists in Spain following a

5 See the sub-headings for the introduction, Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 5. 6 The specific contest for primacy between painters and connoisseurs for the prerogative to judge paintings is addressed in Anna Tummers, “The Painter versus the Connoisseur? The Best Judge of Pictures in Seventeenth-Century Theory and Practice,” in Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 127-47.

95 central Italian academic model; his interventions on the subject of connoisseurs and artistic expertise, including the passage quoted at the start of this chapter, have high cultural stakes attached to them, and emerge from an acute need for painters to defend the activity of speaking about paintings as their own disciplinary turf.7 The contrast with

Mancini is revealing in its asymmetry: the Sienese physician’s “day job,” as it were, is not at all at stake in his writings about art the way Carducho’s is, and the competing visions that the two figures present for what it means to make and discuss art differ in urgency and ambition as much as in breadth of audience. Carducho was engaged in constructing a viable edifice of theory on which the social and intellectual aspirations of art and artists in Spain could be built; Mancini was indulging in an intellectual interest in a way that made it enhance his social and professional portfolio. That the question of what connoisseurship was and who was properly suited to do it could engage both such thinkers is a symptom of its relevance across Spanish and Italian visual and courtly culture.

This chapter will explore how Ribera addressed the questions of who had such authority and of what it consisted. First, we will consider the evidence of Ribera’s reputation as a connoisseur, which was conveyed in terms of his prowess as an interlocutor: where one might expect the emphasis to fall on Ribera’s skill as a producer of art, the focus instead is on what an excellent person he was to look at and talk about paintings with. In fact, these two categories were both described together under the

7 The passage is cited as part of an insightful discussion of these issues, which also pertain to the Sevillian artist and theorist Francisco Pacheco (among others), in Juan Luís González García, “”Vencen al arte del decir?” Estilo, Decoro, y Juicio Crítico de los Pintores-Predicadores de los Siglos XVI y XVII,” in in José Riello (ed.), Sacar de la Sombra Lumbre: La Teoría de la Pintura en el Siglo de Oro (1560-1724) (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2012), 87-104, esp. 98-104, quote p. 102; see also Zygmunt Wázbiński, “Los Diálogos de la Pintura de Vicente Carducho: El Manifiesto del Academicismo Español y su Origen,” in Archivo Español de Arte 63, no. 3 (1990): 436-47.

96 heading of taste. Ribera’s connoisseurial skill was described in his own lifetime as good taste, gusto, a term that could be used to refer to the qualities of a work of art’s making or to a trait of its beholders. Having seen the positive characterizations of Ribera as a connoisseur, a second section of this chapter will explore the flip side to the tasteful

Ribera, the radically dishonorable image of the painter that emerges from the writings of

Giulio Mancini, particularly in his biography of Ribera (the first ever written). Within

Mancini’s Considerations on Painting, Ribera embodies a notion of artistic practice (and especially inspiration) as fundamentally incompatible with connoisseurship and the mediocre ingegno or balance of mind that is Mancini’s ideal. The way Mancini describes

Ribera is part of a larger move to displace the authority and social ascendancy attached to judging paintings away from artists, and to redirect it to gentlemen dilettantes.

If Mancini’s Considerations seem to disenfranchise Ribera from any prerogative to judge art, Ribera himself produced works around the same period that vigorously assert such a prerogative by insisting on the artist’s ability to teach drawing. In a third section, this chapter will attend to the closest thing we have to a systematic theory of taste and exemplarity expressed by Ribera himself, his etched studies of features from 1622.

Rather than considering these etchings as the beginnings of an unfinished drawing manual or cartilla de dibujo, I shall look at them (along with the Large Grotesque Head of the same dimensions) as a complete set of collectible prints that invoke the authority to teach rather than actually teaching. The four prints together exemplify Ribera’s ability to manipulate styles and approaches to the imitation of nature at will. The etchings direct their address, not to the studio, but to the collector’s cabinet, to the site of connoisseurship, as though Ribera intended the prints to be the subject of conversation

97 rather than utilitarian instructional tools. Contriving to produce a kind of “perfect deformity,” Ribera polemically inverts expectations of ideal beauty derived from canonical cinquecento models. Thus, while early sources record Ribera’s literal participation in a spoken culture of connoisseurship, his prints, at an early and transitional stage in his career, spell out his authority to judge by demonstrating his ability to produce models for drawing, which invoke and invert current theoretical models of disegno.

a) Ribera’s practice of connoisseurship

Testimonials for Ribera’s connoisseurship: Ludovico Carracci, Cosimo del Sera, and Luigi Scaramuccia

Some of the earliest recorded reactions to Ribera refer not only to his skill as a painter, but to his competence in discussing and appreciating paintings. On December

11th, 1618, Ludovico Carracci wrote to Ferrante Carlo of a Spaniard “of excellent taste” who had painted a Saint Martin Dividing his Cloak in Parma (appendix 1); the letter begins,

It gave me tremendous pleasure (grandissimo gusto) to gather from your letter, full as it was of news of your paintings, that there reigns about your collection furious activity both day and night (vi è la furia di giorno e di notte), and [I was also delighted] to hear the opinions of those painters who have most excellent taste (un gusto eccellentissimo), particularly those of that Spaniard who follows in the school of Caravaggio. If he is the same one who painted a St. Martin in Parma, who was with signor Mario Farnese, one will have to look sharp, lest poor Lodovico Carracci become a laughingstock; one will have to tug at the bootstraps and stay upright. I know well that they’re not dealing with a person who’s asleep.8

8 “Mi è stato di grandissimo gusto sentire dalla sua lettera, copiosa d'avvisi intorno alli quadri di V. S., che vi è la furia di giorno e di notte, e sentire li pareri di quelli pittori che hanno un gusto eccellentissimo, particolarmente quel pittore Spagnuolo che tiene dietro alla scuola di Caravaggio. Se è quello che dipinse un S. Martino in Parma, che stava col signor Mario Farnese, bisogna star lesto che non diano la colonia al povero Lodovico Caracci: bisogna tenersi in piedi con le stringhe. Io so bene che non trattano con persona addormentata.” Giovanni Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi (eds.), Raccolta di Lettere sulla Pittura, Scultura ed Architettura Scritte da’ Più Celebri Personaggi dei Secoli XV, XVI e XVII, vol. I (Milan: Giovanni Silvestri, 1822), letter XCVII, pp. 289-91; Giovanna Perini (ed.), Gli Scritti dei Carracci. Ludovico, Annibale, Agostino, Antonio, Giovanni Antonio (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1990), letter no. 33, p.

While the Spaniard in question is never named, there is no doubt that Ludovico was referring to Jusepe de Ribera, then aged 27, who after his baptism in Játiva, Spain, was first documented in Italy in 1611 as the author of the aforementioned Saint Martin for the church of San Prospero in Parma.9 Ludovico praises the painting, and alludes, perhaps facetiously, to the competition presented by the younger artist: “bisogna star lesto che non diano la colonia al povero Ludovico Caracci,” which might be rendered roughly as

“one will have to look sharp to make sure they don’t make a joke of the poor Ludovico

Carracci.”10 While Ribera presented a sufficient threat to local painters in Parma for them to intimidate the young painter into leaving town forthwith, it is difficult to imagine that an artist with Ludovico’s reputation would have any serious cause for concern over one more young foreign painter working in Caravaggio’s manner. His mock fear can be taken instead as a good-humored tribute to Ribera’s precociously impressive reputation.

Ribera in Ludovico's letter takes on the social capacities of the gentleman dilettante, the life of the party in Ferrante Carlo’s picture gallery. The painter’s eccellentissimo gusto manifests itself in a way usually associated with the owners rather than the makers of art. We will return to the important issue of taste presently, but the first point to note is that Ludovico and Ferrante Carlo within this exchange both express

143. The letter has long since been incorporated into the Ribera literature, and has rightly been considered an important source of information on Ribera's activity and contacts in Parma; see especially Gabriele Finaldi, “Se è quello che dipinse un S. Martino in Parma... Más sobre la actividad del Joven Ribera en Parma,” in José Milicua and Javier Portús (eds.), El Joven Ribera (Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2011), 17-29. 9 That the painter who executed the Saint Martin in question was in fact Ribera is confirmed by a document published by Michele Cordaro, “Sull'attivita del Ribera giovane a Parma,” in Storia dell' Arte 39-40 (1980), 325-6; see also Perini, Scritti dei Carracci, note 198 pp. 97-98. 10 Bottari and Ticozzi suggest that the obscure phrase “dare la colonia” be read as a euphemistic way of saying “dare la burla;” Bottari and Ticozzi, Raccolta, I, 289.

99 appreciation for Ribera not in terms of how well he makes paintings, but how well he speaks about them.

Ludovico's letter begins with a response to Ferrante’s enthusiasm for “avvisi” about his own pictures. The two men had been friends and correspondents for over a decade, and Carlo had returned to Rome under Scipione Borghese's protection in

September 1618, and became not only familiar with, but eventually responsible for one of the most important collections of art in the city.11 Ferrante Carlo was also a private secretary to Cardinal Paolo Sfondrato, and was therefore probably acquainted with

Sfondrato's friend Benedetto Giustiniani, who like Ferrante Carlo had strong ties to

Bologna, having been papal legate there from 1606 to 1611, and who was also

(incidentally) one of Ribera’s most prominent early collectors in Rome.12

Carlo's collection of pictures appears to be a site of intense activity: “vi è la furia di giorno e di notte.” This activity, for which Ludovico shares a palpable enthusiasm with his correspondent, consists of spoken as well as visual participation with art and artists,

“hearing the views of those painters who have excellent taste” (sentire li pareri di quelli pittori che hanno un gusto eccellentissimo), especially ‘that Spaniard’ who follows in the school of Caravaggio.13 Ludovico’s letter operates a twofold reversal: the painters are the men of taste with whom it is the patron’s greatest pleasure to discuss his collection, and this discussion, rather than the making of the pictures, is the site of the creative furia that

11 On Ludovico's friendship with Ferrante Carlo, see Perini, Scritti dei Carracci, 86-87; Ferrante Carlo’s work for and with Cardinal Scipione Borghese is described in Martino Cappucci, “Carli, Ferdinando (Ferrante),” Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ferdinando- carli_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, accessed 23 june 2014). Ferrante Carlo’s involvement in Bolognese literary circles is discussed in detail in Carlo Delcorno, “Un avversario del Marino: Ferrante Carlo,” in Studi Secenteschi 16 (1975): 69-155. 12 See chapter 1, note 119 p. 53. 13 Op. cit. note 8.

100 one might tend instead to associate with energetic brushwork or rushes of artistic inspiration.14 The final portion of Ludovico's letter, to which I shall return at the end of this section, reiterates his high opinion of Ribera's aptitude as a companion with whom to look at pictures: Ludovico passes to Ferrante the greetings of a mutual friend, whom he quotes as desiring to show his collection to the Spanish painter to hear what he would have to say about it.15

Ludovico himself is also engaged in an evaluation of other painters when he writes this accolade to Ribera's abilities. His correspondence with Ferrante Carlo includes a conversational and sustained series of exchanges on the merits of other artists, and his estimation of Ribera in a conversational setting is inseparable from his opinions of the younger painter's professional skills, as evidenced by the Saint Martin in Parma.16

Ludovico also painted a Saint Martin dividing his Cloak for the nearby cathedral of

Piacenza, and while scholarly opinion is divided as to whether Ribera's or Ludovico's

Saint Martin was painted first, both versions were certainly in existence by the time

Ludovico wrote the letter.17 One might consider Ludovico’s affirmation of Ribera's conversational capacities rather than his painterly skills as an unspoken disparagement of

14 See David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 60-71. 15 “Il signor Bartolommeo Dolcini saluta V.S., e mostrò di avere questo particolare delle parola dello Spagnuolo. Disse: Io vorria poterli mostrare le mie pitture per vedere quello che dicesse.” Bottari & Ticozzi, Raccolta, 290-91; see appendix 1. 16 One may consider here the parallel with Ludovico’s warm praise of Guercino, also in letters to Ferrante Carlo; Perini, Scritti dei Carracci, letters no. 30 & 31, pp. 140-41. 17 Alessandro Brogi gives Ludovico's altarpiece a date of circa 1614, whereas Eric Schleier and Gail Feigenbaum had dated the altarpiece to 1609-1610, in which case it would immediately precede, and undoubtedly serve as an important model/point of comparison for Ribera's 1611 altarpiece of the same subject in Parma. Brogi instead sees Ribera's Saint Martin as preceding and also serving in some exemplary capacity for Ludovico's version. In the letter to Ferrante Carlo under discussion, Brogi also rightly sees evidence of Ludovico's receptivity to new ideas and readiness to keep up with the times. Alessandro Brogi, Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619) (Ozzano Emilia: Edizione Tipoarte, 2001), vol. I, cat. no. 112, pp. 33, 224- 225.

101 the latter. The most unforced and generous reading of the letter, however, is that

Ludovico's praise of his younger colleague's good taste as manifested in conversation should be taken at face value, and indeed incorporated into a positive judgment of

Ribera's altarpiece in Parma. As a modest and frank beau geste, this praise of Ribera would itself reflect positively on Ludovico's own taste: not only does he show his perception of his colleague's qualities, but he is gracious enough to point them out to others.

Ribera made the same sort of gesture, and produced a very positive impression in consequence, as we learn from a series of letters sent in early 1618 from the Grand Duke

Cosimo II's agent in Naples, Cosimo Del Sera, to his secretary in Florence, Andrea Cioli

(appendices 2-7).18 In negotiations for the purchase of paintings in Naples for the Medici court, del Sera has come into contact with both Ribera and Fabrizio Santafede, and first compares the two in terms of their artistic merits, much in the Spaniard’s favor (appendix

2).19 Praising Ribera’s “bizarria” and “buone invenzioni,” Del Sera reports that according to those who know something (intelligenti) of this profession, Spagnoletto is held to have

“many exquisite parts” (molte parte squisite), and to be second only to Cristofano Allori among living artists. Del Sera subsequently compounds this preference by comparing the two Neapolitan artists' reactions to this Florentine master, two of whose works Del Sera himself owns and describes as the wonders of Naples (stupor di Napoli) (appendix 3).20

Del Sera sarcastically likens Santafede to Allori, saying the Neapolitan is just as good at

18 Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo 1396 & 1400; the letters were first published by Alessandro Parronchi, “Sculture e progetti di Michelangelo Naccherino,” in Prospettiva 20 (1980): 34-46, 40-41; see also New York 1992, 235. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

102 delaying as his Florentine colleague, but perhaps cannot be relied upon to deliver the same quality (appendix 3, 5).21 Both Santafede and Ribera are set to work for the Grand-

Duke, but either the commission to Santafede or its completion (of a Galatea) appears to be in doubt: in a letter of May 1st, 1618 (appendix 7), Del Sera doubts that Santafede was all that impressed upon seeing Allori’s works, a fact which in turn gives the Tuscan agent serious misgivings as to the Neapolitan painter’s abilities and reliability.22 Santafede’s tepid reaction is in immediate contrast with Ribera’s, whose modest and ready admission to being a lesser painter than Allori gives Del Sera confidence that the Spaniard will deliver his work as promised: “ma perche questo è huomo modestissimo, e confessa d’esser inferiore, non e per mancare di quanto ha promesso.”23

As in Ludovico's letter, Ribera is estimated not only based on his own works, but on the things he says about other artists'. His good taste, which is manifest in the quality of his pictures, is confirmed in his pronouncements about art, and vice versa. In contrast to an arrogant Santafede, Ribera's modesty in declaring the superiority of Cristofano

Allori reflects favorably on his character, which in turn reflects favorably on his professional competence, shoring up the Tuscan agent’s confidence as to the fulfillment of a commission. As Ludovico Carracci had shown his taste and his modesty in praising

Ribera, so Ribera exhibits the same qualities in praising Allori; both painters’ actions follow the prototype of Apelles, who according to Pliny the Elder showed his

21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. Many thanks to Chris Geekie and Alberto Virdis for help with the interpretation of this letter. 23 Ibid.

103 understanding and exceptional skill not only in what he painted, but in knowing when to acknowledge the superiority of his colleagues.24

Luigi Scaramuccia’s Le Finezze de’Pennelli Italiani of 1674, in which the guide to the art of Naples is one of Spagnoletto’s students, Aniello [Falcone], also bears witness to Ribera’s reputation for taste. Scaramuccia’s protagonist, Girupeno, travelling in the company of Raphael’s Genio, arrives in Naples, a city that is familiar to neither of them.

Seeking a knowledgeable guide who will be able to show them the rarest pictures in the city, they encounter “a virtuoso and accomplished youth in the profession, and a student

(by his own account) of Lo Spagnoletto, Gioseppe di Riuiera.”25 While Ribera’s works

24 Apelles demonstrates his connoisseurship by his apt and selective criticism of Protogenes (who excelled in all aspects but for his over-diligence), and also by his sparing but judicious praise for Melanthius and Asclepiodorus: “He [Apelles] also asserted another claim to distinction when he expressed his admiration for the immensely laborious and infinitely meticulous work of Protogenes; for he said that in all respects his achievements and those of Protogenes were on a level, or those of Protogenes were superior, but that in one respect he stood higher, that he knew when to take his hand away from a picture - a noteworthy warning of the frequently evil effects of excessive diligence. The candour of Apelles was however equal to his artistic skill: he used to acknowledge his inferiority to Melanthius in grouping, and to Asclepiodorus in nicety of measurement, that is in the proper space to be left between one object and another.” Pliny the Elder, Natural History, ed. and trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), Book XXXV, 80, pp. 319-21. There were of course numerous editions of Pliny in Italian and Spanish in circulation in the early seventeenth century; I have consulted the text in the Italian translation by Lodovico Domenichi, who renders the passage as follows: “Usurpossi anco un’altra gloria, & ciò fu, ch’essendo elgi una volta tutto pensoso & pieno di maraviglia a vedere una figura di Protogene, dove egli haveva usato fatica & grandissima diligentia, hebbe a dire; come egli in tutte le cose era pari a coli [sic.], & forse anco superiore, ma ch’esso Apelle in una cosa lo avanzava, & questo era, che Protogene non sapeva levar mai la mano dalla tavola, dando in tal modo un notabil ricordo, cioè, che spesse volte la troppa diligentia altrui nuoce. Ma egli hebbe bene non punto minore semplicità che arte. Percioch’egli cedeva ad Anfione di dispositione, ad Asclepiodoro delle misure, cioè quanto una cosa debba essere lontana dall’altra.” Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturale di G. Plinio Secondo Tradotta per M. Lodovico Domenichi (Venice: Alessandro Griffio, 1580), 1098. The tremendous impact of Pliny’s Natural History on early modern artistic theory and practice, for instance on conceptions of connoisseurship and social competence in Benedetto Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, Giovanni Battista Armenini’s Precetti dell’Arte de la Pittura, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato della Pittura and Idea del Tempio della Pittura, and Federico Zuccaro’s Idea, are admirably laid out by Sarah Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 264-303. 25“Per non essere il Genio di Raffaello punto prattico della Città, hebbe per bene assieme con il suo seguace Girupeno di provedersi di qualche sufficiente guida, onde condurre li potessero sù le prime ne luoghi, dove collocate fossero le più rare Pitture, poiche facendo pensiere di tosto partire, non tornava loro in acconcio mendicar da se medesimi per immensità sì grande quello, che con lieve aita [sic] facilmente far potevano. Così incontratisi in un virtuoso, e compito Giovane nella Professione, e Scolare (per quant’ ei disse) dello Spagnoletto Gioseppe di Riviera, furono da esso prima condotti in S. Domenico ...” Luigi Scaramuccia, Le

104 are accorded routine and at times tepid praise among the noteworthy sights of Naples, the selection of one of his students as a guide to the city indicates Scaramuccia’s recognition of the Ribera brand name as holding legitimate preeminence within a Neapolitan context, a preeminence that includes expert knowledge of the works of other artists. Whereas anecdotal evidence from the 18th century tends to emphasize Ribera’s all but murderous hostility towards his fellow painters, Scaramuccia gives to Ribera, through his fictionalized student Aniello, a legacy of courtesy and collegial expertise.26

If Aniello’s excellence as a cicerone seems to reflect but faint and secondhand credit to his teacher, one should note that Scaramuccia reserves warmer accolades for

Ribera in another passage of his narrative. As discussed in chapter 1, the highest praise that Scaramuccia has to offer is conferred on Ribera later in the Finezze, when Girupeno and Raphael’s Genius arrive in Parma and see in the church of Santa Maria Bianca a work of “spedito giuditio,” which they first judge to be Correggio’s but is in fact by the hand of the young Ribera.27 Within the framework of Scaramuccia’s text, Correggio is

finezze de’pennelli italiani ammirate e studiate da Girupeno sotto la scorta e disciplina del Genio di Raffaello d’Urbino, facsimile ed. Guido Giubbini (Milan: Edizioni Labor, 1965[1674]), 68-69. 26 This is plainest in Scaramuccia’s discussion of Domenichino’s work in the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, from which there arises no hint of rivalry or hostility between Ribera and Domenichino; Scaramuccia, Finezze, 69-71. This account presents a stark contrast with De’Dominici’s supposition that Ribera slandered and harassed Domenichino to his grave if he didn’t actually poison him; Bernardo De’Dominici, “Vita di Giuseppe di Ribera Pittore,” in Andrea Zezza (ed.) Vite de’Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani vol. 3 (Naples: Paparo, 2008), 16. 27 “(...) e poscia conducendosi à S. Maria Bianca de PP. Scalzi, e vedendo in essa subito à banda destra una Capelletta di spedito giuditio, à prima vista la giudicarono del Correggio, ancorche per verità non fosse tale (come disse loro uno di que’ Padri, che gl’havea osservati fissamente rimirarla) mà ben sì di Gioseppe di Riviera detto lo Spagnoletto, trattata etiandio [sic] nella sua età giovanile, all’hora quando ritrovandosi à Parma, si era fermato à studiare le cose del medesimo Correggio, onde perciò non era meraviglia se i nostri Peregrini si erano ingannati in far sì bell’equivoco, avegnache, come disse il Padre, ogn’un quasi vi cascasse.” (“And going thereafter to S. Maria Bianca of the Discalced Fathers, and seeing therein suddenly on the right a small chapel [painted] with nimble judgment, they judged it at first sight to be by Correggio, although in truth it was not (as they were told by one of these Fathers, who had fixedly observed their contemplation of it) but rather by Gioseppe di Riviera called lo Spagnoletto, having been painted in his young age, at a time when, finding himself in Parma, he had stayed on to study the works of the same Correggio, whence it was no great marvel that our Pilgrims should have been deceived in making so lovely an error, into which, as the Father said, anyone might well fall.”) Scaramuccia, Finezze, 174.

105 the pole star of the Italian firmament, and Raphael himself fufils the subordinate role of guiding Girupeno and the reader to an appreciation of the Parmesan master’s greatness.

As the Genius of Raphael points out, “Spagnoletto knew how to derive great profit from the good of so great an author [Correggio].”28 While Girupeno and the Genio, in their sojourn in Naples, reserve their warmest praise for the Correggesque Giovanni

Lanfranco, there hardly can be a greater accolade than that achieved by Spagnoletto in

Parma itself, of being indistinguishable from the peerless Correggio. In a sense, the aspect of Ribera’s work that most impresses Scaramuccia is not the work’s quality per se so much as it is Ribera’s good sense in emulating so great an artist as Correggio.

De gustibus disputandum?

This slippage or overlap between the practical skills of a painter and said painter’s estimations of his peers and predecessors is inherent in much of the seventeenth century usage of the term “taste,” or gusto, in its applications to art.29 In writings on art from the second half of the sixteenth century, the term’s usage overlaps with that of giudizio, especially as the latter was applied to affirm quality of execution.30 Within Giulio

28 “Gran profitto, disse il Genio, rivolto al suo Scolare, seppe far lo Spagnoletto sopra il buono di sì grand’Autore.” Ibid. 29 See the overview of the question in Frances Gage, Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni Sulla Pittura: Recreation, Manners, and Decorum in Seventeenth-century Roman Picture Galleries (PhDiss. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2000), esp. 379-404; Benedetto Croce, trans. Douglas Ainslie, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (New York: Noonday Press Edition, 1966), 189-93; Hannah Baader, “Giudizio, Geschmack, Geschmacksurteil,” in Ulrich Pfisterer (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft: Ideen, Methoden, Begriffe (Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2011), 153-57; M. Fick, “Geschmack” and “Geschmacksurteil,” in Gert Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. III (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996), 870-907, esp. 876-83; Luigi Grassi, “Gusto,” in Luigi Grassi and Mario Pepe, Dizionario di Arte: Termini, Movimenti, e Stili dall’Antichità a Oggi (Turin: Utet Libreria, 2003), 334-36. 30 An excellent survey of the term’s use and development is in Paolo D’Angelo, “Il gusto in Italia e Spagna dal Quattrocento al Settecento,” in Luigi Russo (ed.), Il Gusto: Storia di una Idea Estetica (Palermo: Aesthetica Edizioni, 2000), 11-34, esp. 20-23.

106 Mancini’s Considerations on Painting, for instance, “gusto” is used much in the manner that one might find “giudizio” used in Vasari’s Lives; as Paolo D’Angelo notes, the turn of the seventeenth century is the hinge of a development in which taste is “recognized as comprehending an autonomous capacity for judgment,” neither “reducible to intellectual judgment nor to that of one of the external senses,” so that, “so to speak, pleasure is intellectualized while judgment is sensualized.”31

Mancini uses “taste” interchangeably as an aspect of connoisseurial practice and as a positive trait of certain paintings: he states that Gerrit van Honthorst, for instance, frequented the life drawing academies in Rome and “showed great taste in drawing”

(mostrò buonissimo gusto nel disegno),32 while El Greco in Spain made “many things of great good taste” (molte cose di gran buon gusto).33 In contrasting ways of pricing pictures, either in exchange for a gift at the discretion of the purchaser or for a prearranged price, Mancini notes that the first mode of pricing, “being proper of men of great ingenuity or liberality, whether it be the craftsman or the man of taste (o sia artefice o huomo di gusto),” deals with a buyer not readily to be outdone in courtesy.34 Both

31 “Il gusto (...) giocherà un ruolo centrale nella nascita dell’estetica moderna quando in esso sarà riconosciuta una capacità giudicativa autonoma, non riducibile né al giudizio intellettuale né a quello di uno dei sensi esterni, quando esso assumerà le vesti di una facoltà specifica, nella quale il “piacere” è anche una fonte di conoscenza, e, per così dire, il piacere si intellettualizza mentre il giudizio si sensualizza.” Ibid., 14. 32 “Et andando per le accademie del vivo, mostrò buonissimo gusto nel disegno ...” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 258. 33 Ibid., I, 231. 34 “Si deve in ultimo considerare il modo con il quale se ne priva il padrone o l’artefice, dandolo, o in modo di regalo e d’osservanza, rimettendosi in tutto e per tutto nella prudenza e voluntà del compratore, o a prezzo convenuto. Che il primo modo, essendo proprio di huomini di grand’ingegno o liberalità, o sia artefice o huomo di gusto, e trattandosi con compratori che non si voglion lasciar superare in cortesia ...” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 140.

107 usages correspond closely to earlier applications of the term giudizio, which can also do double duty as a quality of assessment and as a correct practical application thereof.35

As Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey have demonstrated, the idea of idiosyncratic personal inclination rather than objective or universal judgment as a guiding approach to art was also put into practice by collectors such as Vincenzo Giustiniani: The

Marquis Giustiniani’s taste expresses his nobility all the more for its seeming detachment from prescriptive social standards, and his own inclination is the sufficient arbiter and gatekeeper of his cultural consumption.36 Taste, for Giustiniani, was a manifestation of an inborn status and quality, yet for non-nobles a large part of what made connoisseurship a desirable and interesting practice was the idea that one could learn taste.37 Among non- nobles such as artists and gentlemen intenditori, the ennobling practice of connoisseurship thus opened up as an arena of social competition, in which taste was capital.

Within the first half of the seventeenth century, the idea of esthetic judgment as

“taste” and as the application of a universal norm were not mutually exclusive. Put another way, just because taste was understood to be sensory and subjective did not rule it out from also functioning as a faculty of evaluation that could result in right or wrong

35 See for instance Leonardo’s applications of giuditio as judgment (tied particularly to the artist’s reactions to conversations about his work) and as the application of sound precepts leading to correct execution. Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura (Paris: Jacques Langlois, 1651), ch. XV. p. 3, ch., ch. XIX p. 4, ch. XLII, pp. 8-9, chs. CCXCCIII and CCLXXIV, p. 79. 36 Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, “Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Galleria: A Taste for Style and an Inclination to Pleasure,” in Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 64-108; esp. 88-95. 37 Gage makes this argument with particular reference to Giulio Mancini, associating the practice of connoisseurship with that of physical exercise, both of which enabled access to what were otherwise noble prerogatives such as taste and good health. Frances Gage, “Exercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” in Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2008): 1167-1207.

108 judgments.38 In his Diálogos de la Pintura, Vicente Carducho speaks about taste as the means of selecting, appreciating, and recognizing the manners of various artists using the metaphor of a meal, doubling the sensory and individual aspect of such judgment with an imperative for knowledge and discernment.39 In response to the question of how

(imitative) artistic depictions can vary so greatly when there is but one truth, Carducho likens the various artistic styles to the dishes at a banquet, a smorgasbord of different flavors that is all the more complete and delightful for the variety therein. Yet this apparent catholicity of taste is in fact the platform for a prescriptive discourse on which styles are nutritious and which will produce indigestion: while Michelangelo and Raphael are the “substantial and nourishing dishes of this science,” Caravaggio’s followers are gluttons, gorging themselves on a new dish made “with such savor, appetite and taste” that they risk “apoplexy in the true doctrine.”40 The “gusto” that characterizes Caravaggio

38 The more subjective and purely sensory view of taste is emphasized, for instance, in the definitions of “gusto” provided in the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Venice: Giovanni Alberti, 1612), 411; and in Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lingua Castellana, 458r. 39 Carducho, Diálogos, 270-71. For the wider context of this passage of the Diálogos within ongoing debates about style in Italian and Spanish art theory, see Chiara Gauna, “Giudizi e polemiche intorno a Caravaggio e Tiziano nei trattati d’arte spagnoli del XVII secolo: Carducho, Pacheco e la tradizione artistica italiana,” in Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 64 (1998): 57-78. 40 “Y asi podemos con ese simil dezir, que ninguna destas pinturas es de desestimar, si bien ninguno dexó de carecer de alguna cosa de la perfeccion, y tener otra que le realzase, y de todas podias escoger un selecto Pintor: pues en todas, y en cada una de por si ai tanta admiracion, y agrado, como se experimenta haziendonos al sentido, y al entendimiento un banquete de excelentes manjares, si bien guisados de muchas diferencias, que si nos entregamos en uno, sentimos con lastima dexar el otro: porque dexando aparte el del divino Michaelangel, el del gran Rafael de Urbino, (Polos en que se asienta la verdad sustancial desta generosa disciplina, columnas del non plus ultra, platos sustanciales, y alimentativos desta ciencia) quien ha de desviar el plato del Corezo, de Ticiano del Parmesano, del Salviati, Tadeo Zucaro, el del Barocio, y los de los demas que avemos nombrado, y que han pintado en Italia, España, Francia, Flandes, Alemania, Inglaterra, y en las demas partes que han merecido tales obras, que para nombrarlos, y dezir en sus alabanzas merecidos encarecimientos, era nunca acabar; basta que todos ocupan la fama, que los haze eternos en las memorias de los hombres, y en sus alabanzas heroicos libros, y doctos elogios, y con sus retratos Regias galerias, entre los personajes mas ilustres, dandoles por dignos del lugar mas estimado. En nuestros tiempos se levantó en Roma Michael Angelo de Carabaggio, en el Pontificado del Papa Clemente VIII. con nuevo plato, con tal modo, y salsa guisado, con tanto sabor, apetito y gusto, que pienso se ha llevado el de todos con tanta golosina y licencia, que temo en ellos alguna apoplexia en la verdadera doctrina: porque le siguen glotonicamente el mayor golpe de los Pintores, no reparando si el calor de su natural (que es su ingenio) es tan poderoso, ó tiene la actividad que el del otro, para poder digerir simple tan recio, ignoto, e incompatible modo, como es el obrar sin las preparaciones para tal

109 is at once a flavor and a sense: the Caravaggio course in Carducho’s banquet manifests an exercise of taste on Caravaggio’s part (bad judgment, lack of study and doctrine), and likewise attracts other painters of poor taste, who indulge in the dish immoderately, having selected it out of a base and gluttonous desire. The balanced dishes of Carducho’s

Italian canon enrich the banquet by their variety, exemplifying the happy overlap of the sensory with what Carducho would think of as sound doctrine. The dangers of the sensory dimension of artistic judgment, however, are exemplified in Caravaggio’s renunciation of good doctrine to follow his own ingenio, by whose force he also seduces others. Carducho pits the two applications of the “taste” metaphor against each other: taste as informed selection, versus taste as surrender to sensory experience.

Returning to Ludovico Carracci’s letter, his singling out of Ribera from among

“those painters who have most excellent taste” in the context of discussing the pictures in

Ferrante Carlo’s collection makes the term “gusto” the decisive criterion for how well

accion?” (“And thus with this simile we may say that none of these pictures is to be underestimated, although not one of them could help but lack perfection in some aspect, nor to possess another that elevated it, and from among all these one could pick a choice Painter: thus in all of the[se pictures], and in each there is inherently so much that is admirable and pleasing, as one experiences in turning to the senses (haziendonos al sentido), and to the understanding, a banquet of excellent foods, so well cooked of many differences, that if we begin to enjoy the one, we regret sorely to leave the other; for leaving aside that of the divine Michelangelo, that of the great Raphael of Urbino (poles in which the substance and truth of this generous discipline reside, pillars of the non plus ultra, substantial and nourishing dishes of this science), who would turn away the dish of Correggio, of Titian and Parmigianino, of Salviati, Taddeo Zuccaro, that of Barocci, and of the others we have enumerated, and who have painted in Italy, Spain, France, Flanders, Germany, England, and in the other regions that have merited such works, that to name them all, and to say in their praise the endearments they merit, would be never to finish; suffice it to say that all [of them] inhabit the fame that makes them immortal in the memories of men, and in their praises, heroic books, and learned elegies, and with their portraits, Royal galleries, among the most illustrious persons, show them to be worthy of the highest esteem. In our own times there arose in Rome Michael Angelo of Caravaggio, in the Pontificate of Pope Clement VIII, with a new dish, with such a manner, and roasted sauce, with such savor, appetite and taste, that I believe he has [fed] everyone with such gluttony and licence, that I fear lest they experience some apoplexy in the true doctrine: for in large part the painters (el mayor golpe de los Pintores) follow him gluttonously, without bothering as to whether the heat of his nature (el calor de su natural) (which is his ingenuity) is so powerful, or [whether he] possesses that activity from the other, in order to be able to digest such tough, ignorant fare and incompatible means, as to work without the preparations for such an action?”) Carducho, Diálogos, 270-71.

110 one performs connoisseurship in a conversational setting. Yet the very act of praising the excellence of these painters’ excellent taste separates this use of gusto from mere fancy or even personal inclination. Ribera has passed the sort of test to which Carducho’s Maestro had subjected his apparently well-spoken acquaintance, publicly confirming his legitimacy as a judge of art through conversation. Moreover, Ludovico’s immediate transition to his rather facetious concern that Ribera will put him out of business unless he’s careful demonstrates the association of taste as connoisseurial skill with taste as painterly expertise. The source closest to Ludovico in art theory and criticism, the

Trattato della Pittura (probably written in a period just before Ludovico’s letter, between

1607 and 1615) by Giovanni Battista Agucchi (1570-1632), demonstrates the same overlap in the applications of gusto.41 On the one hand, Agucchi uses the term in conjunction with the notions of “genius” and “disposition,” stating that while artists collectively strive for the same ends and achieve cumulative progress towards them, there remains great diversity among their individual manners.42 On the other hand, he also applies the term “gusto” to the crucial ability of the Carracci to discern and select from what they see in nature, a capacity of judgment that for Agucchi is the crux of the

41 Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London: The Warburg Institute, 1947), 62; Ilaria Toesca and Roberto Zapperi, “Agucchi, Giovanni Battista,” in Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-battista-agucchi_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, accessed 26 January, 2016). 42 “In oltre sarà ancora facil cosa, che gl’intendenti di questo artificiosissimo operare, concedano, che mentre l’un maestro doppo l’altro è andato aggiungendo, e perfettionando l’arte, sia anche stata non poca la diversità delle maniere tra l’uno e l’altro, non solo quanto all’operare più, ò meno eccellentemente, ma secondo la diversità de’ genij, ò dispositioni, ò gusti, habbiano assai diversamente le loro opere eseguite, anchorche ad una medesima meta habbiano tutti havuta l’istessa intentione, e quando anche sia stata uguale la qualità de’ loro ingegni.” (“Moreover it will also be an easy matter for the experts (intendenti) in this most skilled work (artificiosissimo operare) to concede that while one master after another has been adding to and perfecting art, there has also been no small diversity of manner from one to the other of them, not only as to whether they worked with more or less excellence, but according to the diversity of their geniuses, or dispositions, or tastes, they have produced their works rather differently, although all had pursued the same goal with the same intention, and although they were equal in quality of mind.”) Giovanni Battista Agucchi, Trattato della Pittura, quoted from Mahon, Studies, 241-42.

111 Carracci reform of art and the essential trait of good painting. As Titian and Correggio, on whom the Carracci focused their studies from an early date, selected the noblest traits of nature, so the Carracci not only selected Titian and Correggio as models, but discerned and perfected the operation of judgment inherent in the art of the Northern masters:

And considering well with what understanding and good taste (intentidmento e buon gusto) those two great masters [Titian and Correggio] had imitated nature, they [the Carracci] set themselves the task, with the greatest exactitude and diligence, of studying over nature (sopra il naturale) with this same intention that could be gathered from the works of these same [masters], Titian and Correggio.43

In tying “good taste” to understanding, Agucchi gives us an important insight into the deep connection between looking at the works of other artists and producing one’s own works well.

A taste for Ribera

Agucchi also had ties to another protagonist of Ludovico Carracci’s letter to

Ferrante Carlo, Bartolomeo Dolcini (1568-1634), a distant relative of Agucchi’s and fellow Bolognese virtuoso with whom Agucchi was in correspondence at least as early as

July of 1609, asking Dolcini to convey to Ludovico the news of Annibale’s recent death.44 Dolcini also knew Ferrante Carlo well enough to be sending him greetings, the

43 “E ben considerando con quanto intendimento, e buon gusto havessero que’ due gran Maestri [Titiano & Correggio] imitata la natura, si posero [gli Carracci] con esattissima diligenza à studiare sopra il naturale con quella stessa intentione, che da quell’opere si raccoglieva haver havuto gli stessi Correggio, e Titiano.” Ibid., 248. 44 Marina Romanello, “Dolcini, Bartolomeo,” in Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bartolomeo-dolcini_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, accessed January 26th, 2016). Agucchi’s treatise on the origins of the city of Bologna, L’Antica Fondatione e Dominio della Città di Bologna (Bologna: Benacci, 1638) was written as a response to a work on the same subject by Bartolomeo Dolcini, De vario Bononiae statu ab ea condita usque ad annum 1625 (Bologna: Heirs of Giovanni de Rossi, 1626). On Dolcini’s text, see Giovanna Perini, “Raccolta di testi inediti o rari su Ludovico Carracci,” in Atti e Memorie. Accademia Clementina 33/34 (1994): 85-104. Many thanks to Mattia Biffis for this reference and for a useful discussion of Dolcini.

112 conveyance of which brings Ludovico back, at the end of his letter, to the subject of

Ribera: “Il signor Bartolommeo Dolcini saluta V. S., e mostrò di avere questo particolare delle parole dello Spagnuolo. Disse: io vorria poterli mostrare le mie pitture per vedere quello che dicesse. Ma bisogna scusare il signor Bartolomeo, che è innamorato delle sue cose.” (appendix 1). The letter, so far as I have been able to ascertain, survives only in the transcription of Bottari & Ticozzi; I would hasard a guess, however unverifiable it may be, that the passage makes more sense if one reads “questo particolare delle parole dello

Spagnuolo” as a mistranscription of “gusto particolare” for Ribera’s words, which

Ludovico himself had praised at the start of the letter. Ludovico’s next sentence, reporting Dolcini’s own words, would then make perfect sense as a concrete display of

Signor Bartolomeo’s enthusiasm for looking at pictures with the Spaniard in question. In the concluding sentence, Dolcini, like a man infatuated, shows an ardent enthusiasm that seems to elicit the patience and gentle amusement of his friends (“bisogna scusare il

Signor Bartolomeo”); but whether “le sue cose” with which he is enamoured are the objects in his own collection or the works of the just-mentioned Ribera is open to interpretation.

The upshot, in any event, is that Ribera’s reputation as an exceptional painter was inextricably bound up with his reputation as an exceptional conversationalist around paintings, and that this joint and overlapping appreciation of his skills as painter and as connoisseur (here in the sense of “tasteful and knowledgeable interlocutor”) was shared by at least three prominent and well-connected figures in the artistic milieux of both

Rome and Bologna. It is also worth noting that the protagonists in this exchange moved in contiguous social circles with the author of one of the most important sources on

113 Ribera’s life and work, the Sienese physician Giulio Mancini, who is known to have exchanged at least one letter with Ferrante Carlo, who probably knew Ludovico and certainly knew Annibale and Antonio Carracci personally, and whose extensive contacts at the Medici court included the Grand-Ducal secretary Andrea Cioli, the recipient of

Cosimo Del Sera’s letters from Naples.45 It is also highly probable that Mancini was at least an acquaintance of Ribera’s, particularly on the basis of the two men’s ties to the

Accademia di San Luca.46 We shall proceed to consider what Mancini had to say of

Ribera’s aptitude as a connoisseur.

b) Connoisseurship as competition: Mancini’s dishonorable Ribera

Ne sutor ultra crepidam

Talking about art, as in Carducho’s anecdote about the well-spoken gentleman, was not a neutral “à chacun son goût” exchange of views, but the site of a social competition. The on-the-spot practice of spoken connoisseurship that Carducho describes was not merely a discernment of objects, but a discernment of persons. In the crucible of conversations in front of art, the nobleman would show his nobility, the hypocrite his pretensions, the man of taste his understanding, the artist his quality. Accounts of artists and patrons looking at art together tend to make one party look refined and the other

45 Michele Maccherini, Caravaggio e i Caravaggeschi nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini (PhDiss. Rome: Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 1995), 42-44; Denis Mahon asserts that Mancini revised a biography of Guercino on the basis of a conversation with Ludovico Carracci; Mahon, Studies, 311. 46 Maccherini claims that Mancini was probably acquainted personally with every living artist discussed in the Considerations on Painting, and that his circle of such acquaintances was larger than the group of artists whom he does discuss. Ibid., 44. On Mancini’s ties to the Accademia di San Luca, of which Ribera was a member while resident in Rome (chapter 1, note 21, p. 18), see Frances Gage, “Giulio Mancini and Artist-Amateur Relations in Seventeenth-Century Roman Academies,” in Peter M. Lukehart (ed.) The Accademia Seminars: The accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590-1635 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), 247-88.

114 foolish, even when the participants in the discussion are on friendly terms. In a frequently cited anecdote from Bernardo Bizoni's travel diary of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, for instance, a painting in the cathedral of Faenza tests the respective connoisseurial skills of the Marquis and one of his travelling companions, the painter Cristoforo Roncalli.47

While the painter is merely able to say that the painting is a good one, the Marquis identifies the manner as Dosso Dossi’s, an attribution that Roncalli, looking more closely, then confirms with the detection of a signature.48

Talking together about art could work as a social equalizer to a certain extent: shared appreciation for works of art was a natural common ground for artists and collectors, and both parties stood to benefit socially from conversations about art. By the same token, these exchanges held potential for competition or even humiliation. One might recall here the many anecdotes that Carlo Cesare Malvasia relates in which the

Carracci expose the spurious connoisseurship and pretensions of expertise of their

47 “In quella chiesa è un bellissimo quadro di pittura in capo alla nave sinistra della chiesa, e mentre che per tale da tutti era ammirato, si dimandò al Pomaranci se sapeva di chi era mano ed egli rispose: “Io non so il nome del pittor che l’ha fatto, ma ben so ch’è molto bello.” Allora il marchese, dopo d’averlo osservato, disse: “A me pare che sia di mano del Dossi alla maniera con la quale è dipinto.” Il Pomaranci continuò ad osservarlo con maggior attenzione e a caso lesse alcune poche lettere con le quali era scritto il nome del Dossi che lo avea dipinto, di che tutti ebbero gusto, e particolarmente il signor Vincenzo, perché gli parve di non aver fatto poco in accertare l’autore, che dall’istesso Pomaranci non si diceva.” (“In that church there is a most beautiful painting at the head of the nave on the left of the church, and whereas it was admired as such by everyone, Pomaranci was asked whether he knew by whose hand it was, to which he replied, “I do not know the name of the painter who made it, but I do know that it is most beautiful.” Then the marquis, after having observed it, said, “To me it seems to be by the hand of Dossi by the manner in which it is painted.” Pomaranci continued to observe it with greater attention and by chance read a few faint letters with which was inscribed the name of Dossi who had painted it, and in which everyone took pleasure (di che tutti ebbero gusto), and particularly signor Vincenzo, for it seemed to him no small achievement to have ascertained the author, which even Pomaranci could not tell.”) Bernardo Bizoni, ed. Barbara Agosti, Diario di viaggio di Vincenzo Giustiniani (Porretta Terme: I Quaderni del Battello Ebbro, 1995), 29. 48 For Luigi Salerno, this expression of Vincenzo Giustininani's practice of connoisseurship was evidence of his “newness” in contrast with a cinquecento in which such concerns were the exclusive domain of artists. Luigi Salerno, “The Picture Gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani - 1: Introduction,” in Burlington Magazine 102, no. 682 (1960): 21-27, p. 27.

115 patrons.49 As Sarah Blake McHam points out, the Plinian anecdotes concerning

Alexander and Apelles emphasize the intimacy and sense of well-nigh equal footing that characterize their relationship, which became a paradigm for promotions of the social status of artists.50 In Pliny's account of Alexander in the studio of Apelles, as in

Malvasia's accounts of the Carracci, the painter's expertise is contrasted with the gaucherie of powerful patrons who try to appear knowledgeable concerning works of art.

When holding forth on a painting in Apelles' studio, Alexander is entreated by his court painter to keep silence as the king's ignorant remarks are causing even the studio assistants who grind the colors to laugh.51

Already in Pliny’s anecdotes about Apelles, the artist alternates between competitive displays of expertise and no less ennobling displays of humility. The great painter’s openness to all judgments of his work as he listens to passersby, post tabulam latens, exemplifies his own excellent judgment.52 At the other end of the social spectrum

49 See chapter 1, 65-69. 50 Blake McHam, Pliny, 225-26 and passim. 51 “In fact he [Apelles] also possessed great courtesy of manners, which made him more agreeable to Alexander the Great, who frequently visited his studio - for, as we have said, Alexander had published an edict forbidding any other artist to paint his portrait; but in the studio Alexander used to talk a great deal about painting without any real knowledge of it, and Apelles would politely advise him to drop the subject, saying that the boys engaged in grinding the colours were laughing at him: so much power did his authority exercise over a King who was otherwise of an irascible temper.” Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 85, p. 325; “Fu [Apelle] persona molto piacevole & garbata, & perciò era molto grato ad Alessandro Magno, il quale andava spesso a trovarlo a bottega, percioche, come io dissi, egli haveva ordinato, che niuno altro lo dipingesse. Et perche Alessandro stando in bottega discorreva di molte cose dell’arte con poco giudicio invero, Apelle amorevolmente lo consigliava, che stesse cheto, dicendo, che i fattori, i quali gli macinavano i colori, si facevano beffe di lui. Tanta autorità havea la ragione appresso a quel Re, il quale per altro era molto colerico [...].” Pliny, Historia Naturale, 1099. One may also note the way Domenichi has blunted the edge of the story, as Apelles “amorevolmente” begs the king to hold his peace, and it is to reason, not to the painter, that Alexander finally defers. 52 “Another habit of his [Apelles’] was when he had finished his works to place them in a gallery in the view of passers by, and he himself stood out of sight behind the picture and listened to hear what faults were noticed, rating the public as a more observant critic than himself.” Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 84- 85, p. 323. “Il medesimo fornita ch’egli haveva l’opera, la metteva fuori perche ogniuno, che passava, la potesse vedere, & egli nascondendosi poi dietro la figura, stava ascoltando i difetti che l’erano apposti, & cosi stimava miglior giudice il vulgo che se stesso.” Pliny, Historia Naturale, 1099. The importance of openness to the judgments of all and sundry features prominently in Leonardo da Vinci’s thinking on

116 from the artist’s interactions with Alexander, Pliny also relates Apelles' encounter with the shoemaker, whose critique of the painter's depiction of a sandal strap is received gratefully, causing the painter to correct his work. Emboldened, the shoemaker then oversteps his arena of expertise, and presumes to criticize the female figure's leg. The painter's injunction “ne sutor ultra crepidam” (shoemaker, don't go beyond your sandals) puts the cobbler in his place, and the artist's greater nobility is confirmed by his show of humility in having accepted the earlier critique, in contrast with the arrogance of the shoemaker in passing judgment on the painted figure.53 Apelles' encounters with the king and the cobbler both hinge on the socially ennobling or humbling potential of pronouncements about art, and were cited accordingly by major authors such as

Armenini, Lomazzo, Carducho, and Pacheco on the question of who had authority to judge paintings.54

giudizio, as for instance, Leonardo insists, “Certamente non deve ricusare il pittore, mentre ch’ei disegna o dipinge, il giuditio di ciascuno, perche noi conosciamo che l’huomo, benche non sia pittore, havrà notitia delle forme dell’huomo, s’egli è gobbo se hà gamba grossa, o gran mano, s’egli è zoppo, o hà altri mancamenti. E se noi conosciamo gl’huomini poter giudicare l’opere della natura, quanto maggiormente potranno giudicare i nostri errori.” (Certainly the painter must not refuse any person’s judgment while he draws or paints, for we know that a man, though he may not be a painter, will have knowledge of man’s forms, whether he be bent, or whether he have fat legs, or big hands, whether he is lame, or has other defects. And if we know that men are able to judge of the works of nature, how much more shall they be able to judge of our errors.”) Leonardo, Trattato, ch. XIX, p. 4. This passage has a long afterlife, for instance in Lodovico Dolce’s Aretino, from which it is also cited by Francisco Pacheco in the chapter of the Arte de la Pintura that he devotes to connoisseurship; earlier strokes of this discussion, both in Spain and Italy, are summarized in Bonaventura Bassegoda’s edition of Pacheco’s Arte de la Pintura, which expresses an overall moderate stance on the question of who should have authority to judge art. Francisco Pacheco, ed. Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, El Arte de la Pintura (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), 533-34, 543. 53 “And it is said that he was found fault with by a shoemaker because in drawing a subject’s sandals he had represented the loops in them as one too few, and the next day the same critic was so proud of the artist’s correcting the fault indicated by his previous objection that he found fault with the leg, but Apelles indignantly looked out from behind the picture and rebuked him, saying that a shoemaker in his criticism must not go beyond the sandal - a remark that has also passed into a proverb.” Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 85, pp. 323-25; “Dicono che egli fu tassato da un calzolaio, d’haver fatto in una pianella una fibbia manco che non bisognava, p[er]che tornando il medesimo l’altro giorno, insuperbito per haverlo avvertito del primo difetto, & tassandolo di non so che intorno la gamba; sdegnatosi gli fece un mal viso, con dirgli, che un calzolaio non poteva dar giudicio se non della pianella, & questo motto ancora passò in proverbio.” Pliny, Historia Naturale, 1099. 54 References to these anecdotes in Italian cinquecento art theory, including Lomazzo and Armenini, are compiled in Blake McHam, Pliny, 322-23. In Vicente Carducho’s eighth dialogue, the Disciple asks the

117 Giulio Mancini in particular mentions the story of Apelles and the cobbler as an exemplary formulation of the argument that his introduction (to the Considerations on

Painting) sets out to counter:

Nor am I in difficulty over that which could be said to me by some: that such advice [about painting] cannot be given by one who is not of the profession, as the artifice of the things thus made cannot be recognized by those who do not make them. Whence Pliny in book XXXV, in ch. 10 says: “As in the proverb of Apelles and that of Stratonicus the musician of Athens, who, contending with a craftsman, said to him: Don’t you realize that you are not speaking about a hammer?” Wherefore Aristotle in the Ethics writes that each is a good judge of that in which he has practice, and Fabius Pictor in Quintilian says that the arts would be fortunate if only the artists passed judgment on them.55 master to review and correct a list that he has drawn up for a friend, “un Prebendado amigo mio de grandes letras, y partes de mucha estimacion, con quien en Roma me comuniqué familiarmente: ocupa en España un honroso puesto, en que lució sus letras, e ingenio, dando materia a la Fama, y dotrina, y erudicion a los entendidos.” (“a Prebendary, a friend of great letters, and held in much esteem, with whom in Rome I was on friendly terms: he holds in Spain an honorable post, in which he shines for his learning and his mind [ingenio], giving fodder to Fame, and doctrine, and erudition to the knowledgeable.”) To this gentleman of impeccable intellectual and social credentials, Carducho’s technical glossary is ostensibly provided, in which context the dialogue’s Master notes that it is just as well to desire such knowledge, “para ... no dar ocasion que obliguen a Apeles a dezir, que calle, porque los aprendices no se rian, como lo dixo Alexandro, estando en su obrador hablando impropiedades ridiculas.” (“in order ... not to create an occasion that would oblige Apelles to ask him to be quiet, because the apprentices were laughing at him, as had been said [to] Alexander, being in his [Apelles’] workshop and uttering ridiculous improprieties.”). Carducho, Diálogos, 379, 387. The proverb is also central to the way that Pacheco addresses the question of who can rightly judge of art, and indeed, the chapter in which he tackles the matter is structured around a reworking of Pliny (chapter 9, book III); Pacheco cites the paired anecdotes of Apelles post tabulam latens and of the cobbler from the outset of the Arte de la Pintura, in chapter 1, book I: “Y porque parece casi imposible que un hombre solo pueda saber todo esto, solía el prudentísimo Apéles, después que avía pintado alguna cosa, la qual quería que fuese perfecta, ponerla en público y asconderse, atendiendo a lo que se juzgaba de la proporción y arte de su pintura; y según que cada uno hablaba de aquellas cosas de que tenía conocimiento y práctica, así la iba reformando; y, por el contrario, refutaba el juicio de aquellos que querían jusgar de las partes que no pertenecían a su profesión, como hizo al zapatero, que no contento de haber discurrido acerca del calzado de una figura, quería hacer juicio de otras cosas, diciéndole: Ne sutor ultra crepidam. El zapatero no debe jusgar más que del calzado.” (“And because it seems nearly impossible that a single person should be able to know all these things, the most prudent Apelles was in the habit, after he had painted something which he desired should be perfect, of placing it in public and hiding himself, attending to what was judged of the proportion and art of his painting; and according to what each person said of those things of which he had knowledge and practice, so he corrected it; and, on the contrary, he refuted the judgment of those who wished to judge of the parts that did not pertain to their professions, as he did to the cobbler, who, not being content with having held forth on the shoes of a figure, wanted to pass judgment on other things, [Apelles thus] saying to him: Ne sutor ultra crepidam. The cobbler is not to judge more than the shoes.”) Pacheco, Arte, 80. 55 “Nè mi fa difficoltà quello che da alcuno mi potrebbe esser detto: che simil avvertimenti non possin esser dati da uno che non sia della professione, non si potendo riconoscer l’artifitio delle cose fatte da chi non le fa. Onde Plinio al lib. XXXV, al cap. 10 disse: “Simile al proverbio d’Apelle è quello di Stratonico Musico appresso Atheneo che contendendo con un fabro gli disse: Non ti avvedi che non parli di martello?” Onde Aristotile nelle Morali scrive che ciascun è buon giudice delle cose che ha in prattica, e Fabio Pittore appresso Quintiliano dice che l’arti sarebber felici se solo gl’artefici di quelle dessero giuditio.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 5. Mancini is in fact quoting, not directly from Pliny, but is rendering verbatim the

118

Later in the introduction, Mancini goes so far as to claim that if Apelles or Fabius Pictor had encountered a man with the capacity for judgment, peritia, that he has in mind (and implicitly exemplifies), they would have conceded to him knowledge “ultra crepidam et malleum” (appendix 8).56 The Plinian anecdote, here, is not only about how artists respond to interactions with members of other social classes, but about the idea (resisted by Mancini) that authority to judge paintings accrues to them by default. From the outset of his project, Mancini perceives a need to counter the social and professional authority of artists in the arena of connoisseurship. As I shall argue presently, Mancini’s investment in displacing the right to judge art from artists to gentlemen intenditori is not unrelated to the way he writes about Ribera in particular. Within the Considerations on

Painting, Ribera becomes the key example for what Mancini claims is a fundamental incompatibility between the dispostions that make a good artist and those that make a good judge of art.

Mancini’s biography of Ribera

From the various early sources discussed in the first section of this chapter - according to Ludovico Carracci, Cosimo del Sera, and Luigi Scaramuccia - Ribera emerges not only as a conversationalist “of most excellent taste,” but as an artist whose

marginal note on the encounter between Apelles and the cobbler appended by Lodovico Domenichi in his translation; see Pliny, Storia Naturale, 1099. Domenichi’s source, though mistakenly given as Mancini’s, has been identified by Frigo as Desiderius Erasmus’s Adagia; Alberto Frigo, “Can One Speak of Painting if One Cannot Hold a Brush?: Giulio Mancini, Medicine, and the Birth of the Connoisseur,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 3 (2012): 417-36, p. 423. 56 “E se Appelle o Stratonico havesse hauto [sic] a trattar con un simil perito gl’havrebbe resposto, che sapesse ultra crepidam et malleum, et haverebbe potuto dire, per haver la sapienza et intelligenza con la prudenza, per le quali riconosce e giudica tutte le cose; e così Aristotile ancora haverebbe approvato il giuditio di questo perito perchè, havendo in prattica tutte le cose, pertanto di tutte senza passion puol giudicare.” Mancini, I, 11.

119 taste in approaching the work of other artists is inextricably bound to his reputation for excellence in practice. Yet perhaps the most prominent early source on Ribera, his first- ever biography, included in the Considerations on Painting of the Sienese physician

Giulio Mancini (appendix 9), produces a jarringly different impression. Mancini relates that Ribera's lifestyle in Rome was unsanitary and immoral, and that the artist finally fled the city because he was unable to meet his debts despite a handsome income.57 Whereas in Ludovico Carracci’s letter to Ferrante Carlo, the furia that reigns in the art gallery displaces the storm of creative activity from the makers of art onto its consumers, in

Mancini’s life of Ribera, the artist is not figuratively drunk with inspiration so much as he is simply drunk. The well-spoken painter with whom Carlo and Dolcini are so eager to discuss their collections is pointedly absent from Mancini’s biography, whose protagonist makes a quick transition at the start of his career in Rome from “being recognized as an expert (valent’huomo), and coming into great repute and great income” to fleeing his creditors in Rome because he spends more than he earns.58 Ribera is presented at once as a scoundrel and as a bit of an idiot: Mancini relates that one year at Easter, not having gone to confession “more out of neglect than out of ill will or any other impediment,”

Ribera tries to obtain a non gravetur in order to avoid getting in trouble. Not only does the non gravetur, an indemnity issued at the discretion of the Cardinal nipote (generally as immunity from the consequences of debt), have no application to Ribera’s taking or

57 Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 249-51; see appendix 9. 58 “... si fece conoscer per valent’huomo e venne in gran reputatione con grandissimo guadagno. Ma in progresso di tempo, rincrescendoli il lavorare e tenendo vita che spendeva molto più che non guadagnava, fu forzato e necessitato dal debito a partirsi di Roma et andarsene a Napoli ...” (“... he gained a reputation as an expert (valent’huomo) and came into great renown with great wealth. But as time went by, as his workload increased and having a lifestyle in which he spent far more than he earned, he was forced and necessitated by debt to leave Rome and to go to Naples ...”). Ibid., 249.

120 not of communion, but Ribera makes a further fool of himself by trying to pull strings in the wrong office and obtain from the Governor’s office an instrument of Canon law.59

Mancini then immediately compounds this example of Ribera’s stupidity with an instance of the painter’s great aptitude as a swindler:

Notwithstanding this simplicity (semplicità) of his, he also possessed, at need, great rhetoric (gran rethorica [sic]), as the most illustrious governor Giulio Bunterentij had many occasions to observe, who [i.e., Ribera] ductus ad presentiam pro suspicione fugae pro dare (presence considered on suspicion of fleeing his creditors), advocated so well for himself that in such straits [the Governor] even came to lend him money against a promise that [Ribera] would make so many paintings for him.60

Where one might expect modesty and well-spoken insight, one finds stupidity and crooked speech. Mancini’s pointed juxtaposition of Ribera’s “semplicità” with his “gran rethorica” is a dry and understated (and thus all the more potent) equation of Ribera with all that is most plebeian and unworthy, a dull wit except when it comes to cheating; naïvely fearful of the simplest rules, yet incorrigibly prone to lies and shady dealing.

Mancini’s biography, like Ludovico Carracci’s and Cosimo del Sera’s letters, ties the way Ribera speaks to the way he works; yet where Cosimo del Sera had written of an

“huomo modestissimo” who was “certain to deliver what he had promised,” Mancini

59 On the non gravetur, see Laerzio Cherubini, Laertii Cherubini de Nursia Civis Romani & in Urbe praestantissimi Advocati Bullarium Sive Nova Collectio Plurimarum Constitutionum Apostolicarum Clementis Octavi et Smi. D. N. Pauli Quinti ... vol. 3 (Rome: Camera Apostolica, 1617), XLI, 55; see also Leopold von Ranke, trans. Sarah Austin, The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. III (London: John Murray, 1840), 275. Fernando Marías has recently linked this passage in Mancini with José Milicua’s speculation that Ribera may have belonged to a family of conversos or even moriscos, suggesting that Ribera’s avoidance of confession and communion might have roots in an altogether less mundane neglect than Mancini supposes in the matter. The case remains inconclusive but is suggestive nonetheless, and certainly worth considering. Fernando Marías, “Arte y arquitectura en la Toledo del Greco: artistas y clientes conversos,” in Michael Scholz- Hänsel and David Sánchez Cano (eds.), Spanische Kunst von El Greco bis Dalí: Ambiguitäten statt Stereotype/Arte Español del Greco hasta Dalí: Ambigüedades en lugar de estereotipos (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2015), 81-107. 60 “Nondimeno con questa sua semplicità haveva congionta, nei bisogni, una gran rethorica [sic], come si vedde più volte in persona dell’illustrissimo governatore Giulio Bunterentij che ductus ad presentiam pro suspicione fugae pro dare, si sapeva tanto ben raccomandare che da esso in quelle necessità li venivan prestati denari con promessa di farle tante pitture.” Mancini, Considerazioni, 250.

121 treats Ribera’s good reputation and “great rhetoric” as a veneer of civility, smooth talk covering an untrustworthy character.

Mancini’s wry skepticism of Ribera’s motives emerges, again with devastating understatement, in the contrast between the painter’s ignominious flight from his creditors and his substantial income: “Finally he left for Naples, and in truth, one might ascribe [to him] some bad faith, for anytime he wanted to work, he earned five or six scudi a day, which, with ordinary expenses (la spesa ordinaria), quickly and easily would have enabled him to pay everyone back.”61 Again, Mancini’s agile wording paints a harsher picture by ellipsis and suggestive omission than by what it actually says, creating the impression of a tactful author drawing a modest veil over the boorish actions of the artist. When Ribera can be bothered to do any work (implying that this is not his general modus operandi), he earns so much that were he to spend at all reasonably (con la spesa ordinaria), he would soon be out of debt; the unspecified expenses of the painter become much wilder in the reader’s imagination than if Mancini had simply stated baldly, “if he didn’t gamble so much, he wouldn’t have had to leave Rome.”

That the source of the painter’s impecunity is neither fine clothing nor comfortable housing is then clarified with the most vivid and damning passage in the short vita:

Nè a tanti sparapani che teneva vi voleva men di questo guadagno, ancorchè s’aiutasse con poche massaritie di casa che eran queste: matarazzi a nolo per sei persone ...... n. 1 coperte duplius usus per coperta e lenzuolo ...... n. 1 salviette e tovaglie tanti stracci a fogli dissegnati ...... n. 1 piatti grandi multi usus ...... n. c fiaschi per bichier e sottocopa ...... n. c

61 “In ultimo si partì per Napoli, et invero si potrebbe ascrivir a un po’ di mala volontà poichè, ogni volta che voleva lavorare, si guadagnava cinque o sei scudi al giorno che, con la spesa ordinaria, presto e facilmente havrebbe pagato ognuno.” Ibid.

122 sedie per sedere mattoni ...... n. X62

The impromptu inventory that Mancini gives of Ribera's pitiful household goods, which

José Milicua describes as a “trozo picaresco” designed to add color to the account, shows a will on the author’s part not only to entertain the reader but subtly to denigrate his subject.63 This caustic inventory takes on the actual format of an official document, ceremoniously tallying the “piatti grandi multi usus” and the “salviette e tovaglie tanti stracci a fogli dissegnati” with dashes leading to their quantities, written along the right margin. Noting the apartment's insalubrious contents in a meticulous inventory is superfluous from a descriptive standpoint, but achieves a striking rhetorical effect. First, because the list takes on the typographical format of an inventory, complete with dashes between the list of items and their number, it accentuates the pitiable condition not only of Ribera's residence but of his life. As though to suggest how little Ribera would have to leave behind in the event of his death, the inventory of his few worthless possessions is a mocker's vanitas, inviting a conflation of the painter's material worth with his personal worth. The format of the inventory also has a satirical function, laying out the miserly

62 “Nor could his many creditors be satisified with less than such a wage, even supplemented as it was by his few household furnishings, which were these: Mattresses, [rented] for six persons...... 1 lot Double blankets used for covers and bedlinens...... 1 lot Napkins and tablecloths of assorted design ...... -- Large plates of multiple use ...... 1 lot of 100 Drinking glasses and saucers...... 1 lot 100 Seats on bricks ...... 10 lots” Trans. Craig Felton, “The Paintings of Ribera,” in Craig Felton and William B. Jordan (eds.), Jusepe de Ribera: Lo Spagnoletto, 1591-1652 (Exh. cat. Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1982), note 17, pp. 67-68. 63 José Milicua, “En el Centenario de Ribera. Ribera en Roma (El Manuscrito de Mancini),” in Archivo Español de Arte, 25 (1952): 309-322, quote p. 320. Paola Santucci takes the idea of the Picaresque literary genre much further in relation to Ribera, seeing the artist as a kind of pícaro in sympathy with the street- dwelling figures he painted; Paola Santucci, “La ‘Dissimulazione Onesta’ di Jusepe de Ribera. Prolegomena su Arte e Cultura nel Seicento Napoletano,” in Archivio Storico del Sannio 3, nos. 1-2 (1992): 5-89, esp. 50-58.

123 contents of the apartment with the officious flourish that one might expect in a notarial document.

Mancini’s strategic use of understatement in the text of the Consderazioni is plain from its contrast and kinship with a letter written to his brother Diefebo in Siena on April

7th, 1617 (appendix 10).64 If the short vita in the Considerations on Painting is as zesty a bit of reading as a Cardinal could wish for on a rainy day, it remains delicately censored compared to Mancini’s letter to his brother. Referring to a painting in Mancini’s own collection, Giulio recounts that “the author of the Saint Jerome is called lo Spagnioletto who now finds himself in Naples with great pomp and reputation and has not so much excess in art as miscreancy of habit in whoring, eating, running amok ...,” and his “great reputation” is in stark contrast with his scurrilous personal conduct. The inventory of

Ribera’s possessions is present, too, in the letter to Diefebo, with additional vivid details:

For in his house there are continually whores in quantity iii, shirtless, filthy, ugly, and (...), beds in quantity i, spread out on the floor; everyone slept there, one person with their head on the floor, and another with here and there a scrap of body; plates quantity i, and one made therein the salad, the soup and everything else, to which corresponded pots, one in number. A flask without glasses and without napkins, and the tablecloth on Sundays was made up of the week’s drawings ...65

As Mancini presents it, Ribera’s residence is appointed with more prostitutes than furniture, and this noble inventory is rounded off with a reiteration of the non gravetur story, in which Mancini adds that Ribera had obtained such an exemption many times already for his debts and that “if he hadn’t [illegible], he would have been sent to the

64 Siena, Archivio della Società degli Esecutori Pie Disposizioni, Eredità Mancini, busta 4, cc. 479-80; transcribed in Maccherini, Caravaggio e i Caravaggeschi, 306; quoted from Justus Lange, “Opere veramente di rara naturalezza” Studien zum Frühwerk Jusepe de Riberas mit Katalog der Gemälde bis 1626 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003), doc. no. 24, pp. 268-69. 65 “Perché in casa sua continuamente puttane numero iij, senza camicia, sozze, laide e (...), letti numero i, distesso in terra; tutti dormivano chi mettendovi il capo in terra e chi un po’ di corpo; piatti numero i e vi si faceva l’insalata, la broda e ogni cosa, al quale corrispondeva pignatte numero uno. Un fiascho senza bichiera e senza salviette e la tovaglia la domenica erono le carte del disegnio della settimana (...).” Ibid.

124 galleys.”66 The skill that has made Ribera’s success appears in Mancini’s letter to be somewhat wasted on a man who can barely keep himself out of prison, and who values his talent no more than his drawings, which he treats as one might a stack of bulk rate advertisements nowadays.

The letter to Diefebo starts with a reference to a painting of Saint Jerome that

Mancini owned, and concludes with a discussion of how quickly the painter operated, and how greatly the prices of his pictures have increased.67 Whether Mancini is filled with disdain or simply bemused by the contrast between Ribera’s “gran fasto e reputazione” and the unworthiness of his conduct, there does seem to be an unspoken hint that perhaps both the high prices and the reputation are disproportionate to the artist’s true merits. The letter to Diefebo can be read as neutral, admiring, or disapproving of

Ribera, but there is certainly no doubt in Mancini’s mind that Ribera has fared much better than he deserves to. Within his more public presentation of the artist in the

Considerations on Painting, Mancini’s tone is more sardonic beneath the decorous understatements, the “manigoldaria nel costume di puttane” having become “costumi un po’ licentiosetti.” Yet in spite of his gentle glosses on the cruder parts of Ribera’s

66 “Et con tanta sua manigoldaria non s’essendo l’anno passato confessato, dubbitando di non andar in prigione, dimandava ad un amico come potesse far per tal affetto a haver un non graveatur, come per debito le haveva fatto haver più volte e per altri ripetti che il governatore; se non havesse [...] l’havarebbe mandato in Galera.” ("And with so much miscreancy, not having been to confession in the past year, and being worried that he might go to prison, he asked a friend how he might effect to obtain a non graveatur [sic.], as for his debts he had done many times and through other channels than the governor; if he hadn’t [...], they would have sent him to the galleys.”) Ibid. 67 See appendix 10; Mancini’s discussions of Ribera’s speed and rates of pay are continued in the Considerations, which single out Ribera and Caravaggio as instances of painters whose works have undergone enormous inflation; Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 139. Gianni Papi has used these figures as the basis for calculations concerning Ribera’s level of output during his Roman years; Gianni Papi, Ribera a Roma (Soncino: Edizioni del Soncino, 2007), 16. I would tend instead to view this maneuver on Mancini’s part as a way of characterizing the high prices commanded by Ribera and Caravaggio as somewhat aberrant, separating them from the more ennobling references to high prices that Mancini attaches to artists such as Allori or Manfredi; see notes 69 and 87 below.

125 lifestyle, Mancini’s public vita is much more damning than the superficially raunchier version written for his brother.

Conversation versus artistic inclination in Mancini’s biographies of artists

Mancini underscores the contrast between Ribera’s painterly talent and uncouth personal habits by more or less inverting them at the start of the following vita in the

Considerations, that of Bartolommeo Manfredi: “Gladly do I put after lo Spagnoletto

Bartolomeo Manfredi, for being almost in all his ways contrary to him and joining him in the manner of Caravaggio, but with more purpose, union, and sweetness (fine, unione e dolcezza).”68 Having praised Manfredi’s style and noted the great esteem in which his works are held, Mancini confirms the public honor that devolves on the artist, as reflected in the prices he commands and in the nobility of his clientele.69 Whereas Mancini’s mention to Diefebo of Ribera’s prices becomes a point of contrast with the painter’s debt- and prostitute-ridden existence, Manfredi’s price range is consonant with the honor in which he is held by the Florentine Academy, the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, and collectors of the caliber of the Chigi and Giustiniani families. Shyness, tempered with pleasure in conversation that sometimes goes with incautious expenditure, appears to be Manfredi’s

68 “Pongo volentieri doppo lo Spagnoletto Bartolomeo Manfredi, per esser quasi del tutto nel trattare contrario a lui e convenir nella maniera del Caravaggio, ma con più fine, unione e dolcezza.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 251. 69 “Di cose publiche ha operato poco, ma moltissimi quadri privati che dall’Altezza di Toscana ne sono stati compri [sic] a prezzo di 300 e 400 scudi; molti ne son appresso all’illustrissimo marchese Giustiniano et altri. L’Accademia dei Pittori di Fiorenza l’honora molto, che per tal rispetto ne ha voluto il suo ritratto. Comincia a far dell’opere publiche. In Siena vi è uno (dis?)egnio in casa del signor cavalier Chigi, la meglior cosa che forse habbia fatta con intentione, fine, et verità.” (“He has made but few public works, but a great many private pictures, some of which have been purchased by [his] Highness of Tuscany at a price of 300 and 400 scudi; many of them are [in the collections of] the most illustrious marquis Giustiniano and others. The Academy of Painters of Florence honors him greatly, and for this reason they asked him for his portrait. He is beginning to make public works. In Siena there is a [drawing] in the home of the signor cavalier Chigi, perhaps the best thing that he has made with intention, purpose, and truth.”) Ibid.

126 leading flaw; Mancini’s conclusion that Manfredi is a man “of noble aspect, of excellent habits (di costume buonissimo)” completes his pointed opposition with Ribera.70

It is significant that Mancini accentuates Manfredi’s pleasure and skill in speaking as a point of contrast with Ribera. As we know from the other sources already discussed

(Carracci, Del Sera), Ribera too was sought after for his conversation; certainly, he had worked for many of the same patrons as Manfredi, such as the brothers Giustiniani and the Tuscan court. I would suggest that the purpose of the contrast between the two artists is not to make Ribera look bad, but to show on the one hand a painter of noble bearing who converses well (Manfredi), and on the other, an artist’s artist, whose natural disposition and preternatural talent are accompanied by shocking habits.

In this respect, the biography that Mancini gives of Ribera is well-nigh unique among his vite of living artists, introducing the painter with a marked shift in narrative voice from his usual formulas, which begin with a painter’s origins, parentage, or time of arrival in Rome. The closest available comparison within the same section of the

Considerations on Painting is with the anonymous “Don ***” (Matteo Zoccolino), whose vita also begins with great emphasis on his natural inclination, as having taken holy orders he nonetheless took to painting “goaded by natural and painterly furor”

(spinto dal furor naturale pittorescho).71 The idea of natural inclination, with furor as its key expression, is central to Mancini’s distinction between the artistic inclination that can only be a gift, and the training in judgment and disegno available to many. Whereas in

70 “E d’aspetto nobile, di costume buonissimo, d’età incirca 33 in 34 anni e ritirato, ma però a certi tempi ama la conversazione, et in tal occasione non guarda allo spendere; ma pero è pocho.” Ibid. 71 “E porge meraviglia nel considerar quanto che possa la natura nella professione della pittura, poiché il signor don *** vive in *** et, entrato nella religione per salute del anima sua, nondimeno, spinto dal furor naturale pittorescho et in particulare nella prospettiva fa cose maravigliose anchorchè da esso sien fatte per scherzo et in un subito.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 263.

127 general, Mancini declares categorically (in response to Lomazzo) that “no one is born a painter,” but that the art of painting is acquired by training and “intellective habit,”72 his biography of Ribera accentuates the idea of inborn proclivity. Mancini starts by emphasizing the Spaniard's preternatural talent, albeit in a curious double negative: “One cannot nor should one attempt to deny that Giuseppe Ribera, Valencian, commonly called il Spagnoletto, should not have had a disposition from nature, the likes of which for many years has not been seen among the subjects who have [since] appeared [here in Rome]

(...).”73 This apparent praise has the dual effect of emphasizing Ribera’s singular degree of natural aptitude while also indicating that it is invoked as a defense against as yet

72 The issue arises as Mancini objects to Lomazzo’s omission of a philosophically rigorous definition of painting in his treatise on the subject: “Che havendo lasciato queste considerationi, par che in questo sia diminuto, tanto più che subbito se ne passa a considerar la natura della pittura, quale in parte dependeva dal intelligenza di suo nome; nella quale, senza considerar il suo soggetto, subito ne propon la sua difinitione senza haver prima proposto il metodo et modo con il quale insegnano i logici trovarsi la natura e con essa la difinitione delle cose, e queste sono li accidenti sensati come, in proposito nostro, che nesciun nasce pittore, ma che tal professione s’acquista per disciplina, studio, immitation et osservanza, come s’acquistano li habiti dell’intelletto; che il fin del pittore e pittura non è l’attion et operatione istessa, ma quel che lascia dopo di sè d’opera fatta che si dice pittura; che quest’opera fatta è immitation, o mediatamente, o immediatamente, delle cose che si ritrovano in questo mondo; et appresso che quest’immitation non sempre ha il suo fine con il color naturale; et in ultimo che per fin suo ha il diletto et utilità che dà ai riguardanti.” (“That having left aside these considerations, he would seem in this arena to be lesser, all the more so as he quickly goes on to consider the nature of painting, which in part depended on the interpretation of its name (dependeva dal intelligenza di suo nome); in which matter, without considering his subject, he quickly offers its definition without having first proposed the method and mode in which logicians teach us to find the nature and therewith the definitions of things, and these are the sensory accidents (accidenti sensati), as in our own proposition that no one is born a painter, but that such a profession is acquired by discipline, study, imitation, and observance, just as the habits of the intellect are acquired; that the purpose of the painter and of painting is not the action and operation itself, but that which it leaves behind, its work that is called painting (pittura); that this made work is an imitation, either mediated or unmediated (o mediatamente o immediatamente), of the things that are found in this world; and moreover that this imitation does not always have as its purpose the colors of nature (il color naturale); and finally, that it has as its end the delight and utility that it gives to its beholders.”) Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 155-56. An important discussion of this issue is in Frances Gage, “Invention, Wit and Melancholy in the Art of Annibale Carracci,” in Intellectual History Review 24, no. 3 (2014): 389-413, esp. 8-11, and in Gage, “Artist-Amateur Relations,” 252-60. 73 “Non si può nè deve negare che Giusepe Ribera, valentiano, communemente detto il Spagnoletto, non habbia havuto una disposition tale da natura che da molt’anni in qua, fra i suggetti comparsi, non si sia vista la maggiore (...) [in one version: “non si sia vista la maggiore fra i suggetti che son comparsi qui in Roma Ma”].” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 249.

128 unspecified flaws. Any biography that begins “One can’t deny what great natural talent he had” is hardly likely to continue in a flattering vein.

A similarly backhanded compliment introduces Mancini’s biography of

Caravaggio: “This age of ours owes much to Michelangelo da Caravaggio, for the coloring that he introduced, now followed fairly commonly.”74 The specification that many thanks are due to Caravaggio braces the reader for Mancini’s narration of the extravagance (stravaganza) that characterized Michelangelo Merisi’s behavior. After recounting the painter’s death and burial, Mancini returns to the idea of gratitude, using the same double negative construction as in Ribera’s vita: “One cannot deny that for a single figure, for the heads and coloring, he [Caravaggio] did not attain a high mark (non sia arrivato ad un gran segno) and that the profession [of painting] in this century is not greatly indebted to him.”75 The dominant anecdote, for which this assertion of debt is the counterweight, is Caravaggio’s callous denial of his brother, an unprovoked breach of family obligation that takes on sacrilegious overtones, since the brother in question is also a priest.76 Mancini reports verbatim a moving speech given by the brother, who only obtains an interview with Caravaggio at all through Cardinal Del Monte’s pressure on the painter on discovering his “bestiality” (bestialità) in denying that he had any family.77

74 “Deve molto questa nostra età a Michelangelo da Caravaggio, per il colorir che ha introdotto, seguito adesso assai communemente.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 223. 75 “Non si puol negare che per una figura sola, per le teste e colorito non sia arrivato ad un gran segno e che la professione di questo secolo non li sia molto obligata.” Ibid., I, 225. 76 As Frances Gage points out, noting the paradigmatic contrast between Caravaggio’s death as “an implicit consequence of his “bizarre behavior” (stravaganza di costumi)” and the decorous Christian passing of Annibale Carracci. Gage, “Invention, Wit, and Melancholy,” 3. 77 “Ma questo suo gran saper d’arte l’haveva accompagnato con una stravaganza de costumi, perchè haveva un unico fratello, sacerdote, huomo di lettere e bon costumi, qual, sentendo i gridi del fratello, gli venne voglia di vederlo, e mosso da fraterno amore se ne viene a Roma, e sapendo che era trattenuto in casa dell’illustrissimo cardinal Del Monte et il stravagante modo del fratello, pensò esser bene di far prima motto all’illustrissimo Cardinale et esporli il tutto come fece: hebbe bonissime parole, che tornasse fra tre giorni. Obbesdice. Fra tanto il Cardinale chiama Michelangelo, gi dimanda se ha parenti; gli risponde che no; nè potendo credere che quel sacerdote gli dicesse bugia in cosa che si poteva ritrovare e che non gli

129 When Caravaggio stonewalls his brother, forcing him to depart again without so much as a “buon viaggio a Dio,” Mancini again invokes Caravaggio’s contribution to his profession, but this time in harsh and direct juxtaposition with his inhuman behavior:

Whence one cannot deny that he was most extravagant (stravagantissimo), and with these extravagances of his that there were not taken from him several decades of life and thus diminished in part the glory that he had acquired through his profession: which by living he would have increased, with great utility to those who study such a profession.78

Mancini employs the same turn of phrase, “non si può negare,” to create oppositions between Caravaggio’s and Ribera’s greatness in their profession and their contemptible conduct as men, as though attempting to excuse the one with the other.

risultava utile, perciò fra tanto fa cercare fra paesani se Michelangelo havesse fratelli e chi, e trovò che la bestialità era da parte di Michelangelo. Torna il prete doppo i tre giorni, e trattenuto dal Cardinale fa chiamar Michelangelo, e mostrandoli il fratello, disse che non lo conosceva nè essergli fratello. Onde il povero prete, intenerito, alla presenza del Cardinale, gli disse: “Fratello io son venuto tanto da lontano sol per vedervi, et havendovi visto ho ottenuto quello che desiderava, essendo io in stato, per gratia di Dio, come sapete, che non ho bisogno di voi nè per me nè per i miei figli, ma si ben per i vostri, se Dio m’havesse concesso gratia di farvi accompagnare e vedervi successione. Dio vi dia da far bene come io ne’ miei sacrificij pregarò Sua Divina Maestà et il medesimo so che farà vostra sorella nelle sue pudiche e verginali orationi.” Nè si movendo Michelangelo a queste parole di ardente e scintillante amore, si partì il buon sacerdote senza haver del fratello un buon viaggio a Dio.” (“But this great knowledge of art of his was accompanied by extravagant behavior (una stravaganza de costumi), for he had a single brother, a priest, a man of letters and good habits, who, hearing of his brother’s fame, had a great wish to see him, and moved by brotherly love he came to Rome, and knowing that [Caravaggio] was staying in the house of the most illustrious cardinal Del Monte, and [also knowing] his brother’s extravagant ways, he thought it good first to contact the most illustrious Cardinal and to present the whole situation to him, as he then did: he received most courteous words, and was asked to return in three days’ time. He obeys. In the meantime, the Cardinal calls Michelangelo, asks him whether he has relatives; he replies that he does not; not being able to believe that this priest would lie to him in a matter that could be verified and from which he could have nothing to gain, [Del Monte] has inquiries made among [their] compatriots as to whether Michelangelo has brothers and who they might be, and discovers that this beastly act (bestialità) was on Michelangelo’s part. The priest returns after three days, and having been granted audience by the Cardinal, Michelangelo is summoned, and showing his brother to him, [Caravaggio] said that he did not know him, nor was he his brother. Whence the poor priest, moved to tenderness, in the presence of the Cardinal, said to him: “Brother, I have come all this distance only to see you, and having seen you I have obtained what I desired, as I am in a state, by the grace of God, as you know, in which I do not need you either for myself or for my children, but only for your own, if God had conceded to me the grace of finding you a companion and seeing your succession. God grant to you to do well, as I in my sacrifices will pray of his Divine Majesty, and I know that your sister in her modest and virginal prayers will do the same.” Michelangelo not even having been moved by these words of ardent and shining love, the priest left without having from his brother so much as a Godspeed or farewell.”) Ibid., I, 225-26. 78 “Onde non si può negare che non fusse stravagantissimo, e con queste sue stravaganze non si sia tolto qualche dicina d’anni di vita et minuitasi in parte la gloria acquistata con la professione: e col viver si sarebbe agumentato [sic] con grand’utile de’studiosi di simil professione.” Ibid., I, 226.

130 As he had done with Caravaggio, Mancini presents Ribera and his conduct as dishonorable, while also valuing and collecting his paintings.79 These two elements were not in tension within Mancini's writings. On the contrary, for Mancini, the disposition that makes a great artist is the very one that can lead to behavioral disorder, a medical assessment bound up with understandings of melancholy as the characteristic temperament of creative genius.80 The point at issue for Mancini is to separate the natural inclination that characterizes great painters such as Ribera and Caravaggio from the particular disposition of mind that Mancini wants to mark off as the hallmark of an intenditore.

Mancini's biographies of both artists were not part of a project whose main purpose was to write the lives of the painters. Rather, the lives of the painters are included to complete Mancini's self-presentation as an expert on painting.81 In a sense, just as Carducho had practised a kind of connoisseurship on the well-spoken gentleman whose knowledge was mere oropel, Mancini’s biographies are a demonstration and an extension of his understanding of art, incorporating his (often medical) assessments of each artist’s character into his estimation of their works.82 This is an important point from which to reconsider Mancini’s biography of Ribera, not in order to “defend” the painter from the most reliably accurate of his biographers (whose account of Ribera’s unsavory

79 Michele Maccherini, “Caravaggio nel Carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini,” in Prospettiva 86 (1997): 71-92, esp. 76; Papi, Ribera a Roma, 14-16. 80 This is argued in detail, with further bibliography, in Gage, “Invention, Wit, and Melancholy,” 4-16 et passim. 81 Gage, “Exercise for Mind and Body,” 1168-69. 82 Donatella Sparti’s contention that Mancini’s medical expertise was incidental or sideral to his connoisseurial activities has been conclusively disproven by Frances Gage and Alberto Frigo; Donatella Livia Sparti, “Novità su Giulio Mancini: Medicina, arte e presunta “Connoisseurship”,” in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 52, no. 1 (2008): 53-72; Gage, “Invention, Wit, and Melancholy,” passim; Frigo, “Can One Speak of Painting,” 419-21, 429-32, et passim.

131 lifestyle in Rome is probably well founded in fact), but in order to appreciate what

Mancini was trying to accomplish by writing this way about Ribera within the context of his own larger project.

While Mancini often underscores the praise of an artist’s works with a reference to their nobility of manner, dress, or bearing, he only very rarely concedes to artists the connoisseurial capacities that are the subject of the Considerations on Painting overall.

For instance, he repeats, without correcting it, a rumor that Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the

Painters, Sculptors, and Architects were in fact written by Raffaello Borghini, “for he

[Vasari] could not have either such rhetoric or such logic, nor could he say and order things so well, but that only the authors of the paintings [come] from him, and even these without diligence or judgment.”83 When praising Lodovico Cigoli’s “great ingenuity”

(grand’ingegno) and “great erudition” (molt’eruditione), Mancini ties the painter’s desire for knowledge to an excessive curiosity that ultimately brings him to an untimely death.84

Cigoli’s strenuous studies of anatomy are symptomatic of the same excessive curiosity and “troppo sapere” that are his undoing: his own inexpert medical knowledge prompts

83 “Si crede che le vite da lui scritte, o che vanno sotto nome suo, non siano sue, ma del Borghini, perchè non poteva haver nè tanta retorica nè logica, nè dir et ordinar così ben le cose, ma che sol vi sia di suo gl’autori delle pitture et di quelle ancor non con diligenza e giudizio.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 231. 84 “Fu huomo di grand’ingegno et, applicandosi a diverse cose, in tutto mostrò eccesso; perchè si dilettò della musica, della poesia e dell’architettura e pittura quale fu sua professione e per essa fece grandi studij e fadighe, come si vede da quella sua anatomia che va attorno, che non si puol condur se non con gran studij e fadighe. ... Operò ... in S. Maria Maggiore la cupola della cappella, dove non havendo havuto nè dato sodisfattione, per quanto vien detto, s’amalò e, per curiosità o troppo sapere, pigliò senz’ordine del medico non so che seme ricino e, malignandosi la febre, in un tratto infiacchendosi la vita, morì in pochissimi giorni.” (“He was a man of great ingenuity, and, applying himself to various things, in all he showed excess; for he delighted in music, in poetry, and in architecture and painting, which was his profession, and for it he undertook great studies and great pains, as may be seen in his anatomy that is in circulation, which cannot be conducted except with great pains and studies. ... He made ... in Santa Maria Maggiore the cupola of the chapel, where, not having received nor given satisfaction, it is said, he made himself ill, by curiosity or too much knowledge, he took without the orders of a doctor I know not what seed of castor oil plant, and, his fever becoming malignant, all at once his life ebbed away, and he died in but a few days.”) Ibid., I, 229.

132 him to self-prescribe a medicinal plant that provokes the malignant fever of which he dies. Mancini concludes with a physiognomic assessment of Cigoli that situates the weight of his ingenuity in his scientific interests rather than his painterly skills, categorically separating the two:

From what one could see in the external [appearance] of his physiognomy and bearing, always of a pensive spirit, he was of a nature to make greater progress in the matters of philosophical and mathematical contemplation and invention than in invention with [regard to] practice in matters of painting.85

There could be no more stringent nor startling assessment of a painter so remarkable for his mastery of and participation in current and cutting-edge research in natural philosophy. A painter who was close friends with Galileo, wrote a treatise on mathematics, and conducted his own telescopic observations of sunspots was not accorded much credit by Mancini for the way he incorporated these ennobling interests into his artistic practice.86

The only instance in which Mancini explicitly describes an artist in the terms he might apply to the Considerations’ ideal connoisseur is the life of Cristofano Allori.

“Bronzin Giovane,” whose extravagant remuneration is for exquisitely finished paintings in an extremely narrow range of practice, is described as a man with the inclinations of a

85 “Da quello che si vedeva dall’externo di sua fisonomia e star sempre cogitabondo d’animo, era di natura da far maggior progresso nelle cose di contemplatione et invention filosofiche e matematiche, che dell’invention con l’operare nelle cose della pittura.” Ibid. 86 That he did so is absolutely undeniable; see for instance Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: M. Nijhof, 1954); Miles Chappell, “Cigoli, Galileo, and Invidia,” in Art Bulletin 57, no. 1 (1975): 91-98; Stephen F. Ostrow, “Cigoli’s Immacolata and Galileo’s Moon: Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome,” in Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (1996): 218-35; Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. 90-138, 167-70; Miles Chappell, “’Il vero senza passione’: proposte su Cigoli e Galileo,” in Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Alessandro Tosi (eds.), Il Cannocchiale e il Pennello. Nuova Scienza e nuova arte nell’età di Galileo (exh. cat. Pisa: Palazzo Blu, 2009), 131-41; Federico Tognoni (ed.), Il Carteggio Cigoli-Galileo 1609-1613 (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2009); Horst Bredekamp, “Style Matters: Galileo’s Collaboration with Lodovico Cigoli,” in Medieval Renaissance Baroque: A Cat’s Cradle for Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (New York: Italica Press, 2010), 111-28; and Filippo Camerota, Linear Perspective in the Age of Galileo: Ludovico Cigoli’s Prospettiva Pratica (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2010).

133 gentleman who happens to have mastered to perfection a finite repertoire of artistic abilities.87 In praising Allori’s gentlemanly tastes and inclinations, Mancini in fact specifies their segregation from his activities as a professional painter: “Apart from painting (fuor del pittore) [italics mine], he possesses erudition and knowledge of gentlemanly matters, with an inclination to philosophical studies and political writings.

He is of noble habits and thus most beloved of His Highness of Tuscany his natural prince.”88 Should an artist happen to have the mind and inclinations of a connoisseur, it is to the exclusion of the kind of natural inclination that characterizes Ribera or Caravaggio.

Bartolomeo Manfredi’s pleasure in conversation, in its pointed contrast with

Ribera’s socially unacceptable conduct, also suggests an opposition between conversational finesse and the overwhelming natural inclination to art that Mancini ascribes to Spagnoletto. Caravaggio and Ribera become paradigmatic in uniting an excess of inborn talent with an exclusion from the realms of taste and gentlemanly conduct that most artists managed at least partially to exemplify. Mancini describes Ribera in his

Roman years as essentially dishonorable, and subtly presents him as all the more a painter's painter for it: “Non si puo ne deve negare che Giuseppe Ribera ... non habbia havuto una disposition tale da natura che da molt'anni in qua, fra i suggetti comparsi, non

87 “Pochi mesi sono fu detto che in Fiorenza fusse morto *** Bronzini, per distinguerlo dall’altro Bronzino pittor famoso, detto communemente il Bronzin Giovane, il quale, nel finir una cosa, è meraviglioso, esprimendo qualsivoglia minima cosa che sia nel naturale. Puol poco operare, ma quel poco lo fa eccellente e li vien benissimo pagato, come si vede nella Juditta dell’illustrissimo Orsino che le fu pagata 300 scudi: invero è bellissima e finitissima.” (“Only a few months ago it was said that *** Bronzini had died in Florence, commonly called the Young Bronzino to distinguish him from the other famous painter Bronzino; in finishing a thing, [he is] wonderful, expressing even the most minute thing as in nature (nel naturale). He can work but little, but that little he renders excellently and is paid most handsomely for it, as can be seen in the Judith of the most illustrious Orsino, which brought him 300 scudi: truly it is most beautiful and exquisitely finished.”) Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 228. 88 “Fuor del pittore è d’eruditione e cognitione di cose da gentilhuomo, con inclination a studij filosofeci e di lettere politiche. È di costume noblie e pertanto amatissimo dall’Altezza di Toscana suo prencipe naturale.” Ibid. Many thanks to Yoko Hara especially, and also to Chris Geekie and Ludovica Jona, for their kind help with this translation.

134 si sia vista la maggiore ...”89 The facts of Ribera's life probably assisted Mancini in obtaining this effect. Yet given the fact that two other early sources independently describe Ribera as having a particular aptitude in the connoisseurial arena that Mancini was marking off as his own preserve, it seems plausible to read at least this portion of the

Sienese doctor's biography of Ribera as a response to a perceived competition for authority and skill in discussing paintings.

Honor & dishonor: Connoisseurship as social capital

The letters by Ludovico Carracci and Cosimo del Sera discussed earlier show

Ribera's interest and aptitude in the kind of spoken, courtly engagement with paintings from which Mancini's text seeks to segregate artists. In fact, the emphasis in both sets of letters on Ribera as a well-spoken man of taste is in stark contrast to the image of Ribera that Mancini gives of the painter who fled Rome because he could not meet his debts.

One may speculate as to the motives Mancini may have had (including truthfulness) for representing Ribera as such an unwashed rogue. Yet Ribera's biography in this text makes a good deal more sense as a component in a larger strategy aimed at displacing authority over pictures from the artists over to the conoscitori whose activities Mancini is interested in promoting. Mancini's image of Ribera thus reinforces and indirectly justifies his assertion in the introduction to the Considerazioni that artists are not fit judges of painting. Mancini’s biography of Ribera is not factually incompatible with the evidence of early writers such as Ludovico Carracci and Cosimo del Sera; rather, the picture that these latter sources offer of Ribera is incompatible with the aims and parameters of

89 Op. cit. note 73.

135 Mancini’s text, which is premised on a sharp segregation between artistic inclination and connoisseurial authority.

The introduction to the Considerations (appendix 8), quoted briefly at the start of this chapter, addresses the question that is the title of Alberto Frigo’s excellent analysis thereof: “Can one speak of painting if one cannot hold a brush?” Mancini’s answer is predictably in the affirmative, but the fact that he goes to the trouble of anticipating the question so thoroughly attests to a strong expectation that practice should translate into authority. As Frigo explains, Mancini diverged from contemporary thinkers on connoisseurship such as Franciscus Junius, who argued that an innate sense of taste was what made the connoisseur; instead, drawing on a current discussion within the medical community about Aristotle’s categories of peritia and scientia, Mancini argued that an experience of things in general and a disposition or faculty of correctly ordering their value was more important than expertise in a particular subfield of knowledge.90 What made the huomo perito a superior judge on any subject was his mediocre ingegno, his cultivation of a balanced mind and of judgment as such, a capacity from which (as mentioned earlier) artists were disbarred by their submission to creative furor (appendix

8).

In a similar vein, if not quite within the same logic, the introduction to the

Considerazioni contrasts the painter's superficial understanding of the body with a medical knowledge thereof.91 This imperfect understanding makes the artist an inadequate judge, whose expertise is of a different (and inferior) order, just as the man who can teach dancing or horsebackriding has a lesser understanding than the doctor,

90 Frigo, “Can one speak of painting,” 421-29, 432-35. 91 Mancini, Considerazioni, 5-12.

136 who understands these activities' uses, discerning how they affect the person's health, and for whom they are appropriate.92 The very habits of mind that make an able painter also make an inept judge:

Whence, in conclusion, this judgment is impossible or most difficult for the painter, as it demands that the intellect be stripped of the imaginary (fantasma) of which it is to judge, as we gather from Aristotle on the Soul, III: “Intus existens prohibet extraneum” [that which is within prevents that which is without]. Wherefore the painter, who in order to operate must have this phantasm (fantasma) in his imagination (fantasia), it cannot be corrected by the intellect and, even if it should happen to be corrected, this occurs only with difficulty in few cases and after a long time, and this, as Aristotle said, cum ferit singula factus, that is after having acquired the habit of wisdom, intelligence, and prudence.93

Thus, for Caravaggio and Ribera to lead dissolute lives but to produce excellent paintings, though superficially against the grain of the time, reinforces Mancini's point that the skills and habits of mind that make painters excel at their work are not only different but opposed to the traits and abilities that make a good judge of paintings.

Should the two categories happen to coexist in certain individuals, these become the exceptions that prove the rule. While Mancini frequently notes a given artist’s nobility of speech, dress, or bearing, he never does so in conjunction with any emphasis on the artist’s natural inclination.

If the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani’s exercise of taste and submission to his predilections was an expression of nobility, a professional man of Mancini’s social standing could hardly reiterate such a claim. Mancini’s insistence on connoisseurship as a faculty to be cultivated makes it an ennobling rather than an exclusively noble activity.

92 Ibid., 8-9. 93 “Onde, per conclusione, è impossibile o difficilissimo questo giuditio nel pittore, ricercando quella nudità dell'intelletto dal fantasma del quale deve giudicare, havendo noi da Aristotile al III del Anima: “Intus existens prohibet extraneum.” Onde il pittor, per operar dovendo havere questa fantasma nella fantasia, non puol esser corretta dall'intelletto e, se pur avviene che si correga, ciò avviene o con difficoltà in pochi e dopo longo tempo, e ciò, come diceva Aristotile, cum ferit singula factus, cioè dopo haver acquistato l'habito della sapienza, intelligenza, e prudenza.” Ibid., 9.

137 Mancini’s assertion of his own prerogative to judge art, however, occurs at the expense of the traditional view that those who make a thing are entitled to evaluate it. In the introduction to the Considerations on Painting, in a treatise on honor and dishonor, and in a short treatise on drawing, Mancini accomplishes this maneuver by distinguishing between professional artistic practice as a whole and training in disegno.

Circulated in manuscript within a Roman and Tuscan circle of highly-placed clerical patrons, the Considerazioni were addressed only indirectly to Mancini's peers.

The treatise's immediate audience was the circle of Cardinals for whom Mancini was working before Urban VIII appointed him papal physician.94 A key purpose of the

Considerazioni was to provide edifying and entertaining reading to a high-ranking audience, and thus to share in their interests and to close the social gap between them and

Mancini.95 By adopting an open address to a generic audience of dilettanti rather than dedicating or addressing the work to a particular patron, Mancini makes himself the peer of his readers without any breach in modesty or etiquette.

If collecting and appreciating art were defensible as noble pursuits based on the nobility of the men who engaged in them, the practical and less ennobling aspects of painting were to be held at arm's length. Mancini’s Discorso dell'honore, or to give its

94 On Mancini’s patrons and associates in Rome, see Maccherini, Caravaggio e i Caravaggeschi, 36-49. Silvia De Renzi makes the persuasive case that Mancini found manuscripts more advantageous than publishing for social and financial reasons, enabling the mode of circulation of his writings to foster the sense of a privileged coterie rather than a mass audience; Silvia De Renzi, “A Career in Manuscripts: Genres and Purposes of a Physician’s Writing in Rome, 1600-1630,” in Italian Studies 66, no. 2 (2011): 234-48. 95 Gage describes the Considerations as addressing male non-ecclesiastical collectors with extensive households, of a “third rank” after the pope and the curia, who take their social cues primarily from the Cardinal-nipote, using a rhetorical strategy of appearing to speak to (Mancini’s) social equals while tailoring remarks to fit an audience of superiors. Frances Gage, “Observing Order,” in Gail Feigenbaum (ed.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace 1550-1750 (Los Angeles: Getty Institute, 2014), 204-214, esp. 205-6.

138 full title, “Alcune considerazioni del honore fatte da Giulio Mancini per suo trattenimento. Occasione del scrivere e come introduttione a quel che si deve dire,” addresses the nature of honor and dishonor with examples of several specific behaviors and professions.96 This treatise spells out the distinctions that Mancini draws more implicitly in the Considerazioni sulla Pittura between his own profession and painting. A large portion of the Discorso on honor and dishonor is devoted to describing a hierarchy among the various professions, and medical practitioners appear to unsurprising advantage.97 The practice of medicine meets all of the criteria set forth for an honorable profession: of making the soul free and not servile, of bringing no degradation to the body, of contributing to the public welfare and the good of the nation, and of both cultivating and necessitating the highest and most intellectual aptitudes.

In the same discourse, Mancini also praises the practice of painting for the honor it derives from the noble figures who have practiced it (with the famous example of the

Roman Patrician Fabius Pictor duly provided), noting its utility and pleasure, through which it adds to the public welfare (appendix 11).98 The practices of both painting and sculpture, however, are not exempt from sordidezze. While painters are sullied by their oils, sculptors risk their health and their very lives, making both categories of activity unsuitable for a gentleman. Drawing, on the other hand, is exempted from the dishonorable components of these professions and encouraged, as it is in the introduction to Mancini's Considerazioni: what confirms the huomo perito in his ability to judge art is

96 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb. Lat. 4314, ff. 1-179; see Mancini, Considerazioni, lvii. 97 Ibid., ff. 115v-118r. 98 Ibid., ff. 120v-123r.

139 a knowledge of drawing, which is itself a capacity for judgment.99 What art contributes to the good of society is not primarily a set of completed objects (paintings, etc., which for

Mancini are luxuries rather than necessities), but disegno, understood as an embodied practice of cognition whose applications are far more wide-ranging than painting or sculpture, making disegno useful. Wishing to have the matter both ways, Mancini also invokes Aristotle’s Politics to argue that a great part of the civic and political utility of

99 “Qual peritia nelle cose appertinenti alla pittura come s’acquisti l’esplicò l’istesso Aristotile nel VIII della Politica, al cap. 3, quando che propose le quattro discipline necessarie per il suo futuro buon cittadino quando disse: “Videtur quoque figurandi peritia utilis esse ad iudicandum / melius artificium opera.” Perchè un huomo civile, per complimento di sua civiltà dovendo imparar a disegniare com’insegna Aristotile nel luogo citato et altri che scrivono dell’institution civile, con questa facoltà di saper disegnare acquista questo giuditio, come insegna più a basso dicendo: “Similiter quoque figurandi peritia non ut in vendendo emendoque vasa non decipiamur, sed quia contemplari facit pulchritudinem corporum; quaerere vero utilitatem ubique non congruit magnanimis.” Onde questo nostro perito, per mezzo di saper disegnare, con la peritia e cognition universale dell’altre cose, potrà dar giuditio delle pitture: tanto più ch’è vero che al dar giuditio sia util il saper operar quelle tal cose, ma però non è commune nè necessario nè in tutte l’artificose et in particulare nella pittura; perchè questa, non essendo altro ch’un’immitatione delle cose che si ritrovano in questo mondo che sono da più persone riconosciute e giudicate, come l’artificiose dall’artefice che le fa - come dichiarò il ditterio d’Appelle non ultra crepidam et di Stratonico Musico detto di sopra - le naturali da quelli che l’osservano e considerano, le civili da quelli che le fanno et hanno in prattica.” (“How such exercise of judgment (peritia) in matters pertaining to painting may be acquired was explained by Aristotle in the Politics VIII, ch. 3, when he proposed the four disciplines necessary for a future good citizen, saying, “Videtur quoque figurandi peritia utilis esse ad iudicandum / melius artificium opera.” For a civil man, needing, as a complement to his civility, to learn to draw, as Aristotle instructs in the passage cited and others that deal with the civil institution, with this faculty of knowing how to draw, [the civil man] acquires this judgment (giuditio), as [Aristotle] says further on: “Similiter quoque figurandi peritia non ut in vendendo emendoque vasa non decipiamur, sed quia contemplari facit pulchritudinem corporum; quaerere vero utilitatem ubique non congruit magnanimis.” Whence our man of judgment (perito), by means of knowing how to draw, with the exercise of judgment (peritia) and universal cognition of other things, will be able to pass judgment on paintings: all the more so as it is true that in rendering judgment it is useful to know how to make such things (operar quelle tal cose), but it is not common nor necessary, either in all arts nor in painting in particular; for the latter, being nothing other than an imitation of the things that are found in this world that are recognized and judged by several people, as art is [judged] by the artist that makes it - as was declared in the saying of Apelles non ultra crepidam and of Stratonicus the Musician as mentioned earlier - natural things [are judged] by those who observe and consider them, civil things by those who do them and make a practice of them.”) Mancini, Considerations, I, 6. One may note that Mancini in this passage turns the sense of ne sutor ultra crepidam neatly on its head, paying lip service to the notion that the “artefice” is the proper judge of his own products at the very moment in which he assigns to “nostro perito” (a non-aritst) the superior capacity to judge art by virtue of a wider peritia in the things that art depicts.

140 learning to draw resides in its very segregation from utility, insofar as it enables one to cultivate a disinterested faculty of judgment in matters of art and beauty.100

Mancini’s brief treatise on drawing, Che cosa sia Disegno (appendix 12), also starts and ends with the paired questions of whether Mancini has a right, as a non- practitioner of art, to discuss the way it works, and whether disegno is a proper activity for a gentleman.101 In asserting his own prerogative to speak about drawing, he invokes his many conversations with virtuosi, and declares his delight in the subject. His treatise thus evokes much the same social context as Ferrante Carlo’s picture collection

(according to Ludovico Carracci): full of the wisdom of virtuosi and the diletto of appreciative gentlemen. Mancini considers drawing first as an activity, and then as the residue of that activity, asking whether as an action it involves the body or the soul, and concluding that it finds its efficient cause in the intellective appetite (appetito intellettivo), that is to say, in the will.102 Gage has persuasively situated the basis of

Mancini’s association of drawing with intellection in the writings of Girolamo Fracastoro

(1476/77-1553), with a significant variation: “Collapsing Fracastoro’s descriptions of two integrated intellectual processes, imagination and memory, Mancini conceived of

100 Ibid. The passage in question from the Politics runs as follows: “Further, it is clear that children should be instructed in some useful things - for example, in reading and writing - not only for their usefulness, but also because many other sorts of knowledge are acquired through them. With a like view they may be taught drawing, not to prevent their making mistakes in their own purchases, or in order that they may not be imposed upon in the buying or selling of articles, but rather because it makes them judges of the beauty of the human form. To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.” Aristotle, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. H. W. C. Davis, Aristotle’s Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), VIII.3, 304. One may note that in this connection also, Mancini inverts what might be a more intuitive application of his source to his project, since he is essentially quoting (selectively) from this passage as he offers to help his readers “prevent their making mistakes in their own purchases,” among other things. See also the discussion of this passage of Aristotle in David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 60. 101 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb. Lat. 4315, ff. 147r-155r; see Mancini, Considerazioni, xxiv. My heartfelt thanks to Frances Gage for her invaluable assistance with the “Che cosa sia disegno.” 102 Ibid., ff. 149r-150r.

141 invention instead as the manipulation by the intellect of old sense data (fantasmi) in a combinatory and divisory process ...”103 The basis of disegno in “intellective habit” segregates it from the kind of inborn, divine appointment that Vasari had often ascribed to artists (most notably Michelangelo), and while acknowledging the occasional role of inborn inclination, Mancini insists on the status of disegno as a skill that can be trained and acquired. The norm that he presents is of the traits that make an excellent artist being totally at odds with those that make a sound judge, of the sort to which the ideal reader of the Considerations might aspire to become. Just as Ribera’s adept discussions of paintings could erode the social distance between artist and collector, Mancini reinscribes within the bodies of great painters the distinction between ennobling connoisseurship and the sort of mental makeup that makes one an artist.

Medical knowledge and the authority of pictures

Mancini’s treatise on drawing also picks up on points articulated in nuce in his introduction to the Considerations, positing that disegno (but not painting itself as a profession) is an appropriate skill for a gentleman to cultivate.104 Drawing contributes to the civic good by enabling an understanding of mathematics and spatial relations useful for military and engineering purposes as well as for understanding art, which Mancini sees as purely a leisure activity. On this point, as Irene Baldriga points out, Mancini takes the exact opposite stance from that put forward by another proponent of drawing as an apt expertise for gentlemen, the Principe of the Lincean Academy, Federico Cesi (1585-

103 Frances Gage, “Invention, Wit and Melancholy in the Art of Annibale Carracci,” in Intellectual History Review 24, no. 3 (2014): 389-413, 6. Gage also provides a full discussion of Fracastoro and Mancini’s thoughts on disegno as intellective activity; ibid., 4-9. 104 Op. cit. note 99; see also the discussion in Gage, “Artist-Amateur Relations,” 253-56.

142 1630).105 As Baldriga argues, Cesi and his Lincean colleagues were in broad agreement that disegno, seen both as an activity and as the product(s) thereof, was a vital mode of intellectual investigation: within the core aims of the academy was an ideal practice of pittura philosophica, picture-making as philosophical inquiry, as seeking and also producing/making accessible an understanding of the inner nature of things.106 Baldriga points out that Mancini’s stance on the question could not be more different: the introduction to the Considerazioni specifically restricts the purview of painting to external appearances. Baldriga quotes Mancini’s fatal stroke against the artist’s prerogative to judge, which is the image’s own incapacity to address or represent an inner truth: “whence we gather that the painter cannot judge well of paintings, and the argument is such because painting, being an imitation, cannot internally and intimately understand the truth of natural or artificial things, but only from the exterior and surfaces.”107 Mancini goes on to contrast the painter’s understanding of the body with a medical one, invoking Hippocrates, according to whom “the painter roughly (rozzamente) considers the members of the human body, not considering them internally, but only in surface (in superficie).”108

In the same vein, Mancini’s view of the subjective and fluctuating judgment that should attach to the pricing of painting is premised on its essential superfluity:

105 Irene Baldriga, L’Occhio della Lince. I primi Lincei tra arte, scienza e collezionismo (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2002), 30-35; Irene Baldriga, “Le virtù della scienza e la scienza dei virtuosi: i primi Lincei e la diffusione del naturalismo in pittura,” in Caterina Volpi (ed.), Caravaggio nel IV Centenario della Cappella Contarelli, (Citta di Castello: Petruzzi Stampa, 2002), 197-208. 106 Baldriga, Occhio della Lince, 9-14. 107 “Che da questo detto si raccoglie che il pittore non possa ben giudicare delle pitture, e l’argomento è tale perchè la pittura, essendo immitatione, non puol internamente et intimamente intendere la verità delle cose naturali o artificiose, ma solo dall’esterno et superficie.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 8; quoted in Baldriga, Occhio della Lince, 33. 108 “Il che poi esplicò più chiaramente Hippocrate dicendo che il pittore rozzamente considerava le membra del corpo humano, non le considerando internamente, ma solo in superficie.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 8.

143 It now follows that [we] should propose where [pictures] should be placed in the residence of the prince, the public man and the private man, and because this placement can only be carried out if one has first become a patron thereof, either with money or with some equivalent, leaving aside the other means, we shall consider only the price with money, of which we have already discussed some aspects and will add others presently, for painting, not being a necessary thing but a pleasurable one [italics mine], and thereby allowing latitude and differentiation according to the excellence of the master and the antiquity, the rarity of the period and master, and the conservation thereof, as we also see with the medals that vary in price in all these respects; wherefore painting in itself cannot have a set price.109

The same point is stated more summarily in the introduction to the Considerations

(appendix 8); the distinction between necessity and diletto reinforces the social barrier between the makers of painting who get their clothes dirty and the appreciators and consumers of art, who are ennobled by its enjoyment.

The participation of art and artists in the Lincean academicians’ inquiries is downplayed or dismissed in Mancini’s text. Baldriga gives the specific example of the remarkable etched series of animal skeletons that the academy’s chancellor, the German physician Johannes Faber (1574-1629), commissioned from Filippo Liagno, called

Filippo Napoletano (1589-1629), based on firsthand study of Faber’s own collection of anatomical specimens.110 Faber was a colleague of Mancini’s at the Ospedale di Santo

Spirito and a pharmacist to several popes, including Urban VIII,111 and Mancini mentions the skeleton prints in his life of Filippo Napoletano, but describes them merely as

109 “Seguita hora che si proponga dove devin esser collocate nell’habitation del principe, d’huomo publico e d’huomo privato, et perchè questa collocatione non si puol fare se non se n’è fatto prima padrone o con danaro o con equivalente, lasciando gl’altri mezzi, si considera solo il prezzo con danaro, del quale si è detto di sopra qualche cosa et adesso ne aggiunge qualche altra, perchè la pittura, non essendo cosa necessaria ma di diletto, et appresso havendo latitudine e differenza per l’eccelenza del mastro [sic] e per l’antichità, per la rarità di quel tempo e mastro e per la conservation della medessima, come vediamo ancor avvenire delle medaglie quali variano di prezzo per tutti questi rispetti, pertanto la pittura in sè non puol haver prezzo determinato.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 139. 110 Baldriga, Occhio della Lince, 50-60, 77-83. 111 Gabriella Belloni Speciale, “Faber, Giovanni,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-faber_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, accessed February 17th, 2016); on Faber’s art patronage, see also Baldriga, Occhio della Lince, 171-95; on Faber’s interactions and shared interests with Mancini, see also Silvia de Renzi, “Medical Competence, Anatomy and the Polity in Seventeenth-century Rome,” in Renaissance Studies 21, no. 4, (2007): 551-67.

144 “stravaganze di scheleti,” applying to the prints the same unflattering term that he had used to characterize Caravaggio’s and Ribera’s outrageous behavior.112

The contrast that Mancini draws between an artist’s understanding of the body and a physician’s also resonates with his assertion, in the inroduction to the

Considerations on Painting, that painters don’t require all the training in anatomy, philosophy, astrology, etc. that Giambattista Marino claims they should have in his

Dicerie Sacre of 1614.113 Beginning his Dicerie with a discussion of the Shroud of Turin,

Marino proceeds to argue that the divine status of painting (whose first practitioner is

God) places correspondingly high obligations on the training and understanding of painters, whose wisdom will never compare with the Creator’s, but who are still to know all they can of theology, philosophy, history, poetry, anatomy, and other disciplines.114 It

112 Cited in Baldriga, Occhio della Lince, 35. It should be noted, in fairness, that Mancini brings up the animal skeletons in praise of the artist: “... nelle cose picciole in particolare e di fuochi, navigli et animali si fece reputare e stimare; et in certe stravaganze di scheleti d’animali fu molto osservato ....” (“... in small things and in particular pictures of fires, ships, and animals, he became renowned and esteemed; and in certain extravagances of animal skeletons he was much noted ...”) Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 255. 113 “Onde appar quanto che il Marino s’inganni nella Diceria della Pittura, ponendo tanti requisiti nel pittore, bastandoli solo il color, la proportione, prospettiva, affetto et simili, che per l’historia, poesia, decoro et altro, essendo d’altra professione superiore et non di pittore, il quale da questa superiore ne viene ammaestrato, e pertanto non si ricerchi in esso tanta filosofia, astrologia et altro come dice il Marino.” (“Whence it appears that Marino is mistaken in the Diceria della Pittura, placing so many requisites on the painter, to whom suffice color, proportion, perspective, affect and similar things, [so] that for history, poetry, decorum and other matters, at which other professions excel and surpass painting, [so that the painter] should submit to this superior [expert], and therefore one ought not to require of [the painter] so much philosophy, astrology and other things as Marino claims.”) Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 7. 114 Giambattista Marino, Dicerie Sacre (Turin: Luigi Pizzamiglio, 1614), 5v-12v. The particular passage to which Mancini is responding is as follows: “... la scienza ... ne’ Pittori mondani è imperfetta, percioche di rado, ò non mai avviene, che in un solo artefice si uniscano insieme quelle discipline tutte, che in cotal’arte son necessarie. Et chi non sà, che gli è necessaria la contezza della Theologia per poter con sicurezza descrivere le cose di Dio, degli Angioli, & de’Santi? Delle Historie sacre, & profane per non fallar ne’ costumi delle persone, ò de gli avvenimenti? Della Poesia non parlo per la notitia delle favole, poiche con essa è quasi una cosa medesma. Parlo ben dell’Anotomia per collocare i muscoli nelle sedi loro senza stroppio. Parlo della Filosofia per esprimere molti accidenti naturali senza errore. Et se vogliamo regolarci secondo il detto di Panfilo Macedonico maestro d’Apelle, come potrà egli trattegiar con fondamento le linee senza la Geometria? come divisare perfettamente le fabriche senza l’Architettura? come rappresentare i luoghi del mondo senza la Cosmografia? come dimostrare l’imagini del Cielo senza l’Astrologia? come disegnare i siti de’paesi, & le piante delle fortezze senza la Militia? & come allumar le figure, far gli scorci, & attegiare i moti senza la Prospettiva?” (“... science ... in earthly painters is imperfect, for only rarely if ever does it occur that all the disciplines that are necessary to such art should be united in a single artist.

145 is tempting to read Mancini’s objections to this passage in conjunction with his dismissive characterization of Filippo Napoletano’s animal skeletons as “stravaganze.” In any event, Napoletano, like Lodovico Cigoli, undermines Mancini’s social and medical distinctions between painters and intendenti. Filippo Napoletano in particular collapses

Mancini’s tidy separations between painter and patron, maker and collector, craftsman and philosopher. The artist appears in Giovanni Baglione’s biography as someone who might well have shared a range of interests and goals with the Linceans, as he collected

“bellissime bizzerrie [sic] d’ogni sorte,” which he gathered into a museum, to the delight of many “curiosi intelletti” who came to see his collection, the dispersal of which on

Filippo’s death Baglione describes in far more moving terms than he accords to the actual decease of the artist.115

And who does not know that he requires knowledge of Theology, so as to be able to describe with assurance the things of God, and of the Angels and Saints? Of sacred and profane History, so as not to err in [depicting] the habits of persons, or the events? Of Poetry I do not speak, for the knowledge of the fables, for therewith painting is practically one and the same. I will speak of Anatomy, to set the muscles in their places without deformity. I speak of Philosophy, to express many natural occurrences (accidenti naturali) without error. And if we wish to follow the words of Pamphilus the Macedonian, Apelles’ master, how will [the painter] sketch on a [sure] foundation without Geometry? How [will he] represent the places of the world without Cosmography? How [will he] demonstrate the images of the Heavens without Astrology? How [will he] draw the locations of the countries and the plans of the fortresses without Military [knowledge]? And how [will he] bring to light the figures, and cause them to be foreshortened and assuming their motions without Perspective?”) Marino, Dicerie, 7v.-8r. 115 “Filippo si dilettava d’haver bellissime bizzerrie d’ogni sorte, degne d’esser vedute; e vi concorrevano assai curiosi intelletti a vederle; e molto il Museo del Napolitano comendavano. Morto ch’egli fu, chi ne prese un pezzo, e chi una parte; e quello studio in breve tempo disfecesi, che per cumularlo, e metterlo in ordine, egli gran tratto di tempo vi havea consumato. Cosi vanno le cose di questo mondo. Il tempo in un punto disfà quello, che l’arte con la fatica, e con lo studio in molto tempo raguna [sic]. E nel Pontificato di Urbano VIII. qui in Roma diede fine alle opere, & alla vita.” (“Filippo delighted in owning most beautiful and strange things (bellissime bizzerrie) of every kind, well worth seeing; and many inquiring intellectuals (curiosi intelletti) gathered to see them; and highly commended the Museum of Napolitano. Upon his death, one person took this piece, and another this part; and that studio was dislimned in a brief time, which had taken a great stretch of time to accumulate and to put in order. Thus go the things of this world. Time in one moment undoes that which art gathers with much labor and study. And in the Pontificate of Urban VIII, here in Rome [Filippo] gave an end to his works and to his life.”) Giovanni Baglione, Le Vite de’ Pittori Scultori et Architetti Dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII. del 1572. In fino a’ tempi di Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642 (Rome: Andrea Fei, 1642), 335- 36.

146 Mancini’s insistence that artists should not be bothered with anatomy and that their works can speak to external appearances alone also contrasts with Ribera’s overt demonstration of anatomical knowledge in an etching of the Martyrdom of Saint

Bartholomew from 1624 (figure 2.1). The exposed muscles on the saint’s partially flayed arm demonstrate a precise understanding of musculature, without making such understanding override the harrowing narrative context, as had often been done in the sixteenth century, in the placid écorchés of Bronzino or the olympian poise of Marco

D’Agrate’s Saint Bartholomew in Milan Cathedral, for instance. The pose that Ribera has given to Saint Bartholomew is remarkably close to that of one of the flayed and gutted anatomical specimens from a series of studies drawn in Rome by Pietro da Cortona in

1618 (figure 2.2.), apparently based on the dissections of the surgeon Nicolas Larché.116

Cortona’s drawings were produced at the behest of Mancini’s colleague at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito, the surgeon Giovanni Maria Castellani, who was friends with Johannes

Faber (who had even proposed Castellani as a candidate to the Lincean academy).117

Though never published until the eighteenth century, Cortona’s studies were also engraved, well within Ribera’s lifetime, by Luca Ciamberlano. Like Filippo Napoletano’s

116 According to Bellori, Larché’s anatomies were also observed and studied by Nicolas Poussin: “Havendo egli [Poussin] in Parigi, atteso all’anatomia in uno spedale, ripigliò di nuovo questo studio dal Vesalio, e dopo, con la pratica del Larcheo nobile Chirurgo, esercitandosi sopra cadaveri, e schelatri, ne divenne ottimamente instrutto.” Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni (Rome: Successore al Mascardi, 1672), 412; cited in Martin Kemp, “Dr. William Hunter on the Windsor Leonardos and His Volume of Drawings Attributed to Pietro da Cortona,” Burlington Magazine 118, no. 876 (1976): 144-48, p. 148. 117 Maria Conforti and Silvia de Renzi, “Sapere anatomico negli ospedali Romani: Formazione dei chirurgi e pratiche sperimentali (1620-1720), in Antonella Romano (ed.), Rome et la science moderne: entre Renaissance et Lumières (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2008), 433-72, esp 446-52; Mimi Kazort, Monique Kornell, and K. B. Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy (Exh. cat. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1996), 181-83; on the incomplete evidence as to the history of the drawings and prints, particularly ont he question of who the anatomist was whose work informed Cortona’s, see Ludwig Choulant, ed. and trans. Mortimer Frank, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration in Its Relation to Anatomic Science and the Graphic Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920), 235-39.

147 animal skeletons, both Cortona’s drawings and Ciamberlano’s prints from them are pointed evidence, in Mancini’s immediate professional arena, of the sort of ambitious involvement in anatomical and surgical medicine that Mancini dismisses as unnecessary.

Cortona’s drawing, from which Ribera seems to derive Saint Bartholomew’s pose, pays no attention to the musculature of the arms. One might thus read Ribera’s quotation of it as a gratuitous assertion of anatomical understanding, surpassing the demands of the depicted subject but also decorously subordinate to them. In other words, if Ribera did refer to Cortona’s drawing or to Ciamberlano’s print after it, he cannot have used either as a direct source for the part of his own print that shows the anatomy of the arm muscles. If Ribera meant for the Cortona reference to be recognized, it was as an assertion that his own anatomical knowledge went beyond what was strictly necessary for the subject at hand. Whether out of intentional response to one another or not, Ribera and

Mancini are making diametrically opposite claims as to what level of truth or inner understanding a picture can know and depict, and on what level of knowledge it should rest.

c) Authority and polemic in Ribera’s Studies of Features

Training in drawing as training in judgment

If Mancini was unusual in separating the prerogative to judge works of art from the ability to make them, he was quite typical in tying the judgment of art to proficiency in drawing. Indeed, the congruence noted earlier between gusto as a faculty of appreciation for art and as a quality of its execution is symptomatic of the bond between making and judging that had its roots in a theory of disegno going back to the fifteenth

148 century. The way to train this faculty was through drawing practice, from “good examples.” Such examples inculcated not only a mechanical practice based on muscle memory and hand-eye coordination, but a faculty of good judgment, a visual literacy in which the features of the face were the ABCs.118 This metaphor, coined by Leon Battista

Alberti, bore direct fruit in the seventeenth century’s approach to drawing pedagogy in both theory and practice, and was pursued in the program of the Accademia di San Luca, as set forth in Romano Alberti’s 1604 Origine e Progresso dell’Accademia del Dissegno,

De Pittori, Scultori & Architetti di Roma... .119 Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on painting, for instance, exhorted students to “accustom their hands to portraying drawings after good masters” (assuefar la mano col ritrar disegni di buoni maestri),120 a precept that followed Leonardo’s advice to privilege judgment over execution: “That painter who does not doubt, acquires little. When the work surpasses the judgment of the creator, the latter in working gains little, and when the judgment surpasses the work, such a work never ceases to improve, unless prevented by avarice.”121 As we shall see presently,

Leonardo’s exhortation for beginning artists to learn from the examples of buoni maestri was echoed across the art treatises of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,

118 As formulated in Alberti’s De Pictura, which urges those who learn to paint to imitate those who teach writing, who “first teach separately all the forms of the letters, which the ancients called elements; then they teach the syllables; they then soon teach to compose all the idioms.” (“Voglio che i giovani, quali ora nuovi si danno a dipingere, così facciano quanto veggo, di chi impara a scrivere: questi in prima separato insegnano tutte le forme delle lettere, quali gli antiqui chiamano elementi; poi insegnano le silabe; poi apresso insegnano componere tutte le dizzioni.”) Leon Battista Alberti, ed. Lucia Bertolini De Pictura (Redazione Volgare) (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2011), III, 5, p. 305. 119 A development traced in detail by Alexandra Greist, Learning to Draw, Drawing to Learn: Theory and Practice in Italian Printed Drawing Books, 1600-1700 (PhDiss. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011), 11-22, 51-53 et passim. 120 “Il pittore deve prima assuefar la mano col ritrar disegni di buoni maestri, e fatta detta assuefattione, col giuditio del suo precettore, deve poi assuefarsi col ritrar cose di rilievo buone, con quelle regole che del ritrar rilievo si dirà.” Da Vinci, Trattato, ch. XII, p. 3. 121 “Quel pittore che non dubita, poco acquista. Quando l’opera supera il giuditio dell’operatore, esso operante poco acquista, e quando il giuditio supera l’opera, essa opera mai non finisce di migliorare, se l’avaritia non l’impedisce.” Ibid., ch. XI, p. 3.

149 from Romano Alberti and Giovanni Battista Armenini in Italy to Carducho and Pacheco in Spain.122

From the first discussion of the intellectual and practical training required for painting, right at the start of book I in Carducho’s Diálogos de la Pintura, the Disciple voices the fundamental “doctrine” by which to become a good painter, a repetition of drawing that is also inseparable from a practice of inquiry: “Dibujar, especular, y mas dibujar.”123 The disciple characterizes the masters from whom he has taken his examples in drawing as “hombres peritos,” using the Spanish cognate of the very term Mancini had employed for more or less the opposite purpose.124 Carducho associates the practice gained by drawing from these examples with thorough study of disciplines such as anatomy and perspective, followed by an impressive reading list: just the sorts of study that Mancini, as we have seen, dismissed from the purview of the professional artist.125

Carducho’s ideal of the pintor científico is in symmetrical opposition to Mancini’s proposed segregation between the gentlemanly cultivation of understanding and the

122 To give only four examples among many; Romano Alberti, Origine et Progresso Dell’Accademia del Dissegno, De Pittori, Scultori, & Architetti di Roma (Pavia: Pietro Bartoli, 1604), 5; Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’Veri Precetti Della Pittura Di M. Gio. Battista Armenini da Faenza Libri Tre (Ravenna: Francesco Tebaldini, 1587), 3-4; Carducho, Diálogos, 25-35; Pacheco, Arte, 265-68. For an overview with further bibliography, see Maria Heilman, Nino Nanobashvili, et. al. (eds.), Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich. Zeichenbücher in Europa, ca. 1525-1925 (Passau: Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 2014), 111-16. 123 Carducho, Diálogos, 25. 124 “Dibujé algunos años en fe desta dotrina, observando cuidadoso el natural, meditando estatuas antiguas, y modernas, dibujos, y pinturas de hombres peritos, y en la Notomia la cantidad, forma, efectos, y movimientos de los musculos, y huesos, la hermosura de los dintornos, y en la variedad, propiedad, afectos, y movimientos de las figuras; no olvidando la Perspectiva, pratica, y teorica.” (“I drew for several years with faith in this doctrine, observing nature (el natural) carefully, meditating on ancient and modern statues, drawings, and the paintings of men of judgment (hombres peritos); and [studying] in anatomy the quantity, form, effects, and movements of the muscles and bones, the beauty of the contours, and the variety, property, affects, and movements of the figures; not forgetting Perspective, both in practice and theory.”) Ibid. 125 Ibid., 25-33. The list includes a manuscript of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Treatise; see Carducho, Diálogos, note 37 p. 29.

150 artistic necessities of practice.126 The use of the term perito as a badge of excellence for artists practicing at the highest level runs throughout Carducho’s treatise; significantly, it is nearly always the “pintor perito,” not the “hombre perito.” Alongside Carducho’s and

Mancini’s opposite uses of the term perito, we find a common emphasis on expertise in drawing as a keystone to the development of the expertise or peritia in question. No less than the conversational practice of connoisseurship, then, expertise in drawing emerges as a contested arena in which both artists and non-artists in Ribera’s time framed competing claims for authority. It should not surprise us at this point to learn that this, too, was an arena in which Ribera himself was active. The rest of this chapter will explore his studies of features, which invoke the genre of the drawing manual in order to enact and display his capacity for judgment, establishing Ribera as a producer of good examples in the crucial field of drawing.

In this period, the training of novice artists is consistently described as beginning with the copying of individual features of the body, especially the sensory facial features.

These model features could take the form of drawings by the master in whose studio the training was taking place, or they could involve the use of printed manuals that were proliferating in Italy in the first half of the seventeenth century in particular (also called pattern books, model books, libri da disegnare, or cartillas de dibujo).127 While they may

126 Carducho’s ideal of the “scientific painter,” incidentally, has been associated with Ribera’s practice by Javier Portús, “Teatro de emociones: ‘La resurrección de Lázaro’ o Ribera como “pintor científico,” in José Milicua et. al., El Joven Ribera (Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2011), 61-77. 127 Concise but detailed overviews of this development in Italy and Spain, respectively, are in Chittima Amornpichetkul, “Seventeenth-Century Italian Drawing Books: Their Origin and Development,” in Children of Mercury: the Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Exh. cat. Providence: Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, 1984), 108-18; and José Manuel Matilla, “Aprender a dibujar sín maestro. Las cartillas de dibujo en la España del siglo XVII: el caso de Pedro de Villafranca,” in José Riello (ed.), Sacar de la Sombra Lumbre: La Teoría de la Pintura en el Siglo de Oro (1560-1724) (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2012), 135-49.

151 have been used by artists in academic or in workshop settings, such drawing manuals as

Odoardo Fialetti’s 1608 Il vero modo et ordine per dissegnar tutte le parti et membra del corpo humano (see figures 2.3 and 2.4 for example) or Luca Ciamberlano’s Scuola perfetta per imparare a disegnare (figures 2.5 and 2.6) of around 1620 were doubtless also created with dilettantes in mind.128 In his landmark study of the psychology of perception in art, Ernst Gombrich distinguished early seicento drawing manuals such as

Fialetti’s from earlier treatises such as Albrecht Dürer’s, noting a shift away from geometrically rationalized prescriptions for assembling the human form in favor of simple and wordless models breaking the elements of drawing into easily repeatable drills for hand-eye coordination.129 Drawing manuals like Fialetti’s owe their pride of place in

Gombrich’s study to the explicit link that they forge at the crossroads of manual making, visual assimilation, and psychological recognition of forms. As Gombrich more elegantly observes, “we hear a lot about training the eye or learning to see, but this phraseology can be misleading if it hides the fact that what we can learn is not to see but to discriminate.”130

The process by which such discrimination was inculcated in artists was the same one in which they learned to produce and reproduce images. This overlap between making something well and judging its quality well replicates the way that the terms

“gusto” and “giudizio” could refer at once to the connoisseur and to the work of art.

128 The general absence of text in this genre of book compounds the fact that what texts there are remain rather vague as to their audience. See for instance Alexandra Greist, “A Rediscovered Text for a Drawing Book by Odoardo Fialetti,” in Burlington Magazine 156, no. 1330 (2014): 12-18. 129 Gombrich associates such “ABC”-style drawing manuals (in which he includes cartillas derived from Ribera’s prints) with an ultimate bankrupcy of what he calls the (academic) “formula;” Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Millennium edition, 2000), 161-68. 130 Ibid., 172.

152 Mancini’s assertion that proficiency in drawing conferred a prerogative to judge art stems from the widespread idea that both abilities (drawing and judging) were acquired simultaneously. The importance of having good examples from which to train rests on this same assumption: the master draftsmen were those who provided the exempla to the beginners, just as experienced artists continued to learn from their most illustrious predecessors (an attitude attributed to Ribera by Jusepe Martínez regarding the istorie by

Raphael in the Vatican, as mentioned earlier131). Furthermore, if authority to judge (from

Mancini’s point of view) proceeded from knowing how to draw, then displaying the authority to teach drawing was inextricably also an assertion of authority to judge.

Ribera’s studies of features and the genre of the drawing manual

It may have nothing directly to do with his characterization in Mancini’s

Considerations (which were largely complete by about 1621), but Ribera memorably declared his authority to teach drawing by producing three etched studies of features around 1622 (figures 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9).132 It would be pointless to suggest (and impossible to prove, even if it were true or helpful) that Ribera produced these etchings in conscious response to Mancini. Rather, the Sienese doctor’s Considerations on Painting and the Spanish painter’s studies are nearly simultaneous interventions regarding the same question, and as such, attest in tandem to that question’s relevance for the Italian art of the 1620s: where does the authority to judge works of art come from, and of what does

131 As discussed in chapter 1, p. 37. 132 Jonathan Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings (exh. cat. Princeton: Princeton University Art Gallery, 1973), cat. nos. 7, 8, and 9, pp. 69-72.

153 it consist? Having already explored Mancini’s thoughts on the subject, let us turn to

Ribera’s feature studies for a rejoinder.

Ribera’s Studies of Eyes, his Studies of Ears (dated 1622) and his Studies of Noses and Mouths are all signed, though Jonathan Brown has expressed some doubts as to the autograph status of the signatures on the Studies of Eyes and the Studies of Noses and

Mouths.133 As Brown observes, the three prints may or may not have been intended as a drawing manual à la Fialetti, but were deemed to represent the beginnings of one by

Ribera’s eighteenth-century biographers, largely (according to Brown) out of indiscriminate acceptance as autograph of the several published cartillas copied and derived from Ribera’s prints.134 A fourth etching, the Large Grotesque Head (figure 2.10) belongs at least partially to the same group of prints; the image’s dimensions match those of the three sheets of features, and the faint outline of an eye at a ninety-degree angle to the composition further confirms its origins in the same process and project, as was long since noted by Andrew Robison (detail figure 2.11).135

We may leave it as a moot point whether or not Ribera initially intended these four prints together to form the basis for a drawing manual.136 What is important to note is the way this set of prints invokes the genre while significantly departing from several of the most basic conventions set for it. Fundamentally, Ribera’s four etchings fall much

133 Ibid., 71-72. 134 Ibid., 16-17; for a concordance and partial list of prints after Ribera’s studies of features, see also pp. 83- 87. For the most recent discussion (and bibliography) of these derivations, see Heilman, Ninobashvili, et. al., Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich, cat. no. 5.2, pp. 119-22. 135 Ibid., cat. 11, pp. 72-3. 136 Mark McDonald has speculated that the Small Grotesque Head and The Poet were also components of such a project, and has studied its afterlife in Spain as a response to Carducho’s objections to Caravaggio’s “doctrineless” artistic method; Mark P. McDonald, “The Graphic Context of Jusepe de Ribera’s The Poet,” in Art Bulletin of Victoria 32 (1991): 51-58; Mark P. McDonald, “Italian, Dutch, and Spanish Pattern Prints and Artistic Education in Seventeenth-Century Madrid,” in Storia dell’Arte 98 (2000): 76-87.

154 more comfortably under the heading of collectible prints in a small series than under that of the cartilla or drawing book. The user-friendly quality of works like Fialetti’s or

Ciamberlano’s is in sharp contradistinction to Ribera’s strange and challenging images, which function much more readily as art objects than as elements of draftsmanship to be copied. While very few impressions of Ribera’s etched studies of features remain

(particularly for the first state), the more utilitarian character of other drawing manuals is plain from the fact that they so often were used, drawn in. These drawing books have been treated, not as precious collectibles, but as prompts to practice drawing. For instance, a past owner of the New York Public Library’s copy of Odoardo Fialetti’s Vero

Modo... has followed the pictures’ prompts and duly drawn in the book (see for instance figures 2.4 and 2.12). The facial features from Luca Ciamberlano’s Scuola Perfetta have often received the same treatment: in the Washington National Gallery of Art’s impression (figure 2.6), the “missing” components of the more detailed features on the right (an eyebrow, a lock of hair, the shading on the lips) have been filled in on the left by an inexpert hand; just, in a sense, as they were meant to be. Compared to the simple lines and easily replicated shapes of Fialetti’s drawing book, Ribera’s etched feature studies would be a tall order for a neophyte to replicate; with the exception of the schematic eyes in profile, the unshaded versions of his eye and ear studies are more like a magician redoing a trick in slow motion than an instructor making a demonstration for beginners.

Further comparison with other cartillas closer to Ribera’s own bears out the difference in register of his original etchings. Derivations from these began to appear with some frequency within the artist’s lifetime, and their transparent adherence to a didactic purpose throws into sharp relief the refinement and idiosyncracy of Ribera’s

155 work. The closest derivation from Spagnoletto’s prints is the republication by Frans van

Wynegarde of the original plates sliced in two (figure 2.13).137 This second state, common to all three prints, jettisons Ribera’s concern with each etching’s pictorial properties and effects. The second state sacrifices compositional integrity for a “more is more” approach to print publishing, making the feature studies, in their multiplication from three to six sheets, feel much more like a series, and promoting the purpose and seriality of the studies over their appearance as works of art in their own right. More derivative publications such as Louis Ferdinand Elle’s Livre de Portraiture Recueilly des

Oeuvres de Ioseph de Riuera dit l’Espagnolet et Gravé a l’eau forte par Louis Ferdinand take these divergences from Ribera’s plates still further.138 For one thing, the series in

Louis Elle’s publication grew to encompass other body parts, figures, and heads, taken from other drawing manuals or excerpted from Ribera’s other etchings, making the Elle prints as a set more commensurate with other drawing manuals, which they match more closely in pedagogical scope. Furthermore, while the original feature studies had packed far more iterations of each feature onto the plate, Elle and other copyists of Ribera excerpted the individual feature studies and regrouped them more symmetrically into a larger number of sheets (see for instance figures 2.14, 2.15). These derivations from

Ribera, while scrupulously replicating the particulars of each eye or ear, set the facial features in a far more neutral relation to each other and to the sheet itself.

137 Ibid., 69-71. 138 Louis Ferdinand Elle, Livre de Portraiture Recueilly des Oeuvres de Ioseph de Riuera dit l’Espagnolet et Gravé a l’eau forte par Louis Ferdinand (Paris: Nicolas Langlois, n.d.). This version at least was in circulation during Ribera’s lifetime; as Brown indicates, one can venture a guess as to the date of the first edition as the second is from 1650. Brown, Prints and Drawings, cat. 30, pp. 83-84.

156 The contrast between Ribera’s etchings and their derivations says a great deal about how Ribera’s prints were interpreted by subsequent generations of artists, but for our purposes, it also indicates how different the original prints’ effects and purposes are from the “straight content” or didactic use of the facial features they show. Ribera’s feature studies derive much of their visual interest from the suggestion of interaction among the features, and more importantly, between the inside and the outside of the prints themselves. Caroline Fowler has rightly noted the alternation between inwardness and outwardness that the prints suggest with particular reference to the sensory experiences conveyed by the features: the eyes in particular suggest the reciprocal tension between looking, being seen, and seeing through.139 The ears are arranged so as to maximize the use of the space, but they also are in dynamic interplay with the framing edge, eavesdropping from a space beyond the print to the left, or sprouting from the page itself to listen in on the print room's gossip. Ribera's ears engage the viewer in a contest of listening, which becomes at once a component and a term of comparison in the concomitant activities of looking and drawing. Ribera's Studies of Noses and Mouths also alternate between illusions of inward and outward focus. It is hard to think of the two central mouths as doing anything other than yelling, while the open mouth in the lower right seems rather to breathe in. A similar pairing of inward and outward inclination occurs with the three sets of noses in the left portion of the sheet, which lean in and out of the pictorial space as though smelling it or breathing the air from outside its confines.

139 Caroline Fowler, “Senses and Knowledge,” unpublished manuscript, 2015. My heartfelt thanks to Caroline Fowler for her generosity and collegial support in allowing me to read her work at such an early stage. See also Caroline Fowler, “The eye-as-legend: Print Pedagogies in the Seventeenth Century,” in Kunsttexte.de 4 (2010): 1-6.

157 In this regard, Ribera is adapting a maneuver that many of his colleagues had already applied to this genre of image, and is adding a witty twist to it by his suggestion of sensory experience that reaches between and across depicted and real spaces. While the prints that make up the much more voluminous drawing manuals of Fialetti,

Ciamberlano, Palma Giovane, and Oliviero Gatti are generally more pared down than

Ribera’s, more digestible and direct in their drawing, they nevertheless show moments of great sensitivity to the graphic cohesiveness of the print as a print, rather than as a support for drawing exercises. The simple yet refined manipulation of light-against-dark changes, which slide from volumetric protrusion to contrasted backdrop, enlivens the otherwise straightforward Studies of legs and feet by Luca Ciamberlano (figure 2.16), for instance. An even more sophisticated manipulation of chiaroscuro flickering between graphic contrast and illusionistic space animates the studies of male torsos in Giacomo

Franco and Palma Giovane’s drawing book (figure 2.17). The partially dismembered male bodies, crammed into the space across several levels of depth, hover between the statuesque and the corporeal, giving a kind of monstrous promiscuity to the task of maximizing the use of the plate. The arrangement is put to inventive use that far surpasses mere economy of materials, as for instance the oblong plane between the central figure’s missing head and the missing right arm of the Christ-like figure in the lower right plays tricks with the ideas of shared space and surface, doing double duty as a component of two different bodies and moving like a see-saw between two opposing angles to the picture plane.

Such exertions on the part of the printmakers to endow their drawing manuals with graphic interest and artistic merit beyond the utilitarian presentation of practical

158 models might simply manifest the amour propre of the artists in question, whose yen to make well-crafted and interesting images was unabated by the rote nature of the task at hand. Yet one might also, without undue cynicism, take the high degree of quality in these prints as an indication of the breadth of their intended audience, which was certainly not limited to professional artists.140 The frontispiece of Ciamberlano’s Scuola perfetta..., dedicating the publication “to the most noble lovers of disegno” (ALLI

NOBILISSIMI AMATORI DEL DISEGNO), invokes a neat overlap between the appreciators of art and its soon-to-be practitioners (figure 2.5), and points to the kinship between drawing practice and the cultivation of connoisseurial taste. The frontispiece’s relief portrait of Maecenas, the discerning and virtuous patron par excellence, suggests a link between the “nobilissimi amatori” and the patrons of art. Much as Mancini had suggested, the frontispiece implies a contiguity between patronage, connoisseurship (love of disegno), and the practice of drawing proposed within the cartilla.141 If anything, the gentleman dilettante whom Mancini exhorts to master disegno would be a far likelier customer for such manuals than a practicing artist who, if the need arose, could simply produce a sample drawing on the spot and hand it to his apprentices to copy. The prints just mentioned by Ciamberlano and Franco announce their makers’ authority not only by offering instruction in drawing (with the obvious inference that the drawing models presented are good enough to learn from) but by the finesse of their presentation, confirming the implicit claim of expertise in refinement of execution.

140 Heilman, Ninobashvili, et al., Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich, 5ff.; Greist, Learning to Draw, 15-18. 141 Pietro Stefanoni was himself something of a distinguished amateur in such matters, having considerable expertise in antique gems, and an interest in drawings overlapping with scientific inquiry, as is demonstrated in his exchange of letters and even specimens with the distinguished Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi; see Isabella Rossi, “Pietro Stefanoni e Ulisse Aldrovandi: Relazioni Erudite tra Bologna e Napoli,” in Studi di Memofonte 8 (2012): 3-30.

159 We find the same witty rendering of otherwise workaday or practice-oriented subject matter in Ribera’s red chalk Studies of a Head in Profile (figure 2.18), in which two faces likewise share an eye, and the otherwise neutral space of the paper assumes and relinquishes volume and value as it passes from a cheekbone to a temple or flattens into mere blank ground.142 The level of finish and the rigorously thought-out arrangement of the drawing make its labelling as “studies” a blatant misnomer. Any comparison with the sorts of study drawings that other artists devoted to facial features or body parts reveals the extent to which Ribera has orchestrated his drawing as a finished product. Consider for example the studies by Agostino Carracci that Fialetti and Ciamberlano adapted into cartillas (figures 2.19, 2.20, and 2.21): Agostino’s instinctive graphic flair is plain in the shimmering play of lines and contours in the studies of feet and legs, but the elegance of the repetition does not really distract from its practical intent.143 The juxtaposition, on both of Agostino’s study sheets, of more narrative figures at right angles with the isolated features, puts his studies in an entirely distinct category from Ribera’s strange but tightly cohesive Princeton drawing.

Ribera’s red chalk drawing of fragmented and overlapping heads behaves more like a presentation drawing than like the sort of exercise page that, according to Mancini, would come to a premature end as a tablecloth. Like his etchings of facial features, this drawing is an elaborate calling card asserting his virtuosity as a draftsman under a veneer of practicality. The point, in drawing and prints alike, is not so much to offer or exercise actual training in drawing as to display the artist’s qualifications to offer such training.

142 Jonathan Brown, et. al. The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya (Exh. cat. New York: Frick Collection, 2010), cat. no. 4, p. 28-29. 143 Rudolf Wittkower, The Drawings of the Carracci at Windsor Castle (London: Phaidon Press, 1952), cat. nos. 134 & 145, pp. 118-20.

160 The bravura demonstrations of rilievo in all three of Ribera’s etchings, as the features seem to open sensitive orifices in the paper, sprouting from and sinking into the page, are accentuated rather than deconstructed by the unshaded repetitions of the same features.

The uncomplicated relationship of ground to line in the simple contour drawings amplifies the subtle and varied transitions that Ribera sets between the shaded features and the imagined surfaces of paper and face, from the seamlessly stippled eyes to the stark shadows cast onto the paper by the ears, to the lines around the great yelling mouth that flatten back into the surface of the paper just as one expects them to keep to the contours of a round cheek.

If Fialetti’s comparatively crude feature studies are at one end of a spectrum from the functional to the collectible, Ribera’s etchings occupy the opposite extremity. The point is not to draw qualitative comparisons among such works, but to suggest that

Ribera’s prints are more accurately considered in their capacity as collector’s items than in light of whatever pedagogical use they might possess. The general assumption that

Ribera’s feature studies represent the beginnings of a subsequently abandoned project fails to take into account Ribera’s indifference to the practical parameters of a drawing book in his etchings. If one considers them, along with the Large Grotesque Head, as a completed set of prints for a general market, their import is rather different than if one assumes that he meant to produce twenty or so more of them and give more parts of the body than just the sensory organs in the face. On the one hand, as Fowler explores in depth, the limitation to the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth sets the emphasis on the senses themselves, rather than on the body as a whole considered through the study of its

161 fragmented parts.144 On the other hand, the more basic import of the prints not being intended primarily as cartillas is that their invocation of cartillas as a genre becomes far more noteworthy. If a person in search of a drawing manual comes across a sheet covered in studies of eyes, she will think nothing of it; if a person in search of fine prints comes across such a page, the first question to confront her is whether and why such a print might be worth acquiring in the first place if one does not care about its practical uses.

What stands out as a result of Ribera’s etchings’ “failure” to constitute a drawing manual is their invocation of drawing manuals as such.

Invention and observation

To appreciate the significance of this invocation, let us consider what manner of examples Ribera is providing to his collectors or would-be students. The three etchings do not merely apply the same technique to three sorts of facial features; instead, they exemplify three distinct approaches to the very notion of the “type” or example, acting as commentaries on their own subject matter. The decidedly feminine eyes are as delicate in form as in rendering, and no seventeenth-century viewer would have admired their beauty without associating it with the story of Zeuxis selecting the most perfect features from an assembly of the loveliest maidens in Croton, the ur-example of wise selectivity in art. The drawing manual’s pedagogical premise of imaginatively forming a body by reassembling ideal fragments is already rooted in the notion of the Zeuxian Helen, made perfect by the artist’s judicious selection of the best individual parts culled from nature.145

144 Fowler, “Senses and Knowledge,” passim. 145 This brings us back to the Carracci, whose art was interpreted as a similar operation of selection and combination under the heading of “giudizio” as early as Agucchi’s Trattato; Mahon, Studies, 256-7. This interpretation of their modus operandi was emphatically reiterated by Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci

162 Ribera’s Studies of Eyes instantiate the same joint ethos of close observation and ideal beauty: the eyes are as uniform and flawless as they are unmistakably rooted in the study of nature. Beyond providing straightforward models for beginners to replicate, Ribera addresses to intenditori and collectors a programmatic synopsis of one prominent theory about art’s negotiation of observation and ideal beauty. The selection, the observation, and the manner of combining the two, all constitute an exercise of giudizio; or, as

Mancini praised van Honthorst’s life drawings, one might say that Ribera’s features are drawn with great taste.

What is more, Ribera follows this “Zeuxian” piece of art theory with a counterproposal in the Studies of Ears. Masculine where the eyes were feminine (as demonstrated by the strands of short hair that surround most of them), Ribera’s ears are executed in a totally different mode, though with no lesser quality. The obvious contiguity of subject matter among the three etchings should not overshadow their considerable (and obviously deliberate) variegations in style, which in this instance cannot possibly be put down to a natural evolution of the artist’s manner over time.

Where the eyes employ a fine-grained down-to-the-eyelash exactitude in their rendering, the ears, while still precise, mostly eschew the minute stippling and tight resolution of the

Studies of Eyes (details in figures 2.22 and 2.23). Reserving a few short, light strokes for the more delicate portions of the ear (such as the soft and slightly fuzzy skin between the antitragus and the lobe), Ribera employs in this second etching a bolder and more elliptical graphic style, simplifying and shortening the tonal range and leaving fuller

and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (2nd ed. Florence: Edizioni Cadmo, 2000), 56-62 et passim, with specific reference to the bedrock of Renaissance interpretations of the Zeuxian Helen (or Hera), 62. See also Blake McHam, Pliny, 345.

163 spaces between the capriciously rippling parallel strokes that cast shadows around the ears. The contrast is plainest between the almost pedantic eyebrows in the Studies of Eyes and the loose, abstracted rendering of hair in the Studies of Ears. The demonstration of drawing skill is not only in how to form the shapes of the facial features, but in how to carry out different approaches to drawing itself. The tour de force of combined idealism and illusionistic precision in the Studies of Eyes is followed by an equally virtuosic demonstration of fierezza in the looser handling of the Studies of Ears, the two manners being equated respectively with feminine and masculine modes of beauty, the delicate and the decisive.

In this regard also, the etchings’ primary address to an audience of collectors supersedes any utilitarian function that they may have possessed: Ribera varies and controls his graphic style in ways that are meant to be noticed and discussed. The ears and eyes demonstrate Ribera’s mastery and manipulation of different styles in a way that also exemplifies different modes in which the artist can mediate between observation and selection. The rougher, more sculptural beauty of the ears is conveyed in broader strokes than the sort of beauty that the eyes exemplify. The discussions of taste and canons of beauty by Ribera’s most immediate contemporaries, collectors, and (almost certainly) acquaintances, Vincenzo Giustiniani and Giulio Mancini, invoke the notion of different physical types or nationalities as a paradigm for the beauty of different artistic merits and manners as subject to individual taste.146 Ribera’s studies of features intervene in the same discussion, demonstrating, in the context of training the eye and hand, the artist’s

146 Gage, Mancini, 439-49 and passim; Cropper and Dempsey, Poussin, 95-99 and passim.

164 control over the way the beautiful execution of an image compounds and corresponds to the particular type of beauty in the thing depicted.147

In offering drawing examples as collector’s items, Ribera declares himself able to teach both drawing and looking. In executing his drawing examples in markedly different stylistic modes, which correspond to different theoretical approaches to imitation, Ribera also takes his authority to the level of theory, insisting on the artist’s control over the balance between idea and imitatio. Ribera’s attention to this particular point of theory is further evidence of the prints’ address to dilettantes who took an interest in this sort of discussion. Ribera, by modulating his approach to observation across the series of etchings, gives such an audience something to do and talk about; as Gage observes, on the basis of Mancini’s writings, “the recognition of an artist’s personal combination of imitation and invention was ... the task of the connoisseur.”148

The remarkable Studies of Noses and Mouths round out this repertoire of manners, and complete Ribera’s gamut of proposals for how artistic judgment can combine observation with idealism. Having demonstrated gendered ideals of beauty in correspondingly bold and delicate manners, Ribera makes the principles of contrast and comparison the focus in the third etching, combining the rough and the delicate in deliberate contrapposto, and mediating between them with an emphasis on artistic invention and licence. At the level of technique, the Studies of Noses and Mouths combine the granular exactitude of the Studies of Eyes with the elliptical graphic dash of the Studies of Ears, as for instance the meticulously textured bridge of the nose at the

147 Incidentally, this was also a central tenet of Mancini’s “Requisites for the goodness of painting;” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 120-32. 148 Gage, Mancini, 383; citing Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 13.

165 print’s center sweeps down into brushy hints of mustache and suggestions of eyes under the boldly drawn shadows of a brow (detail figure 2.24). Notwithstanding their variety of shape, angle, and attitude, the eyes and ears were of uniform type and rendering, giving internal contiguity of style to the first two etchings (with the exception of the schematic eyes in profile at the left of the first sheet, which read as a concession to the genre rather than as full-fledged components of the image). The Studies of Noses and Mouths, however, are a jumble of types and tones, from the fine-boned and faintly androgynous features at the lower right to the exaggerated lower lip and extravagant wart on the nose and mouth to its left. The narrative seriousness implied in the screaming mouths of the damned souls at center jostles alongside the frankly comic profile of exuberant bumps and warts in the upper right.

The systematic pairing of these oppositions with inward and outward orientations makes the contrasted duality an inescapable aspect of the print: the serene bearded nose points inward as the agitated mouths around it scream out; the handsome, ephebic features lean back, while the thick-lipped and brutish features lean forward; the linear contour of a perfect nose intrudes in the upper left corner, while the improbably ugly profile pokes out of the upper right. While there are clearly components that derive from observation, such as the finely sculpted relief on the tip and bridge of the nose at center, other components just as clearly spring from the imaginative momentum of the etching needle, as in the cheerfully monstrous bit of profile in the upper right. The ambition of the print is to affirm a combination of approaches between the draftsman’s instinctive freedom and the scrupulous observation of nature, a combination that Vincenzo

166 Giustiniani had placed at the summit of his canon of artistic method in his famous letter to Theodor Ameyden discussed in chapter one.149

Teste Profane

In this connection, it is worth recalling that the ugly and magnificent Large

Grotesque Head belongs to the same creative project. Along with its lesser spinoff, the

Small Grotesque Head, it has brought into focus much art historical debate about the very topic on which Ribera expounds in his Studies of Features: what ethos of idealism or observation guides the making of such an image? What theoretical stances might it reflect or eschew?150 A recent essay by Edward Payne addresses these questions, rightly going beyond Jonathan Brown’s idea that the main impetus behind the print was interaction with an actual person suffering from van Recklinghausen’s disease.151 Payne argues

149 “Duodecimo modo, è il più perfetto di tutti; perché è più difficile; l’unire il modo decimo con l’undecimo già detti, cioè dipingere di maniera, e con l’esempio avanti del naturale, che così dipinsero gli eccellenti pittori della prima classe, noti al mondo; ed ai nostri dì il Caravaggio, i Caracci, e Guido Reni, ed altri, tra i quali taluno ha premuto più nel naturale che nella maniera, e taluno più nella maniera che nel naturale, senza però discostarsi dall’uno, né dall’altro modo di dipignere [sic], premendo nel buon disegno, e vero colorito, e con dare i lumi propri e veri.” Vincenzo Giustiniani, ed. Anna Banti, Discorsi sulle Arti e sui Mestieri (Florence: Sansoni, 1981), 41-45, quote p. 44. “Twelfth: the most perfect of all because it is the most difficult. It unites the tenth and eleventh ways that I have already spoken of; it is to paint di maniera and from the model. So painted the excellent and world-famous painters; in our times Caravaggio, the Carracci, Guido Reni, and others. Among these some inclined more toward the “life-like” than to the “maniera,” and others more to the “maniera” than to the “life-like”; none, however, diverged too far from either one of these ways of painting, and all emphasized good drawing, true coloring, and suitable and true lighting.” Vincenzo Giustiniani, “Letter to Signor Teodoro Amideni,” in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (ed. and trans.), Literary Sources of Art History: An Anthology of Texts from Theophilus to Goethe (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1947), 329-333, quote p. 332. Giustiniani placed Ribera in the group below this; see chapter 1, note 123, p. 55. 150 See for instance Harald Hendrix, “Provoking Disgust as an Aesthetic Strategy: On the representation of the non-beautiful in Aristotle’s Poetics and in Art Theory of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque,” in Klaus Herding and Antje Krause-Wahl (eds.), Wie sich Gefühle Ausdruck verschaffen. Emotionen in Nahsicht (Taunusstein: Driesen, 2007), 119-31; Santucci, “Dissimulazione Onesta,” 40-45; and Viviana Farina, All’Ombra e al Sole di Ribera. Questioni di pittura e disegno a Napoli nella prima metà del Seicento vol. 1 (Castellamare di Stabia: Nicola Longobardi Editore, 2014), 63-70. 151 A view put forth in New York 1992, 169; cited in Edward Payne, “Ribera’s Grotesque Heads: Between Anatomical Study and Cultural Curiosity,” in Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich (eds.), Ugliness: The Non- Beautiful in Art and Theory (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 85-103, 88.

167 instead that the head is a capriccio intended to produce a Marinesque effect of wonder, and ties the print to Ribera’s fantastical drawings of grotesque or lilliputian figures,

“which may be read as a metaphor for the manipulating hand of the artist.”152 This provocative notion seems more congruent with Ribera’s project in the Studies of Features than Payne’s further suggestion that the Large Grotesque Head be grouped with the

Portrait of Magdalena Ventura or the Club-footed Boy as an expression of Ribera’s (and his patrons’) interest in physical deformity per se.153

On the contrary, taken in tandem with the three etchings of feature studies, the

Large Grotesque Head continues the reflection on drawing models and takes up the generically proximate formula of the Michelangelesque Teste Divine (figure 2.25), offering a puckish Testa Profana as an inverted ideal of artistic invention and virtuosic draftsmanship.154 Michelangelo’s heads were also part of a larger project of drawing as pedagogy, and after being heavily copied for decades, they had just enjoyed renewed circulation via a series of engravings that Antonio Tempesta produced in Rome in 1613, just when Ribera was living there and was a member of the Accademia di San Luca

152 Payne, “Grotesque Heads,” 101. 153 Ibid., 94-98. The consensus, so far as one exists, is that the Large Grotesque Head represents a potpourri of cultural interests, ranging from grotesques in the Leonardesque tradition to Della Portan Physiognomic studies, with a general fondness for deformed “specimens” along the way. Lubomir Konečný, “Shades of Leonardo in an Etching by Jusepe de Ribera,” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts 122 (1980): 91-94; Andrea Bayer in New York 1992, cat. nos. 80-81, pp. 182-83; Sophie Harent and Martial Guédron (eds.), Beautés Monstres. Curiosités, Prodiges et Phénomènes (Exh. cat. Nancy: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2009), cat. no. 10, pp. 154-55. 154 A comprehensive study of these heads, including their roots in a Leonardesque tradition and a commitment to “exemplarity” both as drawing pedagogy and art theory, is Andreas Schumacher, Michelangelos Teste Divine: Idealbildnisse als Exempla der Zeichenkunst (Munster: Rhema-Verlag, 2007), esp. 85-112, 183-205; Patricia Emison also notes the easy slippage between perfection in female beauty and monstrostity within Michelangelo’s own work, quoting Innocento Ringhieri’s epigrammatic remark that “le belle donne siano un Mostro piu raro di tutti i Mostri (beautiful women are the rarest of all monsters) [her translation].” Patricia Emison, Creating the “Divine” Artist From Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2004), 131-34, quote p. 132.

168 (figure 2.26).155 Ribera’s male head, no less than Michelangelo’s female ones, obeys the internally generative logic of drawing itself, relying on consonance of shapes with each other, transposing to the register of perfect ugliness the perfect beauty that only art can produce. Ribera’s Large Grotesque Head is an irreverent sendup of the hyper-canonical model out of which maniera-drawing had taken its source for nearly a century. The virtuosic inversion of such a model amounts to a polemical announcement of the primacy of artistic licence, in a context (that of the drawing manual) that proposes drawings as articles of doctrine. The warts and goiters of Ribera’s Large Grotesque Head, no less than the Grecian nose and elaborate hairdo of Michelangelo’s Ideal Head of a Woman, are finely tuned performances of verisimilitude, compounds and assemblages of features too improbable to be found in nature, announcing at once their basis in observation and their removal from the imitation of an individual.

Ribera’s scrupulous yet parodic application of this central tenet of academic art theory (in which he may have been well versed as a member of the Accademia di San

Luca) functions in a similar vein to what Sheila McTighe describes as a theoretical investment in caricature on the part of the Carracci.156 Annibale’s drawings of workers, etched by Simon Guillain and published posthumously in 1646 under the title Le Arti di

Bologna, were accompanied, in the editio princeps by the Roman publisher Ludovico

155 Schumacher, Teste Divine, 32-38, 56-58; see also Hugo Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master (Yale University Press, 2005), 192-206; and Creighton Gilbert, “Un viso quasiche di furia,” in Studies in the History of Art 33 (1992), 213-26. 156 A link that is also suggested by Santucci, although she also reads the Large Grotesque Head primarily as an exercise in warts-and-all realism; Santucci, “Dissimulazione Onesta,” 43-45; on the Carracci, see Sheila Mctighe, “Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the ‘Imaginaire’ of Work: The Reception of Annibale Carracci’s Arti di Bologna in 1646,” in Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (1993): 75-91, esp. 76-78; further bibliography and a wider angle on the question of caricature in seicento theory and practice is in Giacomo Berra, “Il ritratto ‘caricato in forma strana, e ridicolosa, e con tanta felicità di somiglianza.’ La nascita della caricatura e i suoi sviluppi in Italia fino al settecento,” in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 53, no. 1 (2009): 73-144.

169 Grignani, by a preface by a “Giovanni Atanasio Mosini” (identified by Denis Mahon as a maestro di casa to Urban VIII named Giovanni Antonio Massani), in which an extensive quotation from Giovanni Battista Agucchi’s treatise on painting became the only fragment of that treatise to survive.157 As McTighe indicates, the published folio’s title and preface “announce [that] Annibale’s drawings of market workers would fall not into the category of low-life subjects, but into that of life-studies - as though they were the equivalent of drapery or anatomy studies.”158 The title in question echoes the full title of

Mancini’s Considerations, explicitly taking as its audience all those who understand and delight in painting: “Diverse figures, 80 in number, drawn in pen in the hours of recreation by Annibale Carracci, engraved in copper and taken from the originals by

Simone Guilino of Paris. Dedicated to all experts (virtuosi) and connoisseurs (intendenti) of the profession of painting, and of drawing (disegno).”159 This address is reiterated in the dedication of the preface “To all those who delight in the most ingenious profession of Disegno,”160 which echoes Pietro Stefanoni’s dedication of the Scuola Perfetta to the

“nobilissimi amatori del disegno.”

According to McTighe, Massani’s preface addresses the inherent tension between the subjects of the Arti di Bologna (socially low and physically deformed) and the

157 Mahon, Studies, 232. 158 McTighe, “Perfect Deformity,” 76. 159 “DIVERSE FIGURE / Al numero di ottanta, Disegnate di penna / Nell’hore di ricreatione / DA / ANNIBALE CARRACCI / INTAGLIATE IN RAME, / E cavate dagli Originali / DA SIMONE GUILINO PARIGINO. / DEDICATE / A TUTTI I VIRTUOSI, / Et Intendenti della Professione della / Pittura, e del Disegno. / IN ROMA, / Nella Stamperia di Ludovico Grignani. / MDCXLVI. / CON LICENZA DE’ SUPERIORI.” Quoted from transcription in Mahon, Studies, 234. By way of comparison, the full title of Mancini’s considerations is “ALCUNE CONSIDERATIONI / APPARTENENTI ALLA PITTURA COME DI DILETTO DI / GENTILHUOMO NOBILE E COME INTRODUTTIONE / A QUELLO SI DEVE DIRE.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 1. 160 “A TUTTI COLORO, / Che della professione ingegnosissima del Disegno / si dilettano. / GIOVANNI ATANASIO MOSINI / Salute.” Ibid.

170 programmatic idealism outlined in Agucchi’s theory of painting.161 Just as the title displaces the genre of the folio from “low” collections of artisanal types (with precedents in the cris de Paris or arti di Roma series from the late sixteenth century) to exemplary drawing manuals, the preface itself frames Agucchi’s idealism as consistent with the

Carracci workshop’s cultivation of caricature.162 Following his long quotation of

Agucchi’s treatise, Massani offers a gloss on the theoretical import of the Arti di Bologna that is thoroughly consonant with Ribera’s riffs on the Michelangelesque ideal and on the

Carracci precedents in the cartilla genre:

But when the artist imitates this [imperfect, defective] sort of object, not only as they are, but [instead], without removing from their similitude, represents them more greatly altered and defective: and in the School of the Carracci these bore the name of loaded portraits (Ritrattini carichi); to these was added (as Annibale said) the third reason for their delight, that is, caricature; which, when it is well executed, incited the beholder all the more strongly to laughter. But with higher understanding, and with taste, (con più alto intendimento, e con gusto) he considered such work in this manner, saying that when the worthy painter makes a loaded portrait well, he imitates Raphael and the other good authors, who, not being content with the beauty of nature (bellezza del naturale), go and gather [such beauty] from several objects, or from the most perfect statues, so as to create a work that is perfect in every part: for which reason the making of a loaded portrait was no different from being a great connoisseur (ottimo conoscitore) of the intention of nature in making that big nose, or wide mouth, so as to make a beautiful deformity in that object. But [nature] not having managed to alter that nose, and that mouth, or other part, to the degree that the beauty of deformity would require, the worthy artist (valoroso artefice), who knows how to come to nature’s assistance, represents this alteration all the more overtly (assai più espressamente), and puts before the beholders’ eyes the portrait, loaded in the measure that is most suitable to perfect deformity.163

161 McTighe, “Perfect Deformity,” 76-78. 162 Ibid., and passim. 163 “Ma quando l’artefice imita questa sorte d’oggetti, non solo come sono, ma senza levare alla similitudine, li rappresenta maggiormente alterati, e difettosi: e nella Scuola de’ Carracci hebber nome di Ritrattini carichi; s’aggiugneva (diceva Annibale) la terza cagione del diletto, cioè la caricatura; la quale quando era fatta bene, eccitava maggiormente il riguardante al ridere. Ma con più alto intendimento, e con gusto, egli tal lavoro in questo modo considerava, dicendo, che quando il valente Pittore fà bene un ritrattino carico, imita Rafaelle, e gli altri buoni autori, che non contenti della bellezza del naturale, la vanno raccogliendo da più oggetti, ò dalle Statue più perfette, per fare un’opera in ogni parte perfettissima: percioche il fare un ritrattino carico, non era altro, che essere ottimo conoscitore dell’intentione della natura nel fare quel grosso naso, ò larga bocca, à fine di far una bella deformità in quell’oggetto. Ma non essendo ella arrivata ad alterare quel naso, e quella bocca, ò altra parte, al segno che richiederebbe la bellezza della deformità; il valoroso artefice, che sà alla natura porgere aiuto, rappresenta quell’alteratione assai più

171

Ribera’s Large Grotesque Head represents just such an improbable saturation point of perfect deformity, pressing every feature to its misshapen superlative. The coexistence of this outré theoretical stance with the more straightforward Agucchian idealism expressed in the Studies of Eyes drives home the comparison between the two stances, as though forcing the debate as to what idealism or observation should consist of in art.

The relevance of such a gesture to the question of taste is spelled out by none other than Giulio Mancini, who praises Annibale Carracci for the wit that he manifests both as an artist and as a conversationalist: “He was of pleasing habits (di costume piacevole), but retiring, sharp in his speech and ready with a biting wit (mordace con piacevolezza), as he was also, in portraying some with deformities, of most singular taste

(di singolarissimo gusto), as is seen in many portraits and in particular [that] of Rinaldo

Coradino.”164 Mancini understands the “most singular taste” manifested by Annibale in his caricatures as a visual cognate of his wit in conversation. Taking these elements in reverse, one should not exclude from Ribera’s Studies of Features the assertion of a conversational quality of gusto. The embrace of deformities as exemplary for training the eye and hand is a refined joke on taste itself, a performance of sharp wit that carries over from ways of drawing to ways of talking.

The particular invocation of antique statuary in Massani’s text is anticipated in

Ribera’s contemporaneous Studies of Facial Features discussed earlier (figure 2.18), which combine a kind of imperial pastiche all’antica with the hairy warts and

espressamente, e pone avanti à gli occhi de’ riguardanti il ritrattino carico alla misura, che alla perfetta deformità più si conviene.” Mahon, Studies, 260-62. 164 “Fu di costume piacevole, ma ritirato, acuto nel parlare e mordace con piacevolezza, come ancor, nel ritraher con deformità qualcheduno, di singolarissimo gusto, come si vede in molti ritratti et in particolare di Rinaldo Coradino.” Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 220.

172 stravaganze of the Studies of Noses and Mouths. The frowning, furrowed brows and intense stare of the central set of features call to mind portrait busts of Caracalla (figure

2.27), while the high cheekbone, Patrician nose, and neatly curling locks of hair have a distinctly Augustan look (figure 2.28). Ribera’s irreverent mixture of regal ancient statuary with unstatuesque hairs and warts drives home the same point: the master draftsman’s connoisseurship of nature and art alike enables him to select the best (and/or worst) from the examples around him, so as to carry creation to its intended

(im)perfection.

The distinction may appear irrelevant and anachronistic between thinking of

Ribera’s etched Studies of Features as the incomplete beginnings of a drawing manual and thinking of them as a completed collectible series invoking the genre of the drawing manual. Yet the salient difference is between actually teaching and asserting one’s prerogative to teach. In the Studies of Features and in the Large Grotesque Head he produced with them, Ribera announces, to much the same audience that Mancini had addressed in his Considerations on Painting, his own authority as a master draftsman to apply a counterintuitive and irreverent canon of “perfection” to the observation of both nature and art. The exploration of a sensory theme developed in the Studies of Features, and brilliantly analyzed by Fowler, is a byproduct of the series’ larger investment in what it means to perform esthetic judgment. The etchings are exercises in taste that both enact and upset existing theoretical canons. They present taste both as discernment of the quality of a work of art and as the production of quality in its creation.

As Gage notes, the capriccio and the grotesque were also the subcategories of artistic production most firmly associated with artistic furor, with an excess of

173 inspiration, as it were.165 Ribera’s paradigm of exemplary draftsmanship rests on inspired excess, on an artist’s licence to invert the very nature of beauty. The immediate congruence of his etchings with the circulation of Mancini’s Considerations, in which the authority that Ribera claims is explicitly displaced from artists to gentlemen intenditori, indicates the currency of the question rather than any relationship of causality between the two projects.

By way of conclusion, a final observation stands to be made about Ribera’s

Studies of Noses and Mouths. The most prominent feature of this etching, the reiterated screaming mouth, invokes both a Michelangelesque canon of drawings and a robust tradition of images subverting it: related to the Teste Divine, just as Ribera’s Large

Grotesque Head relates to his etched feature studies, is Michelangelo’s Furia (figure

2.29).166 As David Summers has noted, Furia as a particular form of creativity was closely related to invention, and was called upon in the production of grottesche and in the quality of bizarria (for which Cosimo del Sera had praised Ribera so warmly).167 The

Michelangelesque Furia also found a place among other drawing manuals, as for instance a clear derivation is included in Luca Ciamberlano’s Scuola Perfetta (figure 2.30). The particular expression of furor in Michelangelo’s drawing was, like the Teste Divine, frequently copied, and was translated into print at an early date; its canonical status within Michelangelo’s lifetime is further verified by its transgressive adaptation by Rosso

165 Gage, “Invention, Wit, and Melancholy,” 8, also citing Emison, Creating the “Divine” Artist, 132-37. 166 Gilbert, “Viso,” 218-20; Schumacher, Teste Divine, 158-60, 202-5. 167 Summers, Michelangelo, 60-62.

174 Fiorentino, in the so-called Furia engraved by Jacopo Caraglio (figure 2.31).168 Not unlike Rosso, Ribera seems to exacerbate and also undercut the tragic gravitas and intensity of the Michelangelesque source, repeating the motif of the screaming mouth and placing it within a body of imperfection. One may see in Ribera’s invocation of the

Michelangelesque Furia a pendant to his homage to Raphael in the Hecate currently in

Apsley House.169 The emphasis on furor signals Ribera’s awareness that the traits for which Del Sera had praised him, ingegno and bizzarria, were his calling-cards. These same traits are those that for Mancini marked an artistic temperament incompatible with the capacity to judge, which, nevertheless, Ribera asserts through the genre of the drawing manual, setting himself up as an instructor in taste itself.

168 Stephen J. Campbell, "Fare una cosa morta parer viva: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)divinity of Art," Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (Dec. 2002): 596-620, esp. 600-2. 169 See chapter 1, 36-38.

175 Chapter 3: Connoisseurship and conversation in Ribera’s Five Senses

a) Context and commission of Ribera’s Five Senses: the Lincei and Oziosi Academies

b) Connoisseurship as a mode of conversation

c) Patterns of discussion, methods of inquiry: the painting-sculpture paragone

d) “A spyglass to tell good from bad counsel:” sense, prudence, and politics

Let there be here no debate as to the terms, I say, between understanding [l’intendere] hand having prudence; it being the case that both the one and the other belong to the intellective parts. Let us therefore declare that sensation [il sentire] and understanding [l’intendere] are not the same thing; for sensation is shared among every animal, and understanding among few: I say among few, for besides men, it seems that a few animals have some modicum of prudence; although it is improper to call it thus. For yet another reason, sensation is not the same as understanding; because understanding can be performed either well or badly, while sensing is only ever done well ...1

Bernardo Segni

Cavaliere. - Nevertheless (if I am not deceived) you contradict yourself, for not long ago you told me, that it was enough to learn to speak words full of simple affect, and now you would have him speak with eloquence and with prudence. But if you have already said that there are in the world but few orators and philosophers, what can I, or so many of my companions do, who have not gold to spend, and cannot, in conversation, be either Demosthenes nor Plato?2

Stefano Guazzo

1 “Non sia quì disputa del nome, frà l’intendere dico, e l’haver prudenza; conciosia chè l’uno, e l’altro s’appartenga all’intellettiva parte. Dicasi pertanto il sentire, e l’intendere non essere il medesimo; perchè il sentire è partecipato da ciascuno antimale, e l’intendere da pochi: io dico da pochi, perchè oltre agli huomini, parte, che alcuni animali habbiano qualche poco di prudenza; benchè ciò si dica impropriamente. Per un altra ragione ancora non è il medesimo il sentire, e l’intendere; perchè l’intendere si fa è bene, e male: & il sentire sempremai si fà bene ...” Bernardo Segni, I tre libri d’Aristotile Sopra l’Anima. Trattato di Bernardo Segni Gentil’huomo, & Accademico Fiorentino (Florence: Giunti, 1607), 131. 2 “Tuttavia (s’io non m’inganno) voi contradite a voi stesso, perché poco fa mi diceste che basta d’ ingegnarsi di dir parole piene di semplice affetto, e ora volete, ch’egli parli con eloquenza, e con prudenza. Ma se già havete detto che sono pochi al mondo gli oratori e i filosofi, come farò io e tanti altri miei compagni, che non habbiamo oro da spendere e non possiamo far nelle conversationi, né il Demostene, né il Platone?” Stefano Guazzo, ed. Amedeo Quondam, La Civil Conversazione vol. 1 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2010), 86.

176

To any artist depicting the five senses of the body in Ribera’s time, there remained a wide scope of possibilities as to what exactly one was to represent. The senses could be considered as organs, as allegories, as microcosmic figures for the elements, distinctly human capacities or the most animal of human traits, features of the body but messengers to the soul, the most anatomical or the most abstract attributes of personhood.

In his paraphrase and commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Bernardo Segni illustrates the difference between raw sensation and the judicious processing thereof by noting that while “sensing is only ever done well,” understanding is subject to qualitative judgment, and can be foolish or wise, sloppy or skilful. Within the range of approaches possible for artistic depictions of the senses, then, a fundamental question is whether one is to depict sensation or understanding? What might either of these look like, either together or separately, and how would one go about conveying the difference?

What I will argue with regard to Jusepe de Ribera’s Five Senses from around

1615 is, first of all, that Ribera considered this crucial nuance very carefully, and opted to depict the senses in a way that calls attention to the problem of distinguishing between sense experience and the moral, qualitative weighing through which it is processed. Part of the way Ribera accomplished this foregrounding of the tension between experience and its evaluation was by offering his viewers experiences to evaluate. The early seventeenth century culture of connoisseurship discussed thus far, with its readiness to compare and evaluate works of art, becomes for Ribera a dynamic component in the depiction of the five senses. The prudence of the connoisseur, which Mancini had asserted across his introduction to the Considerations on Painting, was a practice of

177 sensory discrimination, an exercise in looking as discrimination, recognition, and decision-making. Just beyond the fulcrum between sensation and sound judgment based thereon was the virtue of prudence: sensory experience with the distinction of “sense perception done well” was prudent, revealing that the experience was also already a good decision, an act of understanding and sound judgment.

What does prudence, the courtly virtue par excellence, have to do with the very uncourtly figures in Ribera’s Five Senses? As I shall try to demonstrate, the courtly and conversational settings for and in which the series was produced assume an urgent concern with prudence that has not thus far been taken into account as regards Ribera’s series. The paintings have long been known to invoke and cater to a Roman and

Neapolitan scientific milieu connected to the Accademia dei Lincei; the literary

Accademia degli Oziosi in Naples has also merited some mention, not least because it had strong links to the Lincean academy. This chapter will propose that the courtly culture around these academies was not merely a peripheral or external context of production for Ribera’s series, but that Ribera uses and incorporates his expectations about this context in creative and unexpected ways. The conversational strategies and practices that shaped the context of the paintings’ consumption are also dynamic components of the paintings themselves. Much of the most interesting scholarship to emerge on Ribera’s work has considered how the Five Senses in particular show his participation in ambitious intellectual culture in Rome and Naples. Conversation, prudence, and the careful management of communication have long been recognized as concerns for this cultural milieu; let us explore how these concerns might in fact be relevant to the way Ribera painted for such a setting.

178 We will begin by establishing how the Lincei and Oziosi academies come into the picture, and by revisiting the nature of Ribera’s break with the pictorial tradition in his depiction of the five senses. Ribera’s inclusion of a Galilean telescope in his depiction of

Sight has rightly directed scholarship to the connections the series suggests with the

Lincean academy; this chapter aims to build on that scholarship by thinking about how conversation, and the social pressures that came with it, were central and by no means sterile features of this intellectual culture. Ribera’s invocation of the Naples-based

Lincean Giambattista Della Porta’s physiognomic studies invites us to consider the links between the Academies of the Lincei and the Oziosi, both of which counted Della Porta as a member. Even more than the Lincei, the Oziosi academy represented a context driven by conversation, and the topics that the Otiose academics took under discussion align in many ways with Ribera’s Five Senses. The first section concludes with an argument in favor of an earlier proposal that the unnamed Spanish patron of the Five

Senses was in fact a member of the Accademia degli Oziosi, the Count of Villamediana.

Section two looks at how connoisseurship could function as a mode or tactic of conversation, and argues that Ribera’s handling of the subject of the Five Senses anticipates and draws out particular ways in which paintings were looked at. Here, we will revisit the often-reiterated commonplace that Ribera’s Five Senses strongly evoke

Caravaggio’s Roman easel pictures on sensory themes. Beyond this general stylistic and thematic proximity, I propose to explore how visual memories of and comparisons with

Caravaggio’s paintings inflect and enrich Ribera’s series. Ribera uses the mobility of easel paintings, which lent themselves to frequent rearrangement and to “curatorial” configurations suggesting ideas about the pictures’ content, to lend concrete shape to

179 discussions on the hierarchy and relationship among the five senses. Finally, we will consider the evidence for the telescope itself as an object of interest to connoisseurs such as Giulio Mancini and Galileo’s friend Gianfrancesco Sagredo, who even used small telescopes for the express purpose of subjecting his paintings to connoisseurial scrutiny.

One instance of a topic for civil conversation that was of equal interest to artists, to connoisseurs (like Mancini), to the Lincean academy (Galileo in particular), and to the

Oziosi academy (as evidenced by records of their meetings) is the paragone between painting and sculpture. Ribera’s depiction of Touch offers an original and very “Galilean” take on this question, and exemplifies the way Ribera’s series as a whole uses but also departs from well-trodden and fashionable conversational avenues. Another painting from Ribera’s early career, the Saint Andrew in the Quadreria dei Girolamini in Naples, adds weight to the supposition that Ribera creatively invoked the paragone debate, specifically as its terms were set out by Galileo.

The final section of the chapter considers the most important commonality between the five senses and the context and practices of conversation, arguing that prudence was the aspect of the Five Senses that Ribera emphasized most deliberately.

Returning to Sight, we will consider how the devices Ribera depicts for the enhancement of vision were also included in a discourse on prudence, and discussed in terms of what they could not show: the telescope, for instance, could increase the range of one’s vision but could not tell good advice from bad, nor folly from wisdom. Other works from

Ribera’s early years in Rome forge a link between the sense of sight and the prudence of

Socrates; these paintings have much in common with the Five Senses, and put the

180 emphasis on the function of the senses in self-knowledge, as do contemporary texts such as Stefano Guazzo’s Dialoghi Piacevoli.

Considering the Oziosi academy especially as a courtly setting, we will see how courtly virtues associated with discrimination and dissimulation were emblematized by means of the bodily senses, or of devices to enhance them, such as the telescope and microscope. The Lincean academy’s own emphasis on prudence and on the need for dissemblance in conversation also emerges from the correspondence among its members

(we will see examples from the carteggio of the academy’s chancellor, Johannes Faber).

The refinement of Ribera’s paintings, coupled with their unrefined protagonists, suggest a parallel with the elegant poetry in which the Count of Villamediana condemns the hypocrisies of courtly life in very courtly verse. Finally, we will look to Ribera’s Smell for how his series creates an exercise in prudence, asking viewers to discern the nature of the expressions depicted, and confounding expectations of dissimulation with the figures’ prosaically frank rapport with their own bodies and feelings.

a) Context and commission of Ribera’s Five Senses: the Lincei and Oziosi Academies

Identifying the Five Senses and their interpretive context

Around 1615, the barely 25-year-old Jusepe de Ribera fulfilled a commission for a Spanish patron in Rome to paint a series of five half-figures representing the five senses

(figures 3.1-3.5).3 The existence of this series was first reported around 1620, at the end

3 New York 1992, cat. nos. 2-5, pp. 60-64; Justus Lange, “Opere veramente di rara naturalezza” Studien zum Frühwerk Jusepe de Riberas mit Katalog der Gemälde bis 1626 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003), cat. nos. A13-A17, pp. 197-201; the most recent discussion, with further bibliography, is in José Milicua and Javier Portús (eds.), El Joven Ribera (Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2011), 142-53. Consensus on the dating of the series has varied, but Mancini’s testimony that the series was produced in Rome gives us a

181 of Giulio Mancini’s biography of Ribera in his Considerations on Painting (appendix 9):

“he made many things here in Rome, and in particular for ***, a Spaniard, who has five very beautiful half-figures for the five senses, a Christ taken down from the cross, and other [works] that in truth are things of most exquisite beauty.”4 The pressing tasks of sorting out the identity of the unnamed patron, and also identifying the paintings themselves, have long eclipsed the choice of words that Mancini applies to paintings such as the senses of Taste or Smell (figures 3.1 and 3.2) whose notably grimy, lower-class male figures are rather counterintuitive examples of “most exquisite beauty.” The first written evidence that we have of the series thus places it squarely in the context of a discussion of connoisseurship, and holds the series up as an example of the distinction between beauty in painting as such, and beauty in whatever the painting represents.

Mancini in this passage is not filling in his biography with random details about pictures that he happens to have seen or heard of, but is demonstrating his own proficiency in the kinds of expertise that he describes throughout the Considerations on

Painting. To recognize “cose di squisitissima bellezza” in the inherently less-than- beautiful subject matter of scruffy men and of the Deposition of Christ (the main feature of which is a corpse, albeit a holy one) is an instantiation of the Aristotelian principle that

Mancini explicitly claims as a guideline, by which beauty does not consist merely in the inherent loveliness of the thing depicted, but can extend to images of dreadful and ugly

terminus ante quem of 1616, when Ribera moved to Naples; while there is also speculation that Ribera was in Rome as early as c. 1605, he is first documented in the Eternal City in 1612, and there is broad agreement that the series was made in the 1610s. On stylistic grounds (however tenuous), the series is generally dated to around 1615, towards the tail end of Ribera’s time in Rome. 4 “Fece molte cose qui in Roma et in particulare per ***, spagniolo, quale ha cinque mezze figure per i cinque sensi molto belle, un Christo Deposto et altro che invero son cose di esquisitissima bellezza.” Giulio Mancini, ed. Adriana Marucchi, Considerazioni sulla Pittura, 2 vols. (Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 1956), I, 251.

182 things through the excellence of their imitation.5 For Mancini, the viewer with sound judgment (peritia) and mediocre ingegno, evenness or balance of mind, can weigh the quality of a work of art due to expertise rather than experiencing mere seduction by a picture’s attractive subject. Ribera’s series appeals to a connoisseurial practice like

Mancini’s by locating its beauty in the discerning eye of the beholder, who can appreciate an excellent imitation of what might be an unlovely subject.

The Five Senses were late arrivals in Ribera’s catalogue, partly due to the tardy reception of Mancini’s Considerations: his biography of Ribera was first published by

José Milicua in 1952, and the editio princeps of the Considerations on Painting by

Adriana Marucchi followed in 1956.6 In 1966, Roberto Longhi identified the painting of

Taste in the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford (figure 3.1) as one of the original images in the series, whose early popularity is demonstrated in the large number of early copies that exist of all five half-figures.7 Identifications of Smell, currently in the Juan Abelló collection in Madrid (figure 3.2), Sight in the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City

5 “E così poi la bellezza pittoresca sarà nella formatione e proportione accompagnata con il color conveniente, che così la bellezza sarà in tutte le cose, in tutti l’animali, in tutti li huomini di tutti li genere e di profession di vita, come nei servi, nelli schiavi, anzi nelli stroppiati, anzi nelle cose horribili istesse. E perchè questa bellezza di proportion e di colore ha in sè potentia e faccoltà di poter operare bene quello che li convenga, pertanto la bellezza pittoresca doverà ancor haver in sè l’espression di questa potenza, la qual potenzia, perchè viene apparire prima con la formatione et proportione, come fondamento sarà collocata in questa proportione, quale in sè ha del divino, essendo fatta dalla faccoltà formatrice che, come dice Aristotile, ha del divino.” (“Thus, pictorial [or painterly - pittoresca] beauty will be in the formation and proportion, accompanied by the suitable color, in such a way that beauty will be in all things, in all animals, in all men of all sorts and walks of life, as in the servants, in slaves, so too in the disabled, thus even in horrible things. And because this beauty of proportion and of color contains in itself the power and the faculty with which to carry out well whatever befits it, so too pictorial beauty will still have in itself the expression of this potency, which potency, because it comes to appear first with the formation and proportion, as the foundation it will be placed in that proportion, which has in itself something divine, being made of the formative faculty which, as Aristotle says, partakes of the divine.”) Mancini, Considerazioni, 121. 6 A detailed overview of scholarship on the Five Senses is presented in Lange, Rara naturalezza, 80-97. For the sake of clarity, several points from Lange’s discussion are reiterated in the present work, with apologies for any ensuing sense of redundancy. 7 Roberto Longhi, "I 'Cinque Sensi' del Ribera," in Paragone 193 (1966): 74-78.

183 (figure 3.3), and Touch in the Norton Simon Collection in Pasadena (figure 3.4) followed rapidly.8 Multiple versions exist of each one of the Five Senses, with complete sets of copies (such as that in the Dorotheum, Vienna) confirming the general appearance of the whole series. Only for Hearing has any one version yet to be found that commands consensus as an original, but early and high-quality copies such as those in a Swiss private collection and in the Koelliker Collection in Milan (figures 3.5 and 3.6) provide reliable guides to the general aspect of Ribera’s initial version and to the consistency across many of the early copies thereof.9

Longhi's short but crucial essay set the tone for an approach to Ribera's Senses that played up their qualitative and philosophical departure from Northern depictions of the subject in favor of a realism derived from Caravaggio.10 What appealed to Longhi about Ribera’s series was its solid air of exemplarity within a pictorial tradition of

Caravaggesque genre painting. Subsequent scholars also pointed to the diagonal lighting of the pictures (a direct quotation from Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew in the

Contarelli chapel, for instance), and to the powerful precedents for exploring sensory experience as a pictorial problem in several of Caravaggio’s most popular easel paintings from the 1590s (including his Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Boy Peeling a Pear, and his several images of musicians, for instance).11 For Longhi, the Five Senses manifested a

8 For the exact sequence of these publications, see the catalogue entries for the paintings in Lange, Rara naturalezza, 197-201. 9 Gianni Papi has proposed to treat the Koelliker version of Hearing as the original, but its discrepancy of facture with the other four accepted versions is difficult to overlook; Gianni Papi, Ribera a Roma (Cremona: Soncino, 2007), cat. no. 45, pp. 162-63. 10 Longhi, “Cinque Sensi,” 76 and passim. 11 Silvia Danesi Squarzina has even found evidence that Ribera, like Caravaggio, was expected to reimburse his landlords in Rome for having broken the ceiling of his apartment to create a skylight, as an aid to creating similar high-contrast light effects; Silvia Danesi-Squarzina, “New Documents on Ribera, ‘Pictor in Urbe,’ 1612-16,” Burlington Magazine 148, no. 1237 (2006): 244-251. Interpretations of Caravaggio’s pictures in terms of the five senses are in Richard Spear, “A Note on Caravaggio’s Boy with a

184 Caravaggesque interest in depicting “nature with no apparent subject,” an interest which set Ribera’s paintings apart from the emblematic approach to the five senses exemplified in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s series, painted in collaboration with Peter Paul Rubens in

1617-1618 (figures 3.7-3.11).12 To Longhi, these exquisite panels were “delicious and disgusting,” over-precious bibelots indebted to the “foolish and pedantic Iconologia of

Cesare Ripa.”13 This contrast between Northern and Caravaggesque approaches has been thoroughly internalized in the subsequent scholarship, and is worth revisiting briefly before we proceed to other ways in which Ribera’s series has been studied.14

Vase of Roses,” in Burlington Magazine 113, no. 821 (1971): 470-73; and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (ed.), Los Cinco Sentidos y el Arte (Exh. cat. Madrid and Cremona: Museo del Prado, Centro Culturale Santa Maria della Pietà, 1996), 37-38, cat. nos. V.3, V.4, V.5, pp. 136-40; the more frequently-held view, recently expressed by Catherine Puglisi, is that “although he never painted a cycle of the Five Senses, Caravaggio appealed to sensory experience in many of his early genre pictures.” Catherine Puglisi, “Talking Pictures: Sound in Caravaggio’s Art,” in Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone (eds), Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions (Burlington and Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 105-21, quote p. 107. 12 Longhi, “Cinque Sensi,” 76; Klaus Ertz and Christa Nitze-Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625). Kritischer Katalog der Gemälde vol. 3: Blumen, Allegorien, Historie, Genre, Gemäldeskizzen (Lingen: Luca Verlag, 2008-2010), cat. nos. 533-538, pp.1108-53. 13 “La stessa monografa [Elizabeth Du Gué Trapier] s’indugava anche a rilevare che l’argomento dei ‘Cinque sensi’ era già stato trattato dai tardi manieristi nordici. Verissimo, ma purché si voglia intenderne l’uso in un senso opposto alla innovazione caravaggesca del Ribera. Proprio i ‘Cinque sensi’ di Jan Brueghel de Velours, oggi al Prado - e a una data così tarda come il 1617-1618 - sono esempî di sfoggio allegorizzante buono per i Cabinets degli Arciduchi... e, manco a dirlo, affini alla sciocca e leziosa iconologia di Cesare Ripa. ... Di fronte a queste prelibate e disgustose allegorie - toto coelo disformi dalla nuova interpretazione naturalistica del Ribera - non vale dilungarsi in un chiarimento sociologico fin troppo facile.” Longhi, “Cinque Sensi,” 76. 14 The most recent examination of the series, José Milicua’s comment on it for the Young Ribera exhibition catalogue, illustrates how current this view has remained: “Di fronte a questa tradizione - in sintonia formale con il manierismo nordeuropeo - in cui dominano le immagini allegoriche, i riferimenti a repertori narrativi come la Bibbia, i personaggi sontuosamente vestiti e una notevole varietà descrittiva, si impone, con un carattere diametralmente opposto, la serie realizzata da Ribera, con i suoi personaggi dall’apparenza quotidiana, vestiti in modo discreto e umile, le loro azioni facilmente identificabili, e la volontà di recuperare l’esperienza sensibile come tema principale della pittura. Questa serie, che trova un punto di partenza nell’allora recente movimento caravaggesco, presuppone un rinnovamento completo del genere, tanto da un punto di vista stilistico quanto narrativo, in un momento in cui nel nord Europa dominava una tradizione idealizzante e allegorica incarnata per esempio dalla nota serie di Jan Bruegel ... e Rubens.” (“Faced with this tradition - in formal harmony with northern-European mannerism - in which allegorical images, references to narrative repertories such as the Bible, sumptuously dressed figures, and a notable descriptive variety predominate, the series executed by Ribera imposes itself with a diametrically opposite character, with its figures’ workaday appearance, dressed humbly and discreetly, their actions easily identifiable, with a will to recover sensory experience as a principal theme of painting. This series, which finds a point of departure in the then-recent Caravaggesque movement, presupposes a complete renewal of genre, as much from a stylistic as from a narrative point of view, at a moment in which an idealizing and

185 Longhi’s stark opposition of “subjectless” realism with a fussy reliance on Ripa’s

Iconologia, while exaggerated, is useful insofar as it points out Ribera’s departure in image type from the largely northern and allegorical precedents of the pictorial tradition, which section b) of this chapter will consider in greater detail. The salient difference between Brueghel’s series and Ribera’s is the way each group of pictures addresses its viewers, what physical and mental forms of looking it requires in order to get at the things and figures depicted, and from these to the sensory theme underlying them. Most obviously, the Flemish series demands much closer inspection than Ribera’s pictures, which have a stronger impact as a group and from at least a meter or two away. This is largely a matter of internal scale: though the two series have similar dimensions, the minute size and wealth of finely rendered objects in Brueghel and Rubens’ collaboration demands a different approach from Ribera’s five life-sized half figures. The act of moving in towards one of the Brueghel-Rubens panels is at once natural and necessary, as these images cannot be absorbed in any meaningful way at a distance. The more intimate appreciation of the Flemish allegorical vedute is completely different from the more openly social experience that Ribera proposes; even if both sets of pictures could be looked at and talked about by several people, the sheer physical proximity imposed by the Brueghel panels creates a very different viewing atmosphere than the Ribera canvases, which seem to become co-protagonists in the exchanges taking place within the actual room. Moving towards one of his half-figures means moving into an arena of encounter and interaction with the figure in each painting, four out of five of whom return

allegorical tradition predominated in northern Europe, embodied for instance in the well-known series by Jan Brueghel ... and Rubens.”) José Milicua, “I Cinque Sensi,” in Nicola Spinosa (ed.) Il Giovane Ribera tra Parma, Roma, e Napoli, 1608-1624 (Naples: Arte'm, 2011), 154.

186 eye contact. The tables that articulate the space between viewer, picture plane, and figure in each of Ribera’s Five Senses also create a shared social space between figure and viewer: to take a spot at a table opposite someone is inevitably to come into a fairly close form of interaction with them. The passivity of Brueghel’s open rooms, each exposed like a doll’s house to our enjoyment and scrutiny, is perhaps their most noteworthy point of contrast with Ribera’s emphatically confrontational images.

The other point to consider is the way the two sets of paintings function physically as ensembles. The consistency of setting, lighting, general color scheme, and situation across Ribera’s five pictures heightens their coherence as a group, and it is as a group that they demand a first level of consideration. The scale of the Brueghel-Rubens panels precludes consideration of the pictures from the distance required to see all five at once, but Ribera’s paintings heighten each other’s interest and intensity when seen together. The pictures construct an ideal viewer as an interlocutor, a partner in a social interaction, taking a kind of reciprocal encounter as the premise on which the paintings are to be approached. Beyond Longhi’s insistence that these series (Brueghel’s and

Ribera’s) represent two different approaches to subject matter or to “nature,” we might also consider the way Ribera’s pictures construct an ideal viewer who is at once a curator and a partner in dialogue, mentally arranging the five paintings (or at least aware of their easily modified arrangement) on the scale of the whole series, and imaginatively entering into a kind of imaginary social interaction with each painted figure at the level of the individual paintings.

Ribera’s Galilean telescope and the Accademia dei Lincei

187 What Ribera’s series has in common with its Flemish successor is an overt link between the subject of the bodily senses and contemporary forms of inquiry into nature.

In both series, the image depicting Sight centers around a telescope (figures 3.3 and 3.7), and much useful recent scholarship has tended to unite Ribera with his Flemish colleagues under a common intellectual banner rather than insist on their stylistic differences.15 Rubens and Brueghel both had close ties to the Roman branch of the

Accademia dei Lincei, the scientific academy founded in 1603 whose members, including but not limited to Galileo Galilei, were heavily occupied with scientific investigations of and with telescopes when the two painted series were made.16 With the distinction of Ribera’s Sight as the first painted depiction of a Galilean telescope in particular, his Five Senses have become a point of entry for Ribera studies into the growing body of scholarship that explores the relationship between the “new science” emerging around the Accademia dei Lincei and contemporaneous developments in the visual arts.17 Both the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and its Neapolitan branch (or liceo) took an interest in the five senses as a subject, and to that extent, the paintings already

15 Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Galileo, le Arti, gli Artisti,” in Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Alessandro Tosi (eds.), Il Cannocchiale e il Pennello. Nuova Scienza e Nuova Arte nell’Età di Galileo (exh. cat. Pisa: Palazzo Blu, 2009), 20-43; Peter Mason, “El Catalejo de Ribera. Observaciones sobre La Vista de la primera serie de Los Cinco Sentidos,” in Boletín del Museo del Prado 30, no. 48 (2012): 50-61. 16 Giuseppe Gabrieli, “Pratica e tecnica del telescopio e del microscopio presso i primi Lincei,” in Giuseppe Gabrieli, Contributi alla Storia della Accademia dei Lincei, vol. 1 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1989), 347-72; Frances Huemer, Rubens and the Roman Circle: Studies of the First Decade (New York: Garland, 1996) 3-29 and passim; Frances Huemer, “Rubens’s Portrait of Galileo in the Cologne Group Portrait,” in Source 24, no. 1 (2004): 18-25; Lubomir Konečný, “Peter Paul Rubens, Galileo Galilei und die Schlacht am Weißen Berg,” in Artibus et Historiae 26, no. 52 (2005): 85-91; Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Galileo, le Arti, gli Artisti,” 39; Alessandro Tosi, “Lune e Astri Galileani,” in Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Alessandro Tosi (eds.), Il Cannocchiale e il Pennello. Nuova Scienza e nuova arte nell’età di Galileo (exh. cat. Pisa: Palazzo Blu, 2009), 174-87. 17 Paola Santucci, “La ‘Dissimulazione Onesta’ di Jusepe de Ribera. Prolegomena su Arte e Cultura nel Seicento Napoletano.” Archivio Storico del Sannio 3, nos. 1-2 (1992): 5-89; Ferino-Pagden, Cinco Sentidos, 172-73; Milicua, in Giovane Ribera, cat. no. 28, pp. 162-63; Tosi, “Lune e Astri;” Mason, “Catalejo,” 50-61; Itay Sapir, “Blind Suffering: Ribera’s Non-Visual Epistemology of Martyrdom,” in Open Arts Journal 4 (2014-2015): 29-39.

188 invite a “Lincean” reading, or a nearly-Lincean one; texts such as Tommaso

Campanella’s Philosophia Sensibus Demonstrata might invite comparison with the emphatic embrace of physicality that Ribera’s series displays.18 Campanella’s commitment to debunking Aristotelian commonplaces is shared more cautiously by

Galileo, who provided noted insights into the senses, which are often themselves related to his telescopic observations.19 Both Campanella and Galileo, however, are less concerned with the individual senses than they are with sensation and sensory evidence as a philosophical problem; if their writings are to be “applied” to Ribera’s series, therefore, it should be in the broadest terms possible, as a framework of inquiry into how, whether, and to what extent physical experience equals, advances, or thwarts knowledge of the thing experienced.

Paola Santucci's 1992 essay “La 'dissimulazione onesta' di Jusepe de Ribera” was the first sustained study of Ribera's series and its connections to such figures as the

Lincean academicians Galileo, Giambattista Della Porta, and Colantonio Stigliola.

Beginning with a Longhian understanding of Ribera’s and Caravaggio’s work as a radical break with Northern European approaches to the subject of the five senes, Santucci’s essay was also very much shaped by Ferdinando Bologna's just-published L'incredulita del Caravaggio e l'Esperienza delle ‘Cose Naturale.’20 Following Bologna, Santucci saw

18 Luigi Firpo, “Il Metodo Nuovo. Praefatio alla Philosophia sensibus demonstrata di Tommaso Campanella,” in Rivista di Filosofia, 40 (1949): 182-205. 19 Marco Piccolino, “I Sensi, l’Ambiguità, la Conoscenza nell’Opera di Galileo,” in Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies 4 (2007): 245-78; Nicholas J. Wade, “Galileo and the Senses: Vision and the Art of Deception,” in Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies 4 (2007): 279-307. 20 Santucci, “Dissimulazione Onesta,” 35-36 and passim; Ferdinando Bologna, L'Incredulità del Caravaggio e l'Esperienza delle 'Cose Naturale' (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992), esp. 149-68. Ironically, Santucci’s study, which cites Bologna’s work with great frequency and deference, was dismissed in a footnote by Nicola Spinosa, who simply pointed to Bologna’s study as though it had made all further discussions including Santucci’s redundant; Spinosa Obra Completa, 45, and note 38 p. 276.

189 in both Caravaggio's and Ribera’s naturalism a philosophical stance and an experimental practice reminiscent of the empirical and optics-driven aspects of some of the Linceans’ intellectual commitments, citing the shared patronage circles of Caravaggio and Galileo, notably the Cardinals Francesco Maria del Monte and Scipione Borghese, who were both included in the select circle of patrons to whom Galileo first presented one of his telescopes as a gift.21 For Santucci, Ribera's Five Senses are essays in skeptical experimental science, de-bunking the canonical authorities of philosophy and theology through empirical observation.22 The incredulity that Bologna had already attributed to

Caravaggio is taken as a literal matter of religious unbelief, and the “dissimulazione onesta” of Santucci's title is a reference to what she sees as Ribera's concealment of a heterodox adherence to Erasmus.23

Santucci’s reference to “honest dissimulation” as a theme for the Five Senses is spot on, but her reading of what exactly is being dissimulated might be broadened and applied to more immediate concerns than a putative interest in Erasmus. The more immediate relevance of dissimulation was to the oral and semi-courtly context for which easel paintings such as the Five Senses were destined. In order to understand the stakes of

Ribera’s participation in “scientific” intellectual culture, we can first look at what kind of intellectual culture his paintings would participate in by default. The way that Ribera’s figures construct ideal viewers as interlocutors, as participants in a social encounter, acknowledges that social encounters and conversation were the basic settings in which his paintings were, as it were, “consumed.”

21 Santucci, “Dissimulazione Onesta,” 29-40; Bologna, Incredulitá, 162-66; Tosi, “Lune e Astri,” 177-180. 22 Santucci, “Dissimulazione Onesta,” 35. 23 Ibid., 58-70.

190 The culture of the Lincean academy was highly attuned to conversation, and to courtly strategies of dissemblance and dissimulation in particular, as Mario Biagioli has argued most forcefully with regard to Galileo.24 Within this context, dissimulation comes into play, not as a safeguard for heterodox intellectual stances, but as a natural adjunct to conversation, a sine qua non of social survival. As Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi observes, the atmosphere of civil conversation that predominates in and around “Lincean” paintings such as Rubens’s Self-portrait with Friends in Mantua or Niccolò Tornioli’s Astronomers in the Galleria Spada is itself thoroughly Galilean.25 If, as Tongiorgi Tomasi posits, such a close connection exists between connoisseurial and scientific cultures of conversation, does this connection apply beyond a superficial commonality of setting to the way Ribera painted his overtly “Lincean” Five Senses? From Biagioli’s masterful study, we may fruitfully apply to Ribera’s series the principle that courtly culture was not merely a structural parergon or contextual necessity that enabled the practice of science, but a dynamic and not necessarily negative component in that science’s making. What we see in Ribera’s series parallels the productive interaction and creative synergy that exist between Galileo’s work and the pressures of the courtly setting in which that work became possible: Ribera’s Five Senses render fruitful and dynamic the plain fact that half-figure easel pictures are made for a gallery setting and are consumed through a range of discursive practices that I am grouping under the heading of “connoisseurship.”

24 Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: the Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 25 Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Galileo, le Arti, gli Artisti,” 39; in this connection, see also Evelyn Lincoln’s discussion of Stefano Della Bella’s frontispiece for Galileo’s Dialogue of the Two World Systems, “Talking Pictures: The Discourse of Images in Illustrated Dialogues,” in Evelyn Lincoln, Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 211-36.

191 We can begin by considering the way Ribera’s invocation of the Galilean telescope functioned as a conversational prompt. The placement of the instrument in comparison with glasses and a mirror, as an attribute for a personification of sight, makes the telescope refer to broader questions about the nature of perception and perspicacity, rather than to its astronomical applications alone, as Peter Mason’s recent study of

“Ribera’s telescope” rightly indicates. While several scholars saw the protagonist of

Ribera’s Sight as a kind of maverick Galilean scientist, Mason has pointed out that the figure’s appearance and dress are quite incompatible with the idea of a natural philosopher or “scientist,” and call to mind hunting rather than astronomy.26 As Mason argues, the telescope was prized more generally for its daytime uses than for its astronomical applications, and Ribera’s suggestion of hunting in the figure’s dress and feathered cap is not unlike the telescope’s first appearance in a painting, Jan Brueghel the

Elder’s Landscape with a view of the castle of Mariemont (figures 3.12, 3.13), as a recherché accessory in the gentlemanly pursuit of hunting.27 The audience for whom

Ribera produced the series probably would have been less preoccupied with astronomy than with the contrast between the figure’s at best middle-class appearance and his gentlemanly accoutrements of telescope and hunting cap. In any event, the link between sight and hunting might well have made for a safer and more appealing topic of conversation than potential references to Erasmus or Copernicus, one of whom was already on the index when Ribera’s series was painted while the other was just about to be.

26 Mason, “Catalejo,” 53-54; Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tore Kulbrandstad Walker, Sense and the Senses in Eearly Modern Art and Cultural Practice (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 6; Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Galileo, le Arti, gli Artisti,” 39; Tosi and Tongiorni Tomasi (eds.), Cannocchiale, cat. no. 83, pp. 356-57. 27 Mason, “Catalejo,” 53-54.

192 The Lincean academy's practices, in any case, were played out as much through cultural interests as through “purely” scientific ones, as for instance when Francesco

Stelluti inserted his commentaries on the telescope and on the research of his fellow academicians into his translation and commentary of Aulus Persius Flaccus’s Satires, the

1630 Persio.28 The telescope was a subject of professional competition in a scientific context, as for instance a contest of priority emerged within the academy over the invention of the telescope between Galileo and his neapolitan colleague Giovanni Battista

Della Porta, who was at work on his treatise De Telescopio right until his death on 4

February, 1615.29 This fact was remarked upon in a letter to the academy's principe

Federico Cesi by a second Neapolitan academy member, Nicola Antonio (or Colantonio)

Stelliola (or Stigliola), who, like Della Porta, was working on a treatise on telescopes until his death.30 Stigliola's Ispecillo Celeste dedicated itself to the task of laying out the mathematical principles underlying the functioning of the telescope, but the tone of the work is often philosophical rather than mathematical, and touches on the ordering and foundations of knowledge. Stigliola might just as easily be writing art theory when he bases his analysis of the telescope in its negotiation of universal and particular: “The investigations of causes and of the certain assignment of truth, taking their beginning from outward appearances, proceed to the intrinsic nature of things, and receive as their essential and primary cause, that which being in itself one, responds to the universality of

28 Aulus Persius Flaccus and Francesco Stelluti, Persio. Tradotto in verso sciolto e dichiarato da Francesco Stelluti, Accad. Linceo da Fabriano (Rome: Giacomo Mascardi, 1630); the work’s literary appeal, and the aptitude of the Linceans in couching and combining their scientific work in culturally refined and appealing terms, is remarked upon in Gabrieli, “Pratica e tecnica,” 354. 29 Ibid., 355-57; Vasco Ronchi, “Du De Refractione au De Telescopio de G. B. Della Porta,” in Revue d’Histoire des Sciences et de leurs Applications 7, no. 1 (1954): 34-59; Eileen Reeves, Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 8- 10. 30 Gabrieli, “Pratica e tecnica,” 357.

193 events.”31 Stigliola's preoccupation with the relationship between external appearances and “the investigation of causes” puts his work in a conversation that had a courtly social dimension rather than being carried out completely among specialists who could meticulously follow the mathematical claims. The telescope in the 1610s became a lightning rod for discussions of both the limitations and the centrality of sensory experience in the acquisition and formation of knowledge. The cannocchiale, as it was adapted and used by Galileo in particular, enabled an unprecedented reconfiguration of the heavens themselves based on a set of physical observations, while also underscoring the relative weakness of the human eye and the potential for sensory experience to be as misleading as it could be fruitful in the pursuit of knowledge.32

Giovanni Battista Della Porta (c. 1535-1615), a Lincean academician based in

Naples, also combined his interest in the telescope with a range of concerns about what

31 “Le investigationi delle cause: & della certa assegnazione del vero, pigliando principio delle apparenze esterne, procedono nell’intrinseco delle cose: & ricevono per causa essenziale, & prima, quella che essendo in se stessa una, risponde all’universalità degli eventi.” Nicola Antonio Stigliola, Il telescopio over Ispecillo Celeste di Nicola Antonio Stelliola linceo (Naples: Domenico Maccarano, 1627), 55. One might for instance compare Stigliola’s line of inquiry with Federico Zuccaro’s discussion of disegno sensitivo: “Et è d’avertirsi, che si come il nostro senso esterno conosce gli accidenti solo delle cose in quanto sono in quelle, e pur quelle non conosce, si come l’occhio nostro vede i colori varij in quanto sono nel pomo, nel quadro, & nel muro; & pur non vede la sostanza nascosta sotto quei colori, che questa solamente conosce l’intelletto, così all’opposito non è inconveniente, che l’intelletto nostro, mentre forma il suo disegno, vegga, & conosca la natura di qual si voglia cosa, come essistente ne’particolari, benche quei particolari non conosca; mà solo siano conosciuti dalla fantasia, & della cogitativa.” (“And it is to be noted that as our external sense knows only the accidents of things insofar as they reside therein, yet does not know [the things], as our eye sees the various colors as soon as they are in the pupil, in the picture, and in the [fresco]; and yet [our eye] does not perceive the substance hidden beneath these colors, which is only known by the intellect, thus on the contrary it is not unfitting that our intellect, while it forms its disegno, should see and know the nature of any thing, as existing in its particulars, although these particulars are not what it knows; but that these should be known only by the imagination and by the cogitative [faculty].”) Federico Zuccaro, L’Idea de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti del Cavalier Federico Zuccaro. Divisa in 2 libri (Turin: Agostino Disserolio, 1607), 31. 32 A detailed recent discussion with further bibliography is in Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, “La Conquista del Visibile. Rimeditando Panofsky, rileggendo Galilei,” in Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies 4 (2007): 5-47; see also Noel M. Swerdlow, “Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope and their evidence for the Copernican theory,” in Peter Machamer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge and New York, 1998), 244-70.

194 was implied in sight, both physically through optics, and intellectually/socially through approaches such as physiognomics. Della Porta was considerably older than Galileo

(1564-1642), and had preceded him as a celebrity on the academy’s roster, possessing already an international reputation of long standing; his fellow academicians conceded to

Della Porta a great deal of credit in the matter of the telescope based on his discussions of lenses in his De Magia Naturalis and De Refractione.33 The conflict between Della Porta and Galileo over the invention of the telescope was resolved within the Lincean academy largely in Della Porta’s favor (although technically neither was the first to invent the instrument, as the Linceans also realized), while Galileo took the recognition for having first applied the instrument to astronomy with such epochal results.34

Della Porta can also be partially credited with inspiring the academy’s emphasis on superhuman sight and perspicacity as an intellectual credo. The lynx that gave the

Lincean academy its name and emblem is a derivation of that found on the frontispiece to the 1589 edition of Della Porta’s Magiae Naturalis Libri XX (figure 3.14), which appends to the lynx the motto “aspicit et inspicit,” or “sees and examines.” This motto emphasizes

33 Giuseppe Olmi, “La Colonia Lincea a Napoli,” in Fabrizio Lomonaco & Maurizio Torrini (eds.), Galileo e Napoli (Naples: Università degli Studi di Napoli/ Guida Editori, 1987), 23-58; Raffaella Zaccaria, “Della Porta, Giovambattista,” (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovambattista-della-porta_%28Dizionario- Biografico%29/, accessed apr 25th, 2015); and Andrea Trentini, “Il Telescopio e le prime osservazioni celesti,” in Ebe Antetomas, Alessandro Romanello, and Andrea Trentini (eds.), “Favelleran di te sepmre le stelle.” Galileo, i Primi Lincei, e L’Astronomia (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2012), 20-27. Book XVII of Della Porta’s widely circulated book on natural magic considers mirrors and their uses, and includes sections on “crystalline lenses” and their uses (chapter X), and on “eyeglasses” that let one see from afar, “De gli occhiali con li quali possa l’huomo veder di lontano, che avanza ogni pensiero,” (chapter 11). This is the chapter’s heading in the 1611 Italian translation, p 648 (Naples, Giovanni Iacomo Carlino & Costantino Vitale). The passage does not vary or expand the content of the 1589 Latin edition also published in Naples by Orazio Salviano, p. 270. 34 Trentini, “Telescopio,” 23-7; Albert van Helden, “Galileo’s Telescopes and his Astronomical Discoveries,” in Paolo Galluzzi (ed.), Galileo. Images of the Universe from Antiquity to the Present (Exh. cat. Florence: Palazzo Strozzi, 2009), 246-53; the exacting social maneuvers required for Galileo to assert and protect this recognition are detailed in Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 78-134 and passim.

195 the twofold emblematic significance of the lynx’s keen sight: its physical acuity of perception is to be understood literally, expressing itself in the high premium placed on looking and on physical experience in general. Its keen sight is also a figure for mental perspicacity, processing and evaluating what is conveyed by the senses. Thus, in describing the aims of the Academy of which he was principe and co-founder, Federico

Cesi wrote in Del naturale desiderio di sapere, that the academy “suggests the very clever lynx as a continuous incitement and reminder to seek the acuity and penetration that the mind’s eye must have in order to know things, and it proposes to observe minutely, diligently, and as much as possible, the outside and the inside of all the objects that present themselves in this great theater of nature.”35

The idea of perspicacity is also conveyed in Ribera’s image of Sight, as Milicua and Mason have pointed out, through the aquiline features and keen gaze of the figure.36

These draw on Della Porta’s comparisons between appearances and essential qualities in humans and in animals, comparisons that are illustrated, often with examples drawn from likenesses of famous figures, in the widely read and translated De physiognomia humana libri sex. To varying extents, Ribera ties the five figures’ appearances to the senses that they represent, perhaps most obviously for instance in the grossolano and rather

35 Trans. Brendan Dooley, Italy in the Baroque. Selected Readings (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 30. “Di modo che, mancando un’ordinata institutione, una militia filosofica per impresa sì degna, sì grande e sì propria dell’huomo qual è l’acquisto della sapienza, e particolarmente con i mezzi delle principali discipline, è stata a questo fine et intento eretta l’Accademia o vero consesso de’ Lincei, quale con proportionata unione de’ soggetti atti e preparati a tal opra, procuri, ben regolata, supplire a tutti li sopradetti difetti e mancamenti, rimuovere tutti li ostacoli et impedimenti et adempire questo buon desiderio, propostasi l’oculatissima lince per continuo sprone e ricordo di procacciarsi quell’acutezza e penetratione dell’occhio della mente che e necessaria alla notitia delle cose, e di risguardar minuta e diligentemente, e fuori e dentro, per quanto lece, gli oggetti tutti che si presentano in questo gran theatro della natura.” Federico Cesi, “Del Natural Desiderio di Sapere et Institutione de’ Lincei per adempimento di esso,” in Giuseppe Montalenti and Saverio Ricci, Federico Cesi e la Fondazione dell’Accademia dei Lincei (Exh. cat. Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici CERN, 1988), 107-42, quote p. 124. 36 Milicua in Giovane Ribera, cat. no. 28, pp. 162-63; cited with further discussion in Mason, “Catalejo,” 56.

196 overweight man who embodies Taste. In Sight, the high forehead, the cleft chin, the pronounced parallel furrows beneath the eyes and nose, the receding hairline, and above all the prominent and high-bridged naso adunco, all link Ribera’s figure with Della

Porta’s illustrated description of aquiline, eagle-like features (figure 3.15).37 The point need not be exclusive to Sight, but in this case one may note the artist’s wit in associating physiognomy as a practice with sight itself, and with the different sorts of sight that need to occur in a physiognomical analysis. As the man’s facial features evoke his likeness to the keen-eyed eagle, the figure himself becomes another way of picturing the idea of the eagle’s superhuman eyesight. The moment in which Ribera’s series was painted may also suggest a connection to Della Porta; apart from the terminus ante quem provided by

Mancini’s mention of the Five Senses, there is no documentary evidence as to when exactly the series was produced, although there is general agreement on a date close to

1615. The series would thus have been painted either just before or just after Della

Porta’s death in Naples on February 4th of the same year, and might in either case include something of an homage to the Neapolitan academician.

The point is not to suggest a Della Portan interpretation of Ribera’s painting to replace a Galilean one, but to continue the already admirable work that has been done to unpack the multifarious connections between Ribera’s series and ambitious intellectual culture in Rome and Naples. Ribera turns the Lincean telescope to account as a cue for how to approach and interpret the picture: the telescope is at once an investigative tool, a social marker of status, and a fashionable topic of conversation. More than merely name- dropping the Lincean academy, Ribera takes into consideration his audience’s general

37 Milicua in Giovane Ribera, 162.

197 interest in that academy’s sphere of activity and anticipates how such a set of interests can be applied to looking at his paintings. The originality of Ribera’s painting lies in the way he bonds the ideal viewer’s activity of taking stock of the image with ambitious and philosophically-charged practices of inquiry that he knows his audience to be interested in. At the same time, the five paintings each hold the potential to function as a prompt for conversation that can take several forms and directions, from the conservative to the ambitious, the hackneyed to the original. The subject of the Five Senses, as Ribera approaches it, combines the academic exercise of setting a topic and rehearsing standard arguments on it as a display of erudition with unpredictable departures from the cultural script.

The telescope in Ribera’s depiction of Sight also trades on the assumption that the audience is conversant with the emblematic and pictorial tradition pertaining to the five senses. Both the Galilean telescope and the Della Portan physiognomy of Sight insert new

“lynxes” as attributes into an image that would naturally call for a lynx as an emblematic inclusion: the telescope and the aquiline profile are witty reformulations of a much older association of sight with lynxes. Around 1540, the Nuremberg artist Georg Pencz had pioneered the combination of elements that was to define most images of the five senses, personifying each sense as a woman engaged in a pertinent activity, and accompanied by an animal that emblematized the sense depicted (figures 3.16-3.20).38 Pencz’s choice of a running caption arranges the prints, and thus the senses, according to a predetermined order: the prints are naturally strung together to form a dictum about the senses, “Truxa

38 Robert Zijlma, ed. Tilman Falk, Hollstein’s German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts 1400-1700 vol. 31 Michael Ostendorfer (continued) - Georg Pencz (Roosendaal: Koninklijke van Poll, 1991), cat. nos. 103-107, pp. 206-210; Ferino-Pagden Cinco Sentidos, cat. no. III.7, pp. 106-7.

198 per auditu / lynx visu / simia nos superat gustu / milvus odore / sed aranea tactu.”39 These foundational components to the subject of the five senses persist into the seventeenth century: the same quotation and general approach to the iconography of the senses are in

Cesare Ripa's entry on the subject in the 1613 edition to his Iconologia.40 Almost a century before Ribera, Pencz had placed a lynx next to the figure of sight gazing at the sun, moon and stars (figure 3.17); the telescope in Ribera’s Sight was a witty update of the motif, referring to the figurative lynxes associated with the cannocchiale around

1615.

The Accademia degli Oziosi and the patronage of Ribera’s Five Senses

We find a similar allusion to figurative lynxes contemplating the heavens in some of the poetry emerging from the major literary academy of Naples in this same period, the

Accademia degli Oziosi, whose members and even interests often overlapped with those of the Linceans. In a love poem by the Otiose academician Juan de Tassis y Peralta, the

Count of Villamediana, we find the beloved compared in turn to a star, a comet, and a sun, “whose light the most valiant lynx would resist in vain,” and whose perfection leads the poet to conclude “that the heavens are always heavens, ever pure, / and accidents do not alter their substance.”41 This insistence on the purity of the spiritual and physical

39 See the discussion in Carl Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 1-22, esp. 19-21; according to Nordenfalk, the motto was derived from the Medieval encyclopedic tradition, notably Richard de Fournival’s Bestiare d’amours, and was first quoted in Thomas de Cantimpré’s Liber de naturis rerum (4, I, 194): “Nos aper auditu, lynx visu, simia gustu, / Vultur odoratu praecellit, aranea tactu.” 40 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia di Cesare Ripa Perugino, Cavaliere de’S.ti Mauritio, e Lazzaro Nella quale si descrivono diverse imagini di Virtù, Affetti, Passioni Humane, Arti, Discipline, Humori, Elementi, Corpi Celesti, Provincie d’Italia, Fiumi, Tutte le parti del Mondo, ed altre infinite materie (Siena: Heredi di Matteo Florimi, 1613), 230. Ripa quotes the same dictum with nearly identical wording, the only difference being the verb “superat” instead of “praecellit.” 41 “Bellísima sirena deste llano,

199 heavens, unaffected by “accidents,” certainly would have held echoes of the fierce debates about the nature and specifically the purity of the heavens that Galileo’s telescopic observations had set off, particularly concerning the “blemishes” observed on the surfaces of the sun and moon.42 Founded in 1611, with the support and active membership of the new Viceroy Pedro Fernández de Castro, the seventh Count of Lemos

(1576-1622), the Otiose academy was a representative manifestation of Lemos’s adept involvement and controlling presence in the cultural life of the city under the appearance of détente. The Accademia degli Oziosi drew its core membership from both Spanish and

Neapolitan ruling classes, while also including skilled and noteworthy members from the professional classes.43

estrella superior de esfera ardiente, animado cometa floreciente, con rayos negros serafín humano; sol que a la lumbre de tu luz en vano resistir puede el lince más valiente, fénix que, peregrina, únicamente logra región de clima soberano. Aunque la envidia exhale los alientos de tu veneno, el mérito seguro luce en símbolo claro de constancia. Revuélvanse ambiciosos elementos, que el cielo es siempre cielo, siempre puro, y accidentes no alteran su sustancia.” Juan de Tassis y Peralta, ed. José Francisco Ruiz Casanova, Juan de Tassis, Conde de Villamediana. Poesía impresa completa (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), no. 59 p. 135. 42 Overviews with further bibliography are in Stephen F. Ostrow, “Cigoli’s Immacolata and Galileo’s Moon: Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome,” in Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (1996): 218-235; Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 138-83 and passim; and Philippe Boulier, “L’inaltérabilité du Ciel Pose un Problème Théologique,” in Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies 10 (2013): 41-71. 43 These included several of the leading poets and authors of the Neapolitan seicento, such as Giambattista Basile and Giulio Cesare Capaccio, not to mention the international celebrity Giambattista Marino. On the Accademia degli Oziosi, the most comprehensive study, with rich further bibliography, is Girolamo De Miranda, Una Quiete Operosa: Forma e Pratiche dell’Accademia napoletana degli Oziosi, 1611-1645 (Naples: Fridericiana Editrice Universitaria, 2000); on the membership and basic arrangement of the academy, see especially 60-64, and 70-90 passim, as well as the synopses in Feliz Fernández Murga, La Academia Napolitano-Española de los Ociosos (Rome: Instituto Español de Lengua y Literatura, 1951) and Carlo Padiglione, Le Leggi dell’Accademia degli Oziosi in Napoli: ritrovate nella Biblioteca Brancacciana dal bibliotecario reggente della stessa commend. Carlo Padiglione, cavaliere dell’Ordine dei SS. Maurizio e Lazzaro (Naples: F. Giannini, 1878).

200 The academy also created a social point of contact between Neapolitan noblemen, intellectuals, and letterati, and the prominent Spanish writers who formed Lemos’s literary entourage, including among others the aforementioned Count of Villamediana,

Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, and the brothers Bartolomé and Lupercio Leonardo de

Argensola.44 As the Count of Lemos’s secretary, Lupercio de Argensola was a crucial political agent who exemplifies the density of the connections across intellectual and political circles in Rome and Naples; as Otis Green remarks, it was Argensola whom

Lemos dispatched to Rome in 1616 to negotiate with Galileo on behalf of the Spanish crown with regard to prospective patronage on the part of the Viceroy.45 Nor was

Argensola the only Otiose academician to have Lincean contacts: in spite of a by-law forbidding members of the Oziosi from belonging to other academies, its roster also included Giambattista della Porta, who was not only the anchor of the Neapolitan liceo of the Lincean academy but the founder of the more hermetic Accademia degli Segreti, whose goal was to inquire into the secrets of nature.46

Like the Linceans, the Otiose academicians shaped their impresa around the idea of keen sight, adopting as their emblem an eagle staring into the sun, with the motto “non pigra quies” (figure 3.21), distinguishing the virtuous otium for which they strove from slothful inactivity.47 Frans Floris's design for Sight, from a series of Five Senses engraved

44 Otis H. Green, “The Literary Court of the Conde de Lemos at Naples, 1610-1616,” in Hispanic Review 1, no. 4 (1933): 290-308. 45 Green, “Literary Court,” 299-300. 46 Common ground between scientific and literary circles in early seicento Naples, including the Lincei, Segreti, and Oziosi academies, is also discussed in Lorenza Gianfrancesco, “From Propaganda to Science: Looking at the World of Academies in Early Seventeenth-Century Naples,” in California Italian Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 1-31, esp. 12-17 and passim. 47 De Miranda, Quiete Operosa, 51-62.

201 by Cornelis Cort (figure 3.22),48 depicts the sense of sight through the same emblem of the virtuous eagle looking at the sun, a conceit derived from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s

Ornithology that was a staple of Oziosi poetry.49

Like most Italian literary academies, the Oziosi were a compound of ritualized formality and no less ritualized informality. Regular meetings were presided over by the

Principe, who for more than a decade following the academy’s founding was the Marquis

Giambattista Manso; these meetings included a formal presentation, along with more general discussion, all on topics set by the Principe.50 These topics could include nearly anything except for politics and theology, at least on potentially controversial points; innocuous religious “questions” praising the academy’s patron, St. Thomas Aquinas, come up frequently. The topics covered in the academician Francesco de’ Pietri’s 1642 compilation of “the most famous questions proposed in the most illustrious Academy of the Otiose of Naples” range from the nature of the Adam’s apple and the relative virtues of blonde and dark hair to the central purpose of human sciences, whether nature is inclined to good or to ill, the varying merits of the four elements, or whether Heraclitus or

Democritus was the wiser philosopher.51

The five senses and the hierarchy among them also appear in De’Pietri’s Problemi

Accademici. As De’Pietri summarizes it, the Oziosi discussion of the contest of primacy

48 Ferino-Pagden (ed.), Cinco Sentidos, cat. no. III.8, p. 108-11; Susan Dackerman (ed.), Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Exh. cat. Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2011), cat. no. 99, pp. 390-95. 49 Ibid., 54. 50 Overviews of these practices, with further bibliography, are in De Miranda, Quiete Operosa, 110-13 and passim, and more concisely in Gianfrancesco, “Propaganda to Science,” 10-12. The informality of many of the academy’s proceedings is underscored, albeit a shade aggressively, in Green, “Literary Court,” 303- 308. 51 Francesco De’Pietri, I Problemi Accademici del Signor Francesco de’Pietri L’Impedito Accademico Otioso, ove Le più famose Quistioni proposte nell’Illustrissima Accademia de gli Otiosi di Napoli si spiegano (Naples: Francesco Savio, 1642).

202 between sight and hearing brings out the merits of both eyes and ears, and compares the two senses in their capacity as methods of learning, declaring that spoken instruction from a master is preferable to the book-learning made possible by the eyes (appendix

13).52 Drawing up the problem along these lines sidesteps and leaves open the question of the potency and prerogatives of pictures in particular, from the post-Tridentine discourse on the necessity of Christian images and their powers to move the soul to the applications of images to modern natural history and philosophy, as the Lincean academy particularly exemplifies. The synopses of the “problemi” in De’Pietri are none of them notable for their originality. An even more uninteresting discussion of the senses, for instance, asks

“through which of the five senses Saint Thomas [Aquinas] mortified himself the most”

(answer: hearing).53 That being said, the presentation of a discussion’s most well-trodden lines makes sense if these are construed as the basis for a livelier debate to take place viva voce.

We have some evidence to this effect in a handful of instances in which manuscript sources record a fuller discussion of a topic summarized by De’Pietri. This is the case, for example, of the thoroughly Della Portan subject of alchemy, a matter of consistent interest to scientific circles in Naples and Rome including the Lincei.54 The

52 De’Pietri, Problemi Accademici, 138-140. The discussion concludes, “Onde è vero, che nel primiero caso delle materiali rappresentationi, prevalerà l’occhio all’udito, ma nel secondo della speculatione delle scienze, prevalerà l’udito da Maestri all’occhio, ò vero alla lettion de’libri.” (“Whence it is true that in the former case of material representations, the eye will prevail over hearing, but in the latter case of the speculations of the sciences, hearing from Masters will prevail over the eye, that is, over the reading of books.”) Ibid., 140. 53 “In qual de’ cinque Sentimenti San Tomaso mortificasse maggiormente se stesso.” Ibid., 276-77. 54 As evidenced for instance by Della Porta’s extensive work on distillation, or by the prevalence of alchemical works in Johannes Faber’s library, as demonstrated by Sabina Brevaglieri, “Libri e circolazione della cultura medico-scientifica nella Roma del Seicento. La Biblioteca di Johannes Faber,” in Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome. Italie et Méditerrannée 120, no. 2 (2008) : 425-44; the strong overlap of these interests with the visual arts has long since been asserted by Biagio De Giovanni, “Magia e Scienza nella Napoli secentesca,” in Ermanno Bellucci and Silvia Cassani (eds.), Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli vol. 2 (Exh. cat. Naples: Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, 1984), 29-40.

203 “problem” to be discussed, as De’Pietri presents it, is whether there is really any such thing as alchemy, and the answer is a resounding “no,” condemning the practice as chimeric, unwholesome, and heretical.55 A manuscript record of an otiose discourse in the Vatican Library makes the opposite case and was clearly written for and by people who had a high degree of familiarity with alchemical practice and terminology, talking easily of sublimation, volatile mercury, Pico Della Mirandola, and Ramon Lull.56 The subject of alchemy comes up for the Oziosi as an occasion for debate and display of erudition that is not substantially different from discussing the nature of rhetoric, or which is the best genre of poetry, whereas the Linceans, including Della Porta, would have taken the matter much more practically and seriously. Ribera’s Five Senses do not really mirror or exemplify either an “academic” or a “practical” approach to the senses as a subject of inquiry, but the paintings do display some links to both academies, hovering between prompts for formalized debate and enactments of creative inquiry. Certainly the

Oziosi’s topics themselves, even based on the later and partial testimony of De’Pietri, present several points of congruence with Ribera’s Five Senses, two of which (the paragone between painting and sculpture, and the causes of tears) I will discuss later in this chapter.

The most direct link between Ribera’s Five Senses and the Accademia degli

Oziosi may in fact be one of patronage. The aforementioned Conde de Villamediana, the

Spanish soldier-poet and correo mayor who had accompanied the Count of Lemos to

55 “Se si dia l’Alchimia,” De’Pietri, 16-17. 56 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS. Borg. Lat. 144, ff. 419v.-421v. The text is one in a series of discourses, all apparently by Andrea Brayda, Otiose Academic, the first of which is noted as having been held in Naples on the 8th of August, 1630, in the presence of the Viceroy, the Duke of Alcalá (according to the heading on fol. 375r.).

204 Naples and there joined the Otiose academy, is in my view the stronger of two candidates for the role of “*** spagnolo,” the patron of Ribera’s series whose name Mancini tantalizingly omits from his Considerazioni. The connoisseurial and documentary problems set by Mancini’s passage have been fruitfully, if not quite conclusively explored since Longhi introduced the first visual evidence to the discussion. Two plausible names have been proposed to fill in the name of the series’ patron, left blank in all the surviving copies of Mancini’s manuscript: both are Spanish diplomats who were verifiably present in Rome in 1615, Pedro Cosida (or Cussida) and Juan de Tassis y

Peralta, the second Count of Villamediana. While the evidence in both cases is at once persuasive and inconclusive, we may in any event take it as read that Ribera’s series was produced for an intellectually refined audience with an interest in recent discussions of the role of the telescope, whether as a marker of social cachet or as a placeholder for serious discussions about the nature of knowledge and sense perception.

Justus Lange has built up a compelling case for Villamediana as the series’ patron, based in large part on the Count’s known presence in the social network and art- market-related dealings of Mancini himself.57 Through the intermediary of the prominent art dealer and architect Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, Mancini was in negotiations for a large sale of his paintings to Villamediana, who was a keen collector, probably best known for his attempts to obtain a copy of Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy from the

Neapolitan Pio Monte di Misericordia.58 While the transaction between Mancini and

57 Lange, Rara naturalezza, 102-109. 58 Ibid., 104-6. Lange’s conclusion finds tentative support in a sustained and excellent study of Crescenzi, who was noted for his connoisseurial aptitude as well and for his strong connections to Spain, where he worked for several years; see Marieke von Bernstdorff, Agent und Maler als Akteure im Kunstbetrieb des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts: Giovan Battista Crescenzi und Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2010), 174.

205 Villamediana does not seem to have gone through, the Count certainly knew Mancini’s collection, and it is unlikely that the reverse would not have been true also. An inventory of Villamediana’s collection has not been found; the Count having died violently without heirs in 1622, his goods were put to auction in Madrid, but he is known to have been in

Rome in 1615, is known to have had ties (at least through Della Porta’s presence in the

Oziosi) to the Lincean academy, and he is known to have been a forward-looking and munificent purchaser of art with a taste for Caravaggesque work and original iconographic approaches.59

A counter-proposal with the weight of considerable consensus behind it has been elaborated by Gianni Papi, who identifies the series’ patron as another Spanish diplomat who was in Rome at the time, Pedro Cosida.60 This supposition stands and falls with

Papi’s larger hypothesis, which assigns to the young Ribera in his Roman years a group of paintings formerly given to the anonymous Master of the Judgment of Solomon.61 A key piece in the puzzle for Papi’s identification of this anonymous master with Ribera is a series of Apostles in the Roberto Longhi collection in Florence. These apostles, which

Longhi had attributed to the Master of the Judgment of Solomon, have a provenance from the Gavotti family, who are known to have inherited from the Cosidas in the seventeenth century.62 Papi thus claimed to have clinched the case, both in favor of his attributions and in favor of Cosida as the Five Senses’ patron, based on the 1624 inventory drawn up

59 Lange, Rara Naturalezza, 105. 60 Gianni Papi, Ribera a Roma (Cremona: Soncino, 2007), 46-7, 52-3. 61 Gianni Papi, "Ribera en Roma. La revelación del genio," in José Milicua and Javier Portús (eds.), El Joven Ribera, (exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2011), 31-59. 62 Andrea Leonardi, Dipinti per i Gavotti. Da Reni a Lanfranco a Pietro da Cortona. Una collezione tra Roma, Savona e Genova (Genoa: Associazioe Amici della Biblioteca Franzoniana, 2006), 50-53. Cited in Papi, Ribera a Roma, 26, note 85.

206 on the death of Pedro Cosida’s son Juan Francisco, which lists pictures of the five senses and of the twelve apostles, both by unspecified artists.63

The strengths of Papi’s argument are the generally good fit of Pedro Cosida to the likely professional and personal profile of the series patron, along with the coincidence of his inventory’s inclusion of a series on the five senses. The popularity of the subject, and indeed of Ribera’s own particular approach to it, however, prevent one from considering the Cosida inventory as conclusive proof. The twelve apostles were a still more popular subject, and it is by no means improbable that both entries in Cosida’s inventory could correspond to works by other artists. Papi’s confident assumption to the contrary rests on a tautology: his proposed attribution of the Cosida-Gavotti-Longhi apostles to the Young

Ribera and his proposal of Cosida as the patron of both series each act as confirmation for the other. The hypothetical identity of the Five Senses’ patron becomes an authenticating mark to be used in questions of attribution, orienting the debate about the series’ patronage towards its potential ramifications for the rest of Ribera’s catalogue rather than its implications for the series itself. The strong case proposed by Justus Lange for seeing the Conde de Villamediana as the series’ patron may be reinforced not only by the density of the connections uniting the Oziosi and Lincei academies, as discussed earlier, but by the overlap between these academies as conversational settings and the discursive approach that Ribera’s Five Senses construct between the figures and ideal viewers, as we shall see in the following section.

b) Connoisseurship as a mode of conversation

63 Mario Epifani, “Appendice documentaria - Le fonti sul soggiorno Romano di Ribera,” in Gianni Papi, Ribera a Roma (Soncino: Edizioni del Soncino, 2007), 241-55, p. 250.

207 Looking at pictures, and other sensory experiences

The challenge to which Ribera’s Five Senses respond with conspicuous success is that of conveying, through pictorial means, non-visual but very physical sensations, getting a visual activity to encompass and suggest the activities of other senses. In this regard, we find Ribera at his most Caravaggesque, responding to bravura evocations of embodied experience such as the famous Boy Bitten by a Lizard (figure 3.23) as though accepting a duel. More explicitly than Caravaggio had done, Ribera constructs visual metaphors for the non-visual experiences he depicts, spelling out the means of conveyance of non-visual sensations within the viewer’s activity of looking at paintings.

As I shall try to demonstrate, the novelty of Ribera’s series is in the explicit articulation of these metaphors rather than in the suggestion of sensory experience per se.

The relationship between Ribera’s Five Senses and the primarily printed treatments of the subject that preceded them is most obviously a contrast between allegory and something akin to genre painting. If we compare for example a depiction of smell such as Abraham de Bruyn’s 1569 engraving with Ribera’s Smell canvas from the

Roman series (figures 3.24 and 3.2), we see a drastic departure in tone and genre, from a rather generic female figure smelling flowers to a strikingly peculiar male figure smelling an onion. Beyond the transition from idealized allegory to unidealized personification, there is a change from showing a figure who does and experiences something to extending the experience depicted to the viewer. For instance, as Milicua perceptively observed, the figure through which Ribera depicts the bodily sense of smell seems quite pungent himself.64 Even as we start to wonder whether the man or the onion smells

64 Milicua, Cinco Sentidos, 152.

208 stronger, we can see how much they look alike: Ribera goes out of his way to make the fraying skin and scraggly tuft of roots on the onion look like the tattered layers of the man’s clothing (see details, figures 3.25 & 3.26). The red snippet of cloth at his waist mimics the bit of skin that peels off of the onion on the table, and pale green shoots from the cut onion rhyme with the dangling strands of gray fabric that hang below the man’s wrist.

The act of looking at Ribera’s picture of smell, registering the details of the figure, is deliberately likened to an act of smelling. One might say that Ribera manages to depict not only “Smell” but smells, conveying in visual form a sensory experience of a different nature than sight and personifying the sense experientially rather than allegorically. In fact, each of the paintings in the series not only presents a figure having a sensory experience, but also foregrounds the comparison between the figure’s experience and the viewer’s. In Taste, for instance, the texture and color of the saltshaker are exactly identical to those of the man's gray shirt; just as Smell looks rather like the onion and twice as smelly, so also Taste looks like the salt he's put on his own food (figure 3.1). The buttons of his shirt, the round moles on his chest, and the olives on the table are also drawn into a three-way simile. Touch is turned away from the viewer, so that the profile of the figure and of the sculpted head that he holds are set in stark relief against the painting's background, enacting in painted rilievo the protrusions that the blind figure probes with his fingertips (figure 3.4). The orientation of the figure in Touch thus maximizes his appearance of relief, lending “tangible” shape to Ribera's image. As

Daniel Aragó-Strasser has pointed out, Ribera’s innovative combination of the theme of the five senses with its application to the paragone or contest between the two- and three-

209 dimensional arts hinges on an examination of art itself.65 The viewer’s own activity of looking at a painting thus becomes one term in a comparison whose other half is the figure’s activity of not looking at a painting. We may compare our own looking to the man’s probing of the head of sculpture that he holds up, while the figure’s pointed obliviousness to the painting in front of him heightens our awareness that what we are doing is looking at an image of the same sort.

Ribera’s determination to clear the bar set by Caravaggio in the depiction of sensory experience is of a piece with the particular setting for which he was painting, both in the sense of a physical venue and in that of a niche market within the Roman art world. The format of the Five Senses as a set of easily movable, life-sized half-figures, whose visual impact increases quite notably with their display and interaction as a group, is an adept application of the sensory theme to a variety of painting that already centered on effects of presence and physicality. Michael Fried’s work explores the idea that the gallery picture as a format lent itself to this particular range of pictorial challenges and effects, paying particular attention to the single-figure easel painting as a specialty cultivated by artists in Caravaggio’s circle and by artists of the generation after him, including Ribera.66 With regard to Caravaggio, Fried relates the format of the single- figure easel painting to the artist’s cultivation of potent effects of presence and bodily awareness.67 While the physical format of Ribera’s Five Senses was almost certainly

65 Daniel Aragó-Strasser, "Acerca de la presencia del motivo del paragone en dos pinturas de Ribera," in Boletin del Museo e Instituto Camón Aznar 64 (1996): 127-62, p. 140. 66 Michael Fried, “Notes Toward a Caravaggist Visual Poetics,” in David Franklin and Sebastian Schütze (eds.), Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome (exh. cat. Fort Worth and Ottawa: Kimbell Art Museum and National Gallery of Canada, 2011), 102-127; Michael Fried, After Caravaggio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), esp. chapter 1, “Singularities”; as noted in chapter 1, p. 50. Again, I am grateful to Michael Fried for sharing his as-yet unpublished work with me. 67 Fried, Moment of Caravaggio, 151-77.

210 agreed upon in advance and stipulated by the patron, we should not overlook the particular ways in which Ribera turns this format to creative advantage.

Conversation and the gallery picture

What kind of activity was it to look at pictures? As I argued in chapter 1, there is a great deal of evidence suggesting that it was largely social, taking place in conversation, particularly in the gallery settings that were proliferating in Rome at the start of the 17th century.68 If we recall the collecting practices of Ribera’s most prominent patrons such as

Vincenzo and Benedetto Giustiniani or Scipione Borghese, we find repeated instances of patrons who orchestrated their art collections dynamically so as to foster certain types of discussion, for instance as Vincenzo Giustiniani would hold in reserve Caravaggio’s Eros

Triumphant under a curtain, only to reveal the picture in a theatrical gesture provoking a discussion of quality and style within the collection. The ways in which paintings could be grouped, displayed, and even commissioned often followed a kind of curatorial logic that looked for dynamic pairings of esthetic qualities with subject matter, as for instance

(as noted in chapter 1) Scipione Borghese’s juxtaposition of Ludovico Cigoli’s Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife with Giovanni Baglione’s Judith and Holofernes acted out a comparison between types of female beauty. The point of owning easel pictures like

Ribera’s Five Senses was, to some extent, to be able to talk about them; the serial format of the commission opens up great potential for enabling such discussion, just as Cardinal

Borghese’s pairings of pictures could do.

68 Chapter 1, 52-57.

211 Prior to Ribera’s Roman series on the subject, the five senses were most often represented in serial prints, in which a wide variety of approaches to the subject had developed, particularly North of the Alps over the course of the sixteenth century.69 The subject naturally lent itself to serial depiction, and ideas about the senses often found expression in the structure of the series itself, all the more so since the relationship amongst the senses was an important aspect of their discussion. The locus classicus in early modern thinking on the five senses, Aristotle’s De Anima, continually interspersed discussions of the individual senses with how and to what extent they worked in tandem, how they might be organized and interrelated. The importance, in Ribera’s time, of visualizing order among the senses is indicated by the recourse to diagrams in glosses on

Aristotle’s De Anima, such as those scattered throughout Bernardo Segni’s 1607 vernacular edition (figures 3.27, 3.28), illustrating the arrangements among the five senses and the senso commune, or the categorical divisions of the senses according to the nature of what they perceive.70 Aristotle notes the interdependence as well as the

69 Lubomir Konečný, “Los Cinco Sentidos desde Aristóteles a Constantin Brancusi,” in Sylvia Ferino- Pagden (ed.), Los Cinco Sentidos y el Arte (Exh. cat. Madrid and Cremona: Museo del Prado, Centro Culturale Santa Maria della Pietà, 1996), 29-54; Carl Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600,” in Görel Cavalli-Björkmann (ed.), Netherlandish Mannerism (Stockholm: Nationalmusei skriftserie, 1985), 135-54. 70 The latter question, for instance, is addressed as follows: “Medesimamente è certissimo, chè le diversità de’ sensibili diversificano le potenze del Senso; perchè la potenza è detta al suo oggetto: il quale oggetto è diverso secondo l’immutazione, che e’fà nel senso. Et altresì vengono per tal ragione li sensi immutati à esser diversi. Mà diciamo in quanti modi li Sensi siano immutati dal sensibilie. In uno, per via di tatto scambievole; e questo modo fà il senso del Tatto, e del Gusto. In un altro, che è per il mezo estrinseco, che si fà con l’alterazione del sensibile; e questo è il senso dell’Odorato: perchè l’odore l’immuta con qualche risoluzione della cosa odorabile. In un terzo modo si fà per via di moto locale, & in tal modo il suono immuta il senso dell’Udito. In quarto, & ultimo modo si fà per via d’immutazione spiritale, sì nel mezo, come nello strumento; e talmente il colore immuta il senso del Viso.” (“Likewise it is certain that the diversity of sensible [things] diversifies the capacities (potenze) of the Sense; because the capacity is addressed to its object: which object varies according to the change that is wrought on it in the sense. And furthermore for this reason the changed senses come to be different. But let us declare in which modes the Senses are changed by the sensible [things]. In one, by way of exchangeable touch; and this mode [applies to] the senses of Touch and Taste. In another, which is by extrinsic means, which occurs by the alteration of the sensible [thing]; and such is the sense of Smell: for the odor it modifies with some resolution from

212 distinctness of the senses, and also remarks on the commonality between touch and taste as “contact” senses, with sight and hearing operating over distance, and smell occupying a middle position.71 Since the pertinent mode of approaching the senses, in these and other derivations from Aristotle, was by ranking and comparing them, what better conveyance for the subject than a set of images that lent themselves, “internally” in what they depicted and “externally” as art objects, to being ranked and compared?

The articulation of an intellectual stance on the senses, their import, and their hierarchy could often take shape in a series in a way that would not be possible for a single image to convey, as we saw in Georg Pencz’s prints mentioned earlier. A 1595 set of engravings by Jan Pietersz. Saenredam after Hendrick Goltzius, for instance, gives a narrative order to the five senses, which are depicted as a sequence of amorous encounters progressing from the first glance (sight) to the bedroom (touch) (figures 3.29-

3.33).72 The idea of the dangerous, seductive potential of the senses is expounded in the captions in moralizing terms, and positively revelled in within the images. The ravishment operated by each sense is enacted by the couple in each engraving, and playfully extended to the viewer with the officially sanitizing safeguard of the written morals. While series such as Pencz’s and Saenredam’s represent precedents from which

Ribera sets himself apart, the Spanish painter shares with these astute predecessors an interest in making the format itself and the means of personification advance the approach to the senses as an intellectual subject.

the thing smelled. In a third means, it occurs by way of a change of spirits (immutazione spiritale), both in the medium, and in the instrument; and thus does color modify the sense of Sight.”). Segni, Tre Libri, 120. 71 Angelico Buonriccio, Paraphrasi sopra i Tre Libri dell’anima d’Aristotile, del R. D. Angelico Buonriccio Canonico regolare della congregation del Salvatore (Venice: Andrea Arrivabene, 1565), 58v. 72 Ferino Pagden (ed.), Cinco Sentidos, cat. no. III.10, pp. 116-19.

213 In Ribera’s case, the format of the half-figure easel painting lends itself to an emphasis on arrangement and order as a central issue. Where the Goltzius-Saenredam series follows an order whose discovery and imaginative enactment are part of the pleasure and point of the series, Ribera’s pictures are more fluid in permitting multiple arrangements, and locate the payoff for the viewer more in the discussion and determination of a mutable order than in the reading of a set hierarchy. Ribera’s series singles out the sense of touch as exceptional, pointing to its equivocal status in the hierarchy of the senses from Aristotle onward, as the sense that was both the basest and the most universal.73 That Ribera further chose to depict Touch as blind underscores its opposition to Sight, the sense with the strongest claim to dominate the sequence of the senses.74 The visual contiguity among the five paintings anticipates their display as a group. Such displays, in practice, were flexible, and easel paintings could be rearranged at will; new combinations and juxtapositions among images could tweak their meaning or direct their discussion.75 Ribera’s series exploits this particularity of the medium, connecting the discursive practices applicable to easel pictures in general to the philosophical problem of arranging and comparing the body’s means of perception.

Comparison and connoisseurship

73 Aristotle argues for the commonality and fundamental necessity of touch to all animals, for instance, in Buonriccio, Paraphrasi, 159v-163r, and in Segni, Tre Libri, 178. 74 The ascendancy of touch over sight is a discussion that will be pursued further in Itay Sapir’s work on Ribera, based on the direction indicated in Itay Sapir, “Blind Suffering: Ribera’s Non-Visual Epistemology of Martyrdom,” in Open Arts Journal 4 (2014-2015): 29-39; on the (contested) primacy of sight among the senses, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1-38 and passim. 75 Chapter 1, 52-53.

214 As we have seen, a key way in which works of art were assessed and appreciated was by a dynamic comparison with other works of art that they resembled, challenged, or invoked in some way. This is plain in the deliberate commissioning of pendants that respond to existing works, such as Baglione’s Triumph of Divine Love and Cigoli’s

Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, but it is no less the case in subtler or less contrasted cases, such as the Borghese Judgment of Solomon’s simultaneous invocation of the Polet and

Contarelli chapels from San Luigi dei Francesi, also discussed in chapter 1.76 In this instance, the artist caters to a connoisseurial inclination in his viewers with a confident assumption that they will have a visual repertoire of contemporary painting in Roman churches on which to draw. Frances Gage has underlined the important function of memory in Mancini’s approach to connoisseurship, and Irene Baldriga also notes the importance of visual memory within Lincean art patronage and intellectual practice; the connoisseurial cultivation of a mental image bank overlaps to a surprising extent with the ars memoriae exercised as a tool for scientific inquiry by Linceans such as Giambattista

Della Porta or Johannes Faber.77

In this connection, we might revisit the often-repeated comparison between

Ribera’s Five Senses and Caravaggio’s Roman work (notably for Giustiniani and Del

Monte) with Ribera’s particular and deliberate citations of Caravaggio in mind. The frank eye contact, the offer of wine, the vividly painted food on a table spanning the foreground, and the pose with one hand in front of the body and the other raising a wine

76 Chapter 1, 78-80. 77 Frances Gage, "'Some Stirring or Changing of Place': Vision, Judgement and Mobility in Pictures of Galleries," in Intellectual History Review 20, no. 1 (2010): 123-45, esp. 137-39; Irene Baldriga, L’Occhio della Lince. I primi Lincei tra arte, scienza e collezionismo (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2002), 123-48.

215 glass, all link Ribera’s Taste with Caravaggio’s Uffizi Bacchus (figures 3.1 and 3.34).

The comparison is as sustained and deliberate as it is incongruous: nothing could offer a more puckish contrast to Caravaggio’s alluringly ephebic youth than the portly tavern- dweller in Ribera’s painting. In anticipating that his viewers will recognize the blatant references to Caravaggio’s Bacchus, Ribera effectively incorporates the contrast between that painting and his own into his rendition of Taste. The uncouth open mouth, meaty hands, and snugly-fitting shirt of Ribera’s figure acquire a piquant humor through the recollection of the languid elegance and unforced sex appeal of Caravaggio’s semi-nude figure. The memorable grace of Bacchus’s gesture, as he seductively proffers a brimming glass of wine, undergoes an abrupt descent into slapstick as Ribera’s Taste seems about to upend his wine carafe, held in a ham-fisted grip, directly into the viewer’s lap. The allusions to Caravaggio’s Bacchus not only accentuate the humor and appeal of Ribera’s painting, they also enrich the painting’s address of the subject of taste by hinting at the idea that one might choose, as it were, very different sorts of (imaginary) drinking companions from within the picture galleries of Rome. Ribera’s allusion to Caravaggio’s quite different figure applies the issue of taste to the painting itself, inviting viewers to extend the esthetic or connoisseurial evaluation of the painting as an art object to the subject it depicts (“subject” here meaning both the male figure and the sense that he personifies).

Ribera employs a similar maneuver in Hearing, also by means of a reference to

Caravaggio, whose various Lute Players come easily to mind in connection with Ribera’s musician (figures 3.5, 3.6, and 3.35). The best dressed of Ribera’s five senses, Hearing, serenades us from a book, as might a professional court musician rather than a busker or

216 tavern entertainer.78 One cannot say for certain whether Ribera’s original painting of hearing had the insincere smile and bad gums that we see in the copies; what is plain from the contrast with Caravaggio’s images of Lute players, such as the delicate and soulful young singer on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the change in tone and social register, from a refined lyrical interlude to a less promising audition.79 The lavish array of books and musical instruments in Caravaggio's Lute Player in the

Metropolitan Museum of art, for example, is in sharp contrast with Ribera’s shabby songbook that has been folded down the middle to be carried in a pocket or tucked in a belt. Ribera’s image doesn’t quite invite us to assume that what we are hearing is a clear- voiced declaration of love; we are instead somewhat reluctant recipients of a performance, one which we prepare to judge rather than enjoy. Both Caravaggio’s and

Ribera’s musicians should also be considered in the context of musical connoisseurship, an arena in which the two artists’ important common patron, the Marquis Vincenzo

Giustiniani, was a prominent and innovative voice.80 As Andrew Dell’Antonio’s work demonstrates, Giustiniani’s Discorso sopra la Musica was a key intervention in the emerging discourse that made the discerning listener a guiding concern for how music was made and understood, a concern that was intimately bound to the development of

78 A brief discussion of shifting social distinctions between musical listeners and performers, with further bibliography, is in Rosella Vodret and Claudio Strinati, “Painted Music: ‘a new and affecting manner,’” in Beverly Louise Brown (ed.), The Genius of Rome, 1592-1623 (Exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2001), 90-115. 79 On Caravaggio’s lute player and its connections to contemporary music (including Giustiniani’s writings on the subject) and also to new and risky currents in natural philosophy, see Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio,” in Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193-212, esp. 195-98; and Elizabeth Cropper, “Caravaggio and the Matter of Lyric,” in Genevieve Warwick (ed.), Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 47-56. 80 Andrew Dell’Antonio, “’Particolar gusto e diletto alle orecchie:’ Listening in the Early Seicento,” in Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman (eds.), Culture and Authority in the Baroque (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 106-21.

217 connoisseurship both in music and in the visual arts.81 In prompting a comparison with a visual memory of Caravaggio’s refined and seductive musicians, Ribera also suggests an imaginative exercise of musical discernment or comparison between performers.

Across Ribera's Five Senses, multiple sets of similes and contrasts are in play: in

Smell, for instance, our imaginary experience of smelling the man is likened to the man's experience of smelling the onion, but then other competing smells also can be considered and compared with those just mentioned. The onion is not the only thing on the table: a closed bulb of garlic and an open blossom plucked from an orange tree are neatly aligned across the painting’s foreground (see detail, figure 3.36). Isolated from a narrative setting

- there is no kitchen larder, no clutter of the man’s other oddments on the table - these items’ raison d’être is to be contemplated and compared, set alongside one another and assessed. The sweet and elusive scent of the orange blossom is in contrast with the raw pungency of the onion, which in turn is compared with the garlic: open versus closed, similar but quite distinct. The man’s costume also picks up the orange blossom’s white and green hues, though these coloristic echoes are subtler than the visual links to the onion just as the flower’s smell is harder to detect. The activity on offer to the beholder is to anticipate and imagine the various qualities of the sensory experience that is being extended to us, and to sort, rank, and compare the different smells depicted. What is true of the items on the table in front of Smell is also true of the paintings as a group. Ribera’s

Five Senses prompt an ideal viewer-interlocutor to compare the paintings, weighing them as a set of easel pictures and also as a group of personifications representing an idea.

Internally, these paintings function by opposition and simile, comparison and evaluation,

81 Andrew Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 52-60, 88-91, and passim.

218 and these visual strategies extend to the series as a whole. Ribera applies to the subject of the five senses the comparative strategies that increasingly structured Roman collectors’ approaches to easel painting, pressing the estimation of the paintings as art objects into the service of an intellectually ambitious consideration of the sensory subject.

Telescopes and Connoisseurs: Mancini and Sagredo

What I have been claiming so far is that Ribera creatively applied connoisseurship as a conversational mode to the investigation of the senses. If this is the case, how might

Ribera’s appeal to connoisseurship relate to the Lincean context invoked via the Galilean telescope? On the one hand, scholars going back at least to Erwin Panofsky’s landmark study Galileo as a Critic of the Arts have drawn a link between the Lincean academy and artistic patronage and criticism, and Baldriga’s work on patronage at the Accademia dei

Lincei is also noteworthy in this regard.82 This body of scholarship has also revealed a direct connection between connoisseurship and the use of the telescope itself, a link that has not been applied thus far to Ribera’s work.

There is ample evidence of interest on the part of connoisseurs, prominent collectors, and agents in the Roman art world in the telescope. Setting aside the consideration of Galileo as an artist (as argued especially by Horst Bredekamp) and the use of telescopes by artists such as Lodovico Cigoli, who was close personal friends with

Galileo and deeply invested in scientific inquiry himself, scholars have long since noted the interest in telescopes on the part of powerful patrons of the arts, such as Scipione

82 Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954); Baldriga, Occhio della Lince, 171-261 passim; Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Galileo, le Arti, gli Artisti,” passim; Giuseppe Olmi, “’Coselline’ e ‘sovrane bellezze.’ Note sul collezionismo nell’età di Galileo,” in Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies 4 (2007): 105-26.

219 Borghese and Francesco Maria del Monte.83 Yet as several scholars have noted, we also find multiple references to the telescope in Giulio Mancini’s writings, and Lange has rightly brought these to bear on the discussion of Ribera’s Five Senses.84 Mancini was of course a physician, and as has been mentioned already, counted the chancellor of the

Accademia dei Lincei among his colleagues both within the Papal court and at the

Ospedale di Santo Spirito.85 What I suggest Mancini’s writings should reinforce, however, is a consideration of how an “advanced” scientific subject such as the Galilean telescope was actually approached in Roman intellectual culture. Mancini’s remarks, like

Sagredo’s (which I shall also discuss in this section) do not consider the instrument primarily in the context of astronomy, but rather as a fashionable subject of conversation, an intellectual curiosity valued for its potential to redound honor and esteem rather than its revelation of sunspots and other phenomena. Biagioli demonstrates that the telescope’s value as social capital was of paramount importance both to Galileo and to the small and carefully-chosen circle of princes and patrons to whom he initially gave it.86 The rapid transition of telescopes “from being wondrous devices to cheap gadgets (by nobles’ standards),” and the distinguishing cachet that Galileo managed to associate with his own instruments, clarify the effort of Ribera and his patron to participate in the higher end of a very widespread trend.87 The inclusion of the recognizably Galilean telescope in Ribera’s

Sight would signal (or at least attempt to signal) the patron’s identification with the very

83 An overview with further bibliography is in Tosi, “Lune e Astri.” Among Horst Bredekamp’s many studies of drawing as a key component in Galileo’s work, see especially Galilei der Künstler: Die Zeichnung, der Mond, die Sonne (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007). 84 Lange, Rara naturalezza, 93; Frances Gage, “Exercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” in Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2008): 1167-1207, p. 1198. 85 Chapter 2, p. 144. 86 Biagioli, Instruments of Credit, 80-85. 87 Ibid., 84.

220 elite social circle to whom such an instrument had been made available, a set that included Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, and Grand-

Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany.

Not unlike the Ribera paintings under consideration, Mancini’s treatises on honor and on painting alike rehearse and prompt refined but essentially informal and accessible conversation on philosophical topics. In the Discourse on Honor, Mancini focuses on the senses in terms of their potential to ennoble, just as the Considerations on Painting had laid out the ennobling virtues of connoisseurship. In the Discourse on Honor, Galileo’s telescope becomes a test case for the source of the senses’ nobility, and for separating what is merely perceived from what is properly understood through the internal faculties.

The very connoisseurial issue of drawing sound distinctions and judgments based on what one perceives through the senses is discussed in the Discourse on Honor using

Galileo’s telescope as an example. On the one hand, Mancini begins by citing Plato’s

Timaeus, noting that the senses are investigators and bearers of external things to the internal faculties, and thus have an honorable function, as enabling cognition.88 The honorable status of the sensory organs is confirmed a contrario by the fact that they can incur dishonor if they are damaged or missing, as when blind Homer is mocked by the

88 “Platone nel Timedo disse che i sensi fussero stati dati come investigatori e portatori delle cose esterne alle facolta interne che pertanto parrà da dire che nella loro eminenza vi sia l’honore poi che per causa loro si argumenta la cognitione. Et si conferma perche dalla privatione o inperfettione loro vediamo causarsi la derisione come avviene a ciechi è sordi: Onde Homero fu borlato da quei marinari quali nel letto del mare si mettavano da pedocchi a quali non vedendo quello che facevano fù burlato, che è una sorte e modo di disohonore, da quella gente cosi sozza e vile; e quel che si dice del vedere si puol dire del udito per essere questo il senso della disciplina e cosi della cognitione e prima radice e fondamento dell’honore. Onde per questi rispetti par da dire che ne sensi vi sia l’honore. Nondimeno perche servono ad altro fine e che non sono per loro stessi, come si vede da Platone e da Aristotile gia notati, per tanto in quanto diremo che in loro non sia propriamente collocato l’honore, se non in tanto in quanto servono alle facolta interne.” Giulio Mancini, Alcune considerazioni dell’honore fatte da Giulio Mancini per suo trattenimento, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb. Lat. 4314, fols 24v, 25 r.

221 sailors whose antics he cannot see. Yet because the senses are only a means to an end, they cannot be the true “soggetto d’honore,” but become honorable only insofar as they serve reason. Mancini illustrates this separation between sensing and a nobler activity of processing what one senses as follows:

Nor can one say that the invention of the telescope has given great honor to the most excellent Galileo because this invention, from which the honor comes, belongs to the intellect in the practice of mathematics and physics; but the use [of the telescope] is of the senses just like with ordinary spectacles, and is common to that which denotes imperfection and dishonor for the eye; so too this telescope shows the weakness of our sight, with which we don’t see all the things that are put before our eyes; but it is the invention that is most honorable and ingenious. The same might be said of the instruments that multiply sounds and perfect hearing, [i.e.] that these do not belong to the external sense but to the internal faculties through which they were invented.89

The telescope is an example of the senses’ dishonor, as it points to their limitations; what is honorable about it is the ingenuity behind its invention and use for discovery.

Mancini’s discussion of the occhiale is a topical illustration for the point that he is making about whether the external senses are “the subject of honor,” and the telescope itself becomes a figure for the distinction between the honorable inventions of the ingegno and the flawed and limited external senses that necessitate the invention in the first place. In a word, the telescope is shorthand for the senses’ capacity to abase or ennoble.

Mancini is known to have taken a lively interest in the telescope from the moment of its arrival on the Roman scene, where the cannocchiale was a current topic of

89 "Ne dire che l’inventione del Ochiale [sic] habbia dato grand’honore al Eccellentissimo Galileo, perche questa Inventione d’onde pende l’honore appartiene all’intelletto con habito matematico e fisico, ma l’uso e ben del senso come li ochiali [sic] usuali e communi, de quali come possiamo dire che denotino imperfettione et dishonore rispetto all’occhio; cosi questo occhiale ne dimostrara la debolezza del nostro vedere, che non vedi tutte le cose che si li sono poste avanti alli occhi, ma che l’inventione sia ingeniosissima et honoratissima. Il medesimo si potrebbe dire del [sic] Instromenti che multiplicano il suono et perfettionano l’udito, che questi non appartenghino al senso esterno ma alle facolta interne dalle quali sono inventate." Cited in Gage, “Exercise,” 1198.

222 conversation in the social circles in which he moved: in a letter to his brother Diefebo in

Siena, Giulio Mancini wrote from Rome on July 3rd, 1609:

There was a telescope here, said to belong to the Count Mauritio, which represents things from very far away, they say even to the grotto of Senano or Frascati from Rome. I have not seen it, but from people who had made the experiment, and who are not even of average but of most imperfect eyesight, I have been told that from Monte Cavallo they saw and recognized a friend who was going into Santo Pietro in Montori[o], and it is a most marvelous thing, all the more so as, used another way, it makes nearby things that are extremely small appear enormous. The telescope is in the hands of the most Illustrious Borghes[e], tell me about it, if you know anything.90

The inclusion of the telescope in Ribera’s depiction of Sight fits into the same motivation: to participate in a conversation that is going on at a desirably sophisticated level of society. If the emphasis in that conversation was on a marvelous amplification of the bodily senses and not on the astronomical debates to which Galileo’s telescopic observations had led, this is perhaps hardly surprising, if one adheres to a 1615 or early

1616 date for Ribera’s painting. In the years following Mancini’s letter to his brother,

Galileo’s telescopic observations were published and hotly debated: first, in the 1610

Sidereus Nuncius, followed by the Lincei-sponsored Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari in 1613.91 It was precisely in 1615 that discussions of the telescope entered a dangerously sensitive arena: it was in February of that year that Galileo’s letter

90 “E venuto qua uno specchio, dicano esser stato del Conte Mauritio, quale rappresenta le cose lontanissime, dicano di grotta Senano o di Fraschati stando qui in Roma. Io non l’ho visto, ma da gente che n’ha fatta la prova, e che non è di vista mediocre, ma imperfettissima, m’è stato detto che da Monte Cavallo ha visto un amico e riconosciutolo mentre annava [sic] in Santo Pietro in Montori, et è cosa maravigliosissima, tanto più che, da un altra banda, fa le cose vicine piccolissime che sieno grandissime. Il specchio è nelle mani dell Illustrissimo Borghesi, ditemi qualche cosa, se vi savete niente.” Giulio Mancini in Rome, letter of 3 July 1609 to Diefebo Mancini in Siena, busta 3, fols. 246-7, Archivio della Società degli Esecutori Pie Disposizioni, Siena; quoted from partial transcription in Michele Maccherini, Caravaggio e i Caravaggeschi nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini (Rome: PhDiss., Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 1995), 190. Quoted in Lange, Rara naturalezza, 93. 91 Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 9-27; Pietro Redondi, “Fede Lincea e Teologia Tridentina,” in Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies 1 (2004): 117-41; Isabelle Pantin, “Galilée, la Lune et les Jésuites: à propos du Nuncius Sidereus Collegii Romani et du ‘problème de Mantoue’,” in Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies 2 (2005): 19-42.

223 to Benedetto Castelli on the relationship between his discoveries and the interpretation of scripture was first conveyed to the Roman Holy Office, which issued its official warning to Galileo and its condemnation of the Copernican system the following year.92 In any event, Ribera’s insertion of the telescope into a context that invites discussion of art rather than astronomy is consistent with the way other participants in the same intellectual and social circles thought about the instrument: as something that both accentuates and alleviates the limitations of the human eye, and fits into a discussion of how sight works and how it connects to honor or dishonor.

A more literal application of telescopes to connoisseurship emerges from

Giovanni Francesco Sagredo’s practice of pointing a cannocchiale directly at paintings as an aid to determining their quality.93 The use of the telescope specifically for looking at paintings is documented in Galileo’s own correspondence with his friend Sagredo, who was also friends with the Venetian arist Padovanino, and was a self-professed lover and connoisseur of paintings.94 Writing from Venice to Galileo in Florence on July 28th,

92 Rivka Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15-52; the documents relating to the 1615-1616 Inquisition case against Galileo are compiled and translated in Maurice Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 134-54. 93 As noted in Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Galileo, le Arti, gli Artisti,” 34. 94 Sagredo hoped to acquire some of Cristofano Allori’s works via Galileo, to whom he comments, “Da Roma mi vengono promesse copie meravigliose di pitture rarissime. Sto aspettandole con desiderio. Se costì vi fossero copiatori buoni, et si potessero haver buoni originali, spenderei volontieri una cinquantina di scudi, cavando io un singolarissimo gusto dalle belle pitture: et belle intendo quelle che son fresche, moderne, vaghe et naturali, sì che ingannino l'occhio, lasciando le affumicate, antiche, artificiose, malinconiche et originali a gli altri più belli ingegni di me.” (“From Rome I have been promised marvelous copies of the rarest pictures. I am awaiting them avidly. If these are by good copyists, and if I could get good originals, I would gladly spend fifty scudi, as I take a most singular pleasure (singularissimo gusto) in beautiful pictures: and [by] beautiful I understand those that are fresh, modern, lovely and natural, so that they deceive the eye; leaving the smoky, ancient, artificial, melancholy, and original to other loftier minds (più belli ingegni) than mine.”) Galileo Galilei, Le Opere di Galileo vol. 12 (Florence: Barbera, 1934), letter from Sagredo to Galilei, 15 November, 1619, no. 1427, 497; quoted in Cristina Mazza, I Sagredo Committenti e Collezionisti d’Arte nella Venezia del Sei e Settecento (Venice: Studi di Arte Veneta, 2004), 9. Mazza’s research shows that earliest available inventory for the Sagredo family is from 1685, so we lack further details than can be gleaned from Gianfrancesco Sagredo’s letters as to the nature and contents of his art collection; he is also known to have owned naturalia, especially animals; ibid., 6-9.

224 1618, Sagredo announces the happy resolution of a conflict of connoisseurial opinions concerning a series of paintings of the Four Seasons from the Bassano workshop, paintings that Sagredo was to receive in payment of a debt: while Gerolamo Bassano in

Venice had authenticated the works as his father’s, the artists in the Florentine

Accademia del Disegno had rejected them as copies.95 With a hint of glee at having proven the Florentine academicians wrong, Sagredo announces that the paintings were both recognized and (just as importantly) paid for as originals by Bassan vecchio.96

Sagredo goes on to announce that he frequently uses telescopes to look at paintings, under which scrutiny “the well made [pictures] represent nature [rapresentano il naturale] and the others greatly show themselves to be imperfect.”97 The cannoncini become crucibles in which the quality of pictures are proved. The judgment of factures of painting, no less than the exploration of the heavens, is a function of the telescope.

Ribera's use of paint factures to indicate the distance spanned by a telescope narrowly anticipates Sagredo's connoisseurial use of his cannochialino. That effects of viewing distance such as Ribera produces in Sight were indeed a preoccupation for early seventeenth century connoisseurial practice is confirmed again within less than a decade when Mancini specifically advocates a different handling of foreground, middle ground,

95 Sagredo appeals to Galilei for help in resolving the situation, which he describes in an earlier letter of 12 August 1617; Galilei, Opere vol. 12, no. 1270, 338-9; cited in Tongiorgi Tomasi “Galileo, le arti, gli artisti,” 33-4. 96 “Li quadri che furono rimandati di costà come copie, sono stati ultimamente riconosciuti et pagati come autentichi et originali di mano del Bassan vecchio; et qui s’è fatta gran meraviglia che cotesti Academici della pittura gl’habbiano sì mal conosciuti.” Galilei, Opere vol. 12, letter of 28 July, 1618, no. 1335, 400-1; cited in Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Galileo, le Arti, gli Artisti,” 34-35. 97 “Hora in questa città si fanno alcuni cannoncini corti, di due terzi di quarta, assai buoni. Io li uso per vedere pitture da vicino. Le ben fatte rapresentano il naturale, et l’altre maggiormente si scoprono imperfette. Faccio fare il cannone lungo una quarta et meza, et pongo nel mezo il vetro, sicchè resti il vetro colmo in obra, perchè in alcuni siti senza questo aiuto non si può vedere. Alcune volte ancora bisogna ombreggiar con la mano il vetro cavo, perchè, riflettendo come specchio, confonde la vista.” Ibid.

225 and background with regard to landscapes, in order to convey the optical effects of motion through space.98 The viewer's motion through the literal space of the gallery, in turn, held the potential to reenact the different relationships between close, medium, and cursory attention that would be accorded to different portions of a painting, as Gage has compellingly argued with regard to landscapes by Domenichino and Annibale Carracci.99

Mancini mentions both painters, along with Titian, Jan Brueghel, Paul Bril, and others, as having mastered the convincing deployment of perspectival and atmospheric devices to indicate distance in the depiction of landscape.100 Mancini discusses various sections of a picture as requiring particular approaches that replicate certain optical conditions: with regard to the “near part” (parte vicina) in a painting, Mancini emphasizes that the eye and imagination take pleasure in “the artifice of immediate and articulated things,” noting as

98 “In questi siti et termini di visione si considera il modo di colorire e rappresentar la figura della cosa per il più chiaro e men chiaro, più oscuro e men oscuro, secondo la vicinanza e lontananza dell’oggetto, così ancor nella figura che è oggetto commune con più o men terminatione e vivacità delle parti che terminano, dico delli angoli. Per essempio in questo sito di mezzo sia una torre quadrata: gl’angoli per la lontananza si faranno refratti, non così terminati come quando sono nella prima vista; che così, se si rappresentarà una porta terrena, si farà mezza recoperta dall’orizonte per la circumferenza della terra espressa et altro che non lascia terminar la linea vicinale alla soglia della porta. Con queste avertenze condussero le loro opere il Civetta, Titiano, Tobia, Broglo, Brillo e Caracci, Domenichino et altri. Et questo del paese al quale si reduce la scena et in particolar la boscareccia, nel quale vi è sol quella parte del paese che è il presso con un po’ di mezzo tempo, per maestà della quale si danno regole, vi si considera il colore e suo modo di colorito, que più o men acceso et abbagliato secondo che sarà la parte scenica più o men vicina, che così dovrà esser più o meno abbagliato; et in queste si dovrà osservare le regole del colorito degl’altri paesaggi et altre pitture.” (“In these sites and terms of vision, one considers the mode of coloring and representing the figure of the thing by the more or less light, [and] more or less dark, according to the proximity and distance of the object; thus also in the figure that is a common object with more or less resolution and vivacity in the parts that are resolved, that is of the angles. For instance in this middle distance (sito di mezzo) there might be a rectangular tower: the angles will find themselves refracted by the distance, not as resolved (terminati) as when they are first glimpsed; so that if one were thus to represent a gate, it would be half covered by the horizon expressing the circumference of the earth, and such other things that do not allow the proximate line to end on the doorstep. With such instructions Civetta, Titian, Tobia, Broglo [Brueghel], Brillo, Caracci, Domenichino and others carried out their works. And let this, in the landscape to which the scene is reduced, especially if it is a wooded one, in which there is only that part of the landscape that is nearer with a bit of middle distance, from the authority with which rules are given, let the color and its mode of coloring be considered, which will be more or less bright and dazzling according to whether the scenic part is nearer or farther [...]; and therein the rules of coloring should be observed that apply to other landscapes and other pictures.”). Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 115. 99 Gage, “Exercise,” 1186-1200. 100 Op. cit. note 98.

226 an example Jacopo Ligozzi’s drawings for the Bolognese natural historian Ulisse

Aldrovandi.101 Gage also relates these different inflections of sight and observation to

Lincean advances in the fields of optics and natural philosophy, particularly the telescopic and microscopic investigations, of which Mancini might also have been kept abreast by Johannes Faber, his colleague at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito.102

Sagredo’s application of the telescope’s magnifying power to a close investigation of factures of paint is anticipated in Ribera’s depiction of Sight. What we see out of the window in this painting is neither a starry nor a sunny sky in which one might observe the heavenly bodies. Instead, Nicola Spinosa has rightly pointed out that Ribera gives us a landscape painted in a distinctly Venetian manner, as a comparison with similar backgrounds in Titian’s late Poesie confirms (see figures 3.37, 3.38, & 3.39).103 The marked difference in facture between the landscape and the man’s hand directly in front of it creates an effect of distance, marking the difference between the detailed and immediate world of the indoor space that the figure occupies and the outdoor scene whose distance is implied by the loose, painterly facture. The effect calls to mind

Vasari’s commentary on Titian’s late manner, which up close was loosely painted but achieved perfection when seen from a distance, as discussed in chapter one.104 The

101 “Dalla parte vicina prende diletto la fantasia et l’intelletto per l’artificio delle cose immitate et espresse d’un arbore, frutto, animale, huomini, edifitio o altro che d’appresso e dal vero vengon espresse et immitate, come simil cose d’animali e frutti et altro vediamo dilettare, come le cose di Gio. da Udine nelle Logge Vaticane, e quella di Giorgio da Siena nel palazzo de’ Mandoli, e quei libri in Bologna del signor Aldrovandi condotti dal Ligozza ...” (“From the nearer part, the imagination and the intellect take pleasure for the artifice of the things imitated and expressed, of a tree, fruit, animal, person, building or other things that are expressed and imitated from close up and from reality (dal vero), as also similar things like animals and fruits and so forth give delight, as do those of Gio[vanni] da Udine in the Vatican Loggie, those of Giorgio da Siena in the palazzo de’ Mandoli, and those books in Bologna belonging to signor Aldrovandi carried out by Ligozzi ...”) Ibid., 114. 102 Gage, “Exercise,” 1198-99. 103 Spinosa, Obra Completa, 45. 104 Chapter 1, 45-46.

227 proximity of the blurred bit of landscape to the figure’s crisply painted proper left hand holding the ornate telescope showcases Ribera’s mastery of different levels of finish.

More importantly, the ostentatious juxtaposition of the two techniques demonstrates his judgment in deploying them as painterly tools, along with his expectation that such judgment, and its connection to the painting’s subject, will be observed and appreciated.

The distance that the telescope can collapse for the painted hunter is not only hinted at using a painterly device: rather, the distance between a viewer’s eye and a painted surface becomes a way of articulating the usefulness of the telescope.

c) Patterns of discussion, methods of inquiry: the painting-sculpture paragone

The paragone debate as a topic of conversation

While the half-figure format and visual contiguity across Ribera’s Five Senses fosters comparison and rearrangement among the five canvases, the notable outlier within the group is not Sight, but Touch. The only figure to be parallel rather than perpendicular to the picture plane, the presumably blind man representing the sense of touch takes on an exceptional status within the series. As mentioned earlier, this partly invokes the

Aristotelian view of touch as the most universal of the five senses, being the only one that applies to the entire body rather than being located in a particular organ, and encompassing the reception of many different sorts of sensation, including perception of the elements hot, cold, wet, and dry, in addition to purely tactile exploration of textures and shapes.105 Ribera’s decision to single out the sense of touch places it in a position of tension with the sense of sight, linking the issue of the hierarchy among the senses with

105 Buonriccio, Paraphrasi, 95v-98v; Segni, Tre Libri, 96-7.

228 the comparison between painting and sculpture. The contrast between sight and touch is emphasized in the blindness of the figure in Touch and the vivid evocation of tactile experience, juxtaposed with the closed eyes of the unfeeling statue.

Where the other four paintings in the series all rely on eye contact and shared spaces, experiences, and activities between the viewer and the figure depicted, the ninety- degree shift of the figure away from the viewer in Touch alters the viewer's approach to the subject. The painting itself in a sense enacts the man’s blindness by not having him face outward, and re-emphasizes this blindness by inserting the upside-down and foreshortened image of an open-eyed figure in the painting-within-a-painting in the foreground. This metapictorial device serves here the specific purpose of invoking, not art itself, but a specific sort of conversation related to art, the paragone between painting and sculpture.106

Studies of this aspect of the painting have tended to see Ribera’s uses of the paragone theme as a show of cleverness, a somewhat heavy-handed apology for his own medium, or at best, as a subversive debunking of the entire paragone debate.107 The heavily formalized dispute between painting and sculpture possessed a mainly Florentine academic pedigree, and had become a staple of theoretical discussions of art particularly through its treatment in the mid-cinquecento by Benedetto Varchi.108 It had received

106 One could still argue, however, that the evocation of the canvas as an object is a dynamic component in the link Ribera’s series forges between the imaginative interaction with the figures and subject matter, and the more concrete interaction with, or at least around, a set of easel pictures. In this connection, see Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early-Modern Metapainting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 107 Aragó-Strasser, “Motivo del Paragone,” 136-140; Peter Hecht, “The Paragone Debate: Ten Illustrations and a Comment,” in Simiolus 14, no. 2 (1984): 125-36, esp. 127-130. 108 The literature on the paragone is abundant and stimulating; lucid surveys of the question, compiling primary texts and providing ample further bibliography, are in Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s “Due Lezzioni” and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press,

229 further treatment in a host of subsequent texts on art, and was of particular interest in

Spain, where it was something of a theater for a larger discourse on the nobility of the arts.109 The question of the paragone between painting and sculpture also had direct relevance to the Lincean context of Ribera’s series, and exemplifies the congruence of that context with connoisseurial avenues of discussion. A letter of June 26th, 1612 from

Galileo to Lodovico Cigoli was described in Erwin Panofsky’s landmark study Galileo as a Critic of the Arts as a kind of crib-sheet from Galileo to his painter friend, equipping

Cigoli to participate in such a debate in public and to defend his medium eloquently without losing face.110 Panofsky extrapolates as much from the letter’s conclusion: “This is what I recall at the moment as a possible reply to the arguments of those champions of sculpture, communicated to me this morning at your request by our Signor Andrea,” followed by an exhortation “not to go on with them [the champions of sculpture] any further in this controversy; it is more suitable, it seems to me, for an exercise of wit and acumen among those who are not active in either the one or the other of the two arts

...”111 Quite apart from the content of that letter (to which I will return) or any other

1982); Hecht, “Paragone Debate;” and Sefy Hendler, La Guerre des Arts: le Paragone peinture-sculpture en Italie XVe-XVIIe siècle (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 2013). 109 This emphasis is plain, for instance the defense of both arts in Gaspar Gutierrez de los Rios, Noticia General Para la Estimacion de las Artes, y de la Manera en que se conocen las liberales de las que son Mecanicas y serviles, con una exortacion a la honra de la virtud y del trabajo contra los ociosos, y otras particulares para las personas de todos estados (Madrid, 1600), 111-42 passim; see also Juan de Jáuregui, Diálogo entre la Naturaleza y las dos Artes, Pintura y Escultura, de cuya Preminencia se disputa y juzga. Dedicado a los prácticos y teóricos en estas artes, in Francisco Calvo Serraller (ed.) Teoría de la Pintura del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991), 151-56. Further bibliography and detailed overviews of this important topic in Spanish art theory are in Karin Hellwig, Die Spanische Kunstliteratur im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1996), 139-200, and Karin Hellwig, “El Parangón en la España del Siglo de Oro: Un Debate entre la Teoría y la Práctica del Arte,” in in José Riello (ed.), Sacar de la Sombra Lumbre: La Teoría de la Pintura en el Siglo de Oro (1560-1724) (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2012), 223-38. 110 Galilei, Opere vol. 11, letter of 26 June, 1612, no. 713, 340-3; translated and transcribed in Panofsky, Critic of the Arts, appendix I, 32-37. Santucci also relates Galileo’s letter to Ribera’s Five Senses, though without further analysis; Santucci, “Dissimulazione Onesta,” 32. 111 “Tanto per ora mi sovviene poter ella rispondere alle ragioni di cotesti fautori della scultura, partecipatemi questa mattina di ordine di V. S. dal S.re Andrea nostro. Ma io però la consiglierei a non

230 discussions of the topic, the first point to note is that the comparison of painting to sculpture was a topic of discussion, a subject on which participants in civil conversazione could show their erudition by rehearsing canonical arguments and also show their wit by adapting and expanding them. This is essentially what Ribera does with the paragone as well: the dispute is invoked, along with certain canonical arguments, but in his role as the silent moderator of the debate, Ribera also introduces some unexpected twists to enliven the discussion.

The presence of the paragone debate as a topic for civil conversation is demonstrable across several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. Perhaps most notably, its inclusion in the ur-manual on courtly conversation, Benedetto Castiglione’s

Book of the Courtier, shows its status as a topic for discussion in refined circles, and

Vasari also recounts having conducted the debate at the court of Alessandro Farnese in

Rome.112 Giovanni Antonio Mazenta’s 1631 Memorie of Leonardo Da Vinci, commissioned by the famous collector, virtuoso, and latecomer to the Lincean Academy

Cassiano dal Pozzo, describes Leonardo as staging a contest between the two arts at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan, by having a blind man and a fool attempt to produce and pass judgment on a likeness in the two media, respectively.113 The prearranged lines along which the debate was drawn, particularly in Benedetto Varchi’s staging of the discussion in the mid-sixteenth century, have tended to cast the painting-

s’inoltrar più con essi in questa contesa, parendomi ch’ella stia meglio per esercizio di spirito e d’ingegno fra quei che non professino nè l’una nè l’altra di queste due veramente ammirabili arti ...” Panofsky surmises that the Signor Andrea in question is the Grand-Ducal secretary Andrea Cioli. Panofsky, Critic of the Arts, 6-7. 112 Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento vol. 3: Pittura e Scultura (Turin: 1978), 489-93; cited in Hecht, “Paragone Debate,” 125. See also Hendler, Guerre des Arts, 49-50, 59-62. 113 Giovanni Ambrogio Mazenta, ed. Luigi Gramatica, Le Memorie su Leonardo da Vinci di Don Ambrogio Mazenta, Ripublicate ed Illustrate da D. Luigi Gramatica (Milan: Alfieri & Lacroix, 1919), 41; cited in Hecht, “Paragone Debate,” 133-35.

231 sculpture paragone as a predictable academic exercise, a typical instance of the way academic discussion functioned as a display of erudition rather than as a site for risky creative work.114

Closer to Ribera’s series, his own patrons, such as the Marquis Vincenzo

Giustiniani, are known to have taken an interest in the paragone and to have incorporated it creatively into their collecting practice.115 Returning to our hypothesis that the Count of

Villamediana was the series’ patron, it is worth noting that the Neapolitan literary academy of the Oziosi is also known to have included the painting-sculpture comparison in its topics of discourse. Francesco de’Pietri summarizes the broad strokes of the debate in his Problemi Accademici, with a faint and more generic echo of Galileo’s remark that the maraviglia of painting, which creates on a two-dimensional surface illusions of size, scale, relief, motion, energy, distance, and projection, has greater merit than sculpture, which is “palpable and icastic.”116 We find a more detailed, though not necessarily more original, record of the Oziosi rehearsing the painting-sculpture paragone in a manuscript in the Vatican library (appendix 14).117 What we have in Ribera’s Touch is an incisive variation on the proposal of an “academic problem:” the painting unmistakably raises the question of the paragone debate, as though assigning it for discussion, yet it does so in a

114 Peter Hecht, “The Paragone Debate: Ten Illustrations and a Comment,” in Simiolus 14, no. 2 (1984): 125-36. 115 Rudolf Preimesberger, “Paragone-Motive und Theoretische Konzepte in Vincenzo Giustinianis “Discorso sopra la Scultura,”” in Silvia Danesi Squarzina (ed.), Caravaggio in Preußen. Die Sammlung Giustiniani und die Berliner Gemäldegalerie (exh. cat. Berlin and Rome: Altes Museum and Galleria Giustiniani, 2001), 50-57. 116 “E finalmente la dipintura maggiore per lo pregio della maraviglia, percioche in una tela, over tavola piana dimostra con istupore la grossezza, la grandezza, il rilievo, il moto, la forza, l’energia, e la distanza de corpi, e de’ paesi, che sembrano veramente saltar fuori della tela, & esser di moto fra di loro distanti, il che nella scoltura non reca tanta maraviglia, essendo le cose icastiche, e palpabili.” De’ Pietri, Problemi Academici, 20; the question, “Qual sia di maggior pregio la scoltura, o la Dipintura,” is discussed pp. 19- 21. 117 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS. Borg. Lat. 144, ff. 409r-410v.

232 way that feels anything but deferential to the academic tradition it invokes. For viewers who might be familiar with more creative or ambitious approaches to the issue such as

Galileo’s, which I shall discuss presently, Ribera’s painting would stage a kind of empirical test, using the viewer’s experience of a painting as the basis for a discussion of experiencing the illusions of painting and sculpture in turn.

Beyond academic convention: Ribera’s Galilean paragone

Peter Hecht, who was the first to investigate the paragone motif as the primary subject of Ribera’s images of Touch, both in the series under discussion and in the 1632 canvas of the same subject in the Museo del Prado, holds up Ribera as a brilliant conveyer of a more general attitude of detached mockery on the part of artists toward what he characterizes as a parlor game of empty philosophical discussion of art.118 For

Hecht, Ribera’s 1615 image of Touch skewers the entire debate, and the blind man’s oblivion to the painting in the foreground is a dig at the particular argument that painting is less “truthful” than sculpture because it lacks the same degree of physical presence, and a humorous defeat of theory by practice.119 The low status of Touch in the hierarchy of the senses is borne out for Hecht in the humility imposed by the figure’s blindness in

Ribera’s painting.

In favor of this reading, we should consider the ways in which early seventeenth century discussions of the paragone diverged from their cinquecento precedents. The argument that painting had less physical presence and thus less reliable reality than sculpture is countered in Ribera’s painting by an insistence on his own painting’s relief

118 Hecht, “Paragone Debate,” 136. 119 Ibid., 127-30.

233 and color. If we were to observe the man in the painting making the comparison through touch (feeling both the picture and the statue), our own experience would not hold the same importance to Ribera’s treatment of the subject. Having the painted figure perform a comparison is not the same as collaborating with the picture for the comparison to take place between our experience and his. In this painting again, we are given an evaluation to be carried out rather than a narrative scene to be more passively received. If we take the artist’s cue and systematically begin to compare what we see with what the man experiences, we soon find ourselves rehearsing the well-trodden arguments of the academic debate, with the notable twist provided by the man’s blindness, which introduces sculpture’s key advantage of possessing a real physical presence, whereas painting was often considered less truthful.

In Ribera's painting, the blind man and the equally blind head of antique sculpture confront each other at eye level, and the probing fingers on the statue’s eyes constitute something like an exchange of gazes. The matching scale and nearly amorous proximity of the two heads emphasizes their kinship, and the man cradles the statue as though embracing an invisible body beneath it. The paragone is ostensibly between the head of sculpture and the painting on the table in the foreground, but Hecht notes that the comparison in question is not really taking place; as Aragó-Strasser also points out, the man himself is not contrasting the tactile experience of a painting with that of sculpture, as would soon become a more conventional means of invoking the paragone (as for

234 instance in Livio Mehus's painting, figure 3.40), since he is not actually touching the painting.120

The paragone debate comes up with a very similar emphasis in Giulio Mancini’s

Considerations on Painting. In his response to Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s treatise on painting, Mancini begins by lamenting Lomazzo’s lack of a systematic definition of the nature of painting.121 Countering this perceived lacuna, Mancini’s own proposed definition brings the painter’s activity into comparison with his own profession of medicine, emphasizing that each is a learned skill that obeys objective and measurable principles. Just as the doctor’s practice cannot be said to be more about the knowledge of the body than about the means to treat its illnesses (or vice-versa), so too the essence of painting must be seen jointly to reside in knowledge and in the practical means by which it takes effect. The equivalence that Lomazzo posits between painting and sculpture, for

Mancini, is therefore an absurdity, given the difference in the means and in the physical processes and objects in which each medium consists, being undergirded by two qualitatively different sorts of disegno, one based on real proportions and spatial relations, and the other based on perceived ones.122 In other words, the paragone debate for Mancini becomes another occasion on which to contrast the physician’s internal

120 Hecht, “Paragone Debate,” 129-35; Ferino-Pagden (ed.), Cinco Sentidos, cat. no. VI.11, pp. 164-65; Marco Chiarini (ed.), Livio Mehus. Un Pittore Barocco alla Corte dei Medici 1627-1691 (Exh. cat. Florence: Palazzo Pitti, 2000), cat. no. 3, pp. 68-69. 121 Mancini, Considerazioni, I, 155-56. 122 “Onde appar manifesto quanto che il signor Lomazzo s’inganni nel proemio della sua opera quando che dice che la pittura e la scoltura sian una medesima cosa differente l’un dall’altra come è differente un huomo da un altr’huomo, convenendo nel fondamento che è il disegno, e nel fine che è l’immitatione: perchè è ben vero che convengono in questa astrattion della cosa di quantità e figura che si dice disegno, ma il disegno pittoresco et il scultorio (mi conceda questa parola la Crusca), non è il medesimo, poichè il pittoresco si finisce con superficie figurata senza profondità, e per la lontananza e vicinanza delle parti e dei siti vi aggiungi al più l’ombre e chiari, ma il scultorio concepisce questa profondità che, lasciando star questi chiari e queste ombre, la va esplicando o con le sue misure o con quei quadri proportionati alla quantità e profondità che molti usano ... o vero, in luogo de’ disegni, far i modelli quali le servano come ai pittori il lor disegno.” Ibid., 156-57.

235 understanding of things with the painter’s confinement to configurations of appearance.

The essential difference between painting and sculpture for Mancini is between making an object that has a corporeal presence and making an image without corporeality:

... between the painterly conceit to be carried out and that of the sculptor, there is a difference, for the sculptor conceives of it as it is in being (in essere), in terms of the quantities of longitude, latitude, and depth, and in terms of the figure, [as these are] tangible and visible; but the painter [conceives of the conceit] only as it is visible in one surface. And finally [painting and sculpture] are different in matter (nella materia), because the painter considers the body without the body, that is as colored and without corporeality, so that, with this color [the painter] might create its illusion and appearance (finzione et apparenza); but the sculptor considers the body in order to make its illusion corporeal and enduring.123

Mancini's insistence on such essential differences between the two media moves the discussion closer to the philosophical problems that make the senses relevant to the paragone debate in the first place.

The proximity and sympathy in which Ribera places the blind man and the sculpted head lead one to compare the two: one is alive, one is a dead object; one is in color, one is not; neither can see, but both can be felt as physical presences; one can touch, the other cannot. First of all, the salient comparison invoked is between a thing that is alive and a thing that is not. This uncannily echoes Galileo’s defense of painting in his letter to Cigoli, in which he explicitly addresses the issue of presence and relief in sculpture and the test case of the blind man confronted with works in both media. The letter is worth quoting at length:

How much more highly must we think of painting if it, not having any [real] relief, yet shows us just as much relief as does sculpture. But why do I say: just as much as sculpture?

123 “... fra il concetto pittoresco e di scoltore da farsi vi è diversità, perchè il scultore la concepisce tal quale l’è in essere, e quanto alla quantità di longitudine, lattitudine e profondità, e quanto alla figura, e così tangibile e visibile, ma il pittor sol com’è visibile in una superficie. Et in ultimo son differenti nella materia, perchè il pittor considera il corpo senz’il corpo, cioè come colorato e senza corporeità, acciò che, con questo colore, faccia la sua finzione et apparenza, ma il scultore considera il corpo per poterne far d’esso la sua finsione corporea e sosistente.” Ibid., 157.

236 A thousand times more, since it is not beyond the power of painting to represent, in one and the same plane, not only the relief of one figure which amounts to one or two cubits, but the development in depth of a countryside or an expanse of sea which amounts to many, many miles. And those who reply that the sense of touch would disclose the fraudulence of these [prospects] surely would seem to speak like weak-minded people, as though both sculptures and paintings were made in order to be touched in addition to being seen. Furthermore, those who praise the relief of statues do this, in my opinion, in the belief that this means [viz., relief] enables them [viz., the statues] more easily to deceive us and to appear natural to us. Now look at this argument! That relief which does deceive the sense of vision is within reach of painting as well as of sculpture, or rather more so; for, in painting there are - over and above the light-and-dark which is, so to speak, the visible relief of sculpture - the natural colors in which sculpture is lacking. There remains, then, that sculpture is superior to painting in that kind of relief which is perceived by touch. But simple-minded are those who think that sculpture can deceive the sense of touch to a higher degree than painting - provided that we understand by ‘to deceive’ to operate in such a manner that the sense to be deceived accepts the object not as what it is but as what it is intended to imitate. Who would believe that a man, when touching a statue, would think that it is a living human being? Certainly nobody; and a sculptor who, being unable to deceive the sense of sight, would want to show his prowess by trying to deceive the sense of touch would place himself in a most awkward position, since he would ignore the fact that not only projections and depressions (which constitute the relief in a statue) come within the province of this sense but also softness and hardness, warmth and coolness, smoothness and roughness, heaviness and lightness, all of which [would be] criteria of the statue’s power to deceive.124

First of all, Galileo upends the function of touch in the painting-sculpture dispute by making it into the means by which sculpture is unmasked as an illusion and not as the

124 Trans. Panofsky, Critic of the Arts, 35-6. “Anzi quanto è da stimarsi più mirabile la pittura, se, non avendo ella rilevo [sic] alcuno, ci mostra rilevare quanto la scultura! Ma che dico io quanto la scultura? Mille volte più; atteso che non le sarà impossibile rappresentare nel medesimo piano non solo il rilevo d’una figura, che importa un braccio o due, ma ci rappresentarà la lontananza d’un paese, et una distesa di mare di molte e molte miglia. E quelli che rispondono che il tatto poi ne dimostrerebbe l’inganno, certo che c’ par ch’e’parlino da persone debili; quasi che le sculture e pitture sieno fatte per toccarsi non meno che per vedersi. In oltre, que’ che stimano rilevo delle statue, credo certo che ciò facciano credendo che con questo mezzo possano esse più facilmente ingannarci e parerci naturali. Or notisi questo argomento. Di quel rilevo che inganna la vista, ne è cosi partecipe la pittura come la scultura, anzi più; poichè nella pittura, oltre al chiaro et allo scuro, che sono, per così dirlo, il rilevo visibile della scultura, vi ha ella i colori naturalissimi, de’ quali la scultura manca. Resta dunque che la scultura superi la pittura in quella parte di rilevo che è sottoposta al tatto. Ma semplici quelli che pensano che la scultura abbia ad ingannare il tatto più che la pittura, intendendo noi per ingannare l’operar sì che il senso da ingannarsi reputi quella cosa non quale ell’è, ma quella che imitar si volle! Ora chi crederà che uno, toccando una statua, si creda che quella sia un uomo vivo? Certo nessuno: et è ben ridotto a cattivo partito quello scultore, che non avendo saputo ingannar la vista, ricorre a voler mostrare l’eccellenza sua col voler ingannare il tatto, non si accorgendo che non solamente è sottoposto a tal sentimento il rilevato e il depresso (che sono il rilevo della statua), ma ancora il molle e il duro, il caldo e’l freddo, il delicato e l’aspro, il grave e’l leggiero, tutt’indizi dell’inganno della statua.” Galilei, Opere vol. 11, letter of 26 June, 1612, pp. 340-41.

237 thing represented. Furthermore, color marks the difference between the live figure and the statue; three-dimensional presence is common to both. The painting in the foreground, which has color but lacks the mass and shape of the sculpted head, is nonetheless pointedly shown as an object in space by its foreshortening. The three-way comparison among the three “figures” in the painting plays up the importance of rilievo and its collaboration with colore as the rhetorically enlivening components of pittura.

The particular issues of liveliness (vivacità) and of rhetorical force based on an illusion of physical presence (enargeia) both hinge on the joint effects of rilievo and colore.125 The letter from Galileo to Cigoli hinges almost entirely on this very question; touch, the very aspect of sculpture that makes it intelligible to the blind man (for whom painting is a mere flat surface), is for Galileo as irrelevant to sculpture as it is to painting, both of which are premised not on presence but on illusion and imitation. Touch betrays the sham of the imitation just as readily with sculpture as with painting, revealing the statue’s head as a block of marble, not as living flesh, just as it would reveal the painting itself to be a mere paint-encrusted flat support. The paragone as Galileo discussed it was a case study in a sophisticated understanding of sight itself, which as Nicholas Wade has argued, thought of visual phenomena in terms of oppositions between light and dark.126 The underlying scientific and philosophical stakes of the discussion are there in Ribera’s painting for the taking or leaving; if taken, they again frame an epistemological problem rather than a strictly optical or physiological one.

125 Valeska von Rosen, “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhlat des “Ut-pictura-poesis” und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept,” in Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000): 171-208. 126Wade, “Galileo and the Senses,” 301-7.

238 Galileo’s paragone revisited: Ribera’s Girolamini Saint Andrew

Creative approaches to the painting-sculpture paragone are also pursued in another of Ribera’s paintings from around the same period, the Saint Andrew of c. 1618 in the Quadreria dei Girolamini in Naples (figure 3.41). In this painting, Ribera takes the paragone discussion a step further through his remarkable handling of the Saint’s skin.

This most tactile component of the image is endowed with literal relief that mimics on a

1:1 scale the physical properties of the bodily surfaces and textures depicted. Thus, for example, the crow’s feet at the corners of Andrew’s eyes are incised into the paint surface, and the skin that sits in folds atop his knuckles emerges from the canvas in little ridges of impasto (details, figures 3.42 & 3.43). The rilievo through which painting and sculpture most directly contend for effectiveness becomes not only a matter of light and shade, but a handling of surface that has no less real presence than if it were sculpted.

As in the 1615 Touch, a diagonal shadow cuts across the background of Saint

Andrew from the upper left of the painting. To this Caravaggesque effect, Ribera adds a shaft of light that suggests a divine interlocutor for Andrew, as he gestures with his left hand towards himself, and with his right to the cross that he is asked to take up in imitation of Christ. The beam of light gives a narrative dimension to the otherwise static subject of the half-figure apostle; his interpellation by a divine interlocutor animates the painting with an intense, prayerful dialogue between Andrew and the God whom he is asked to follow to martyrdom. The pleading glance of the Saint that remains devoid of rebellion echoes Christ’s anticipation of his sufferings and request for the cup to pass from him in Gethsemane; the cross that is set in front of Andrew is thus promoted from a mere attribute to a visionary preview of the suffering that the Saint will embrace.

239 The shaft of light that gives focus to Andrew’s conversation and inner struggle also combines with the diagonal shadow on the wall to form a second 'cross' of light and shadow that hangs behind Andrew in foreshadowing of his death on such a device. The doubling of the cross in front of the Saint with the shadowy cross behind him opens a comparison between the crosses, one of which is depicted illusionistically as a wooden structure, while the other is a mere matter of light and dark. Neither cross is necessarily a physically real object: both are ultimately configurations of light and dark. It may be coincidental that Galileo’s letter to Cigoli insists so forcefully on this point; more difficult to dismiss from consideration is the separation of the shaft of light into two parts, with a smaller stroke running parallel to the broader beam. There is no cogent reason why a ray of light from heaven should be separated into a small ray and a much wider ray; on the other hand, the exact suggestion of the width of a three-dimensional wooden beam seen in perspective is neatly achieved in this otherwise pointless and unmistakably clear detail.

Hecht’s analysis is convincing on several levels, and the humorous promotion of commonsensical practice over affected philosophizing rings true with the tone of the Five

Senses in particular, and indeed with Ribera’s works more broadly. While one can argue that the Saint Andrew and other later paintings are hardly germane to what Ribera does in the Roman Five Senses, one can also say, with the hindsight the Girolamini Saint Andrew or the 1632 Sense of Touch in the Museo del Prado afford, that Ribera’s thinking on the paragone in 1615 cannot quite be characterized as dismissive of the debate itself, as

Hecht or Aragó-Strasser would have it. What we see both in the Roman Five Senses and in the Girolamini Saint Andrew is Ribera’s familiarity with the conventions that he is

240 upending, and his expectation that the viewer will “play the game” by taking up the proffered indications to converse on the topic. Ribera’s continued and manifold experimentation with the painting-sculpture paragone as a motif may also indicate that he found the question genuinely stimulating. Within the Roman series as a whole, Ribera's invocation of the motif is of a piece with his emphasis on drawing out discussion by

“planting” points of debate that his audience already knows how to take up. Ribera’s inclusion of the paragone motif in his image of Touch is a signal to talk, a way into a discussion that comes fully equipped with arguments old and new, a pattern that can be followed and also deviated from, but that can appeal to the viewer's knowledge and creativity in equal measure.

d) “A spyglass to tell good from bad counsel”: prudence, politics, and the senses

The shortsighted telescope

As in the foreground of Ribera’s Smell, we find in Sight an array of items that have no narrative purpose, but are meant to be considered and compared: a feathered cap, a pair of spectacles with a case for them, and a mirror. The play of homophones between the spectacles, occhiali, and the telescope, sometimes called occhiale, draws instant attention to the similarities and differences between the two sight-enhancing instruments.

How is the costly and coveted telescope different from the more prosaic lenses, and what does each sight-enhancing device say about sight itself? The limitations of human sight are at once underscored and superseded through both sorts of lenses. Yet the glasses and the telescope both have limitations of their own, limitations that become figures for the difference between mere sense perception and the function of the senses as prudence. As

241 we shall see presently, there is evidence that the telescope was also used as a metaphor for the limitations of even superhuman vision, marking the distinction between sense and prudence. The incapacity of the physical sense to impart wisdom or understanding is emphasized within Ribera’s painting by the contrast between the telescope and the mirror, which appears not only as yet another implement for enhancing and expanding sight, but as a figure for a different kind of sight altogether, the self-knowledge of prudence. By presenting the objects in the foreground for comparison, Ribera prompts the ideal viewer to consider different sorts and degrees of sight, and again moves the conversation into a more social or philosophical than strictly scientific arena.

In a letter written to Galileo in August of 1611, in the immediate wake of the “big break” in the Florentine mathematician’s career as he made the transition from University professor to Philosopher and Mathematician of the Grand Duke of Tuscany,

Gianfrancesco Sagredo wrote about the telescope not in terms of its intellectual or scientific potential, but in human and interpersonal terms, pointing to the kinds of sight that the instrument cannot enhance:

I can well believe that the Grand Duke may be pleased to go about with one of your telescopes looking at the city of Florence and some nearby place; but if through some important requirement of his he must look at what goes on in all Italy, in France, in Spain, in Germany, and in the near East, he will put aside your telescope. And even if by your skill you shall discover some other instrument useful for these new purposes, who will ever be able to invent a spyglass for distinguishing madmen from the wise, good from bad counsel, the ingenious architect from the obstinate and ignorant foreman? And who does not know that in this judgment must lie the undoing of millions of fools whose votes are esteemed according to their number and not their weight?127

127 Stillman Drake (ed. and trans.), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Random House, 1957), 68 (n.b. I have amended Drake’s translation in one particular, changing “good men from those of evil counsel” to “good from bad counsel”). “Poi credo che il Gran Duca possi compiacersi di andar mirando con uno de gli occhiali di V.S. la città di Firenze et qualche altro luoco circonvicino; ma se per qualche suo bisogno importante gli farà di mestiere vedere quello che si fa per tutta Italia, Allemagna et in Levante, egli ponerà da un canto l’occhiale di V. S.: la quale seben con il suo valore troverà alcun altro stromento utile per questo nuovo accidente, chi sarà colui che possi inventare un occhiale per distinguere i pazzi da i savii, il buono dal cattivo consiglio, l’architetto intelligente da un proto ostinato et ingnorante?

242

Sagredo contrasts what can be observed with his friend’s telescope and what cannot be mechanically enhanced in our physical sight. The telescope is of no help in perceiving the doings of nations, the intentions of other people, or in discriminating between the false and the trustworthy, the wise and the fool. As Sagredo points out, the enhancement of physical sight that the telescope enabled offers no advancement in the discernment of truthfulness or inherent value. By contrasting the powers of the telescope with a diplomatic understanding of events and situations in other countries, or with discernment of people’s character and motives, Sagredo emphasizes the separation between sense and the judgment required in its processing.128 He sets the telescope that so pleases Galileo’s patron against a fictional and putative spyglass that would distinguish between numerical strength and decisive significance, or between wisdom and folly. The limitations of sight that the telescope reveals are not only those of the human eye in its physical capacities, but those of the keenest eye’s findings without the discernment of value to sift the misleading or irrelevant from the true and substantial, the good advice from the bad, the sound from the slipshod.

What prompts this discourse is Sagredo’s concern over his friend’s decision to leave his secure situation at the University of Padua to take the more lucrative, ambitious, and risky career path of the Florentine court.129 Sagredo's mention of the telescope arises in connection with this warning:

Chi non sa che giudice di questo doverà esser la rota di un infinito numero de millioni di schiochi [sic], voti de’ quali sono stimati secondo il numero, e non a peso?” Galilei, Opere vol. 11, letter of 13 August, 1613, no. 569, 170-2. 128 On the complexity of this issue, see also David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 30- 47 and passim. 129 A decision that prompted considerable offense and ill-will in Venice, some of which seems also to have redounded on Sagredo himself. Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, 44-45.

243 At present you serve your natural prince; a great man, virtuous, young, and of singular promise; but here [in the Venetian Republic] you had command over those who govern and command others; you had to serve no one but yourself; you were as monarch of the universe. The power and magnanimity of your prince gives good hope that your devotion and merit will be welcomed and appreciated; but in the tempestuous seas of courts, who can promise himself that he will not, in the furious winds of envy, be - I shall not say sunk, but at least tossed about and disquieted? I say nothing of the prince’s age, for it seems necessarily that with the years he will mature in temperament and inclination and in his other tastes, as indeed I know that his virtue has such good roots that one may hope from it better and more abundant fruits. But who knows what may be caused by the infinite and incomprehensible accidents of the world? Impostures of evil and envious men, sowing and raising in the mind of the prince some false and malicious idea, may make justice and virtue themselves serve to ruin a gallant man.130

The court itself is the setting that most necessitates the increases to sight that the telescope cannot, alas, provide: however virtuous the prince, however gallant the courtier, the “furious winds of envy” and the “impostures of evil and envious men” are the constant threats that no amount of merit can avert. If the human eye is fallible in ways that the telescope can enhance, the telescope’s limitations are more serious, and require not only vision but the sight of prudence to make up what they lack.

A fundamental aspect of the Lincean academy’s activities was negotiating a choppy strait between avoidance and embrace of courtly dissimulation, a tension already implicit in the academy’s philosophical roots in the neostoicism of Justus Lipsius, as

130 Trans. Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions, 67-68. “Serve al presente Prencipe suo naturale, grande, pieno di virtù, giovane di singolar aspettatione; ma qui ella haveva il commando sopra quelli che comandano et governano gli altri, et non haveva a servire se non a sè stessa, quasi monarca dell’universo. La virtù et la magnanimità di quel Prencipe dà molto buona speranza che la devotione et il merito di V. S. sia agradito et premiato; ma chi può nel tempestoso mare della Corte promettersi di non esser dalli furiosi venti della emulatione, non dico sommerso, ma almeno travagliato et inquietato? Io non considero la età del Prencipe, la quale par che necessariamente con gli anni habbia da mutare ancora il temperamento et la inclinatione col resto di gusti, poi che già sono informato che la sua virtù ha così buone radici, che si devo anzi sempre sperarne migliori et più abondanti frutti; ma chi sa ciò che possino fare gli infiniti et incomprensibili accidenti del mondo, agiutati dalle imposture de gli huomeni cattivi et invidiosi, i quali, seminando et alevando nell’animo del Prencipe qualche falso et calunnioso concetto, possono valersi appunto della giustitia et virtù di lui per rovinare un galanthuomo?” Galilei, Opere vol. 11, letter of 13 August, 1611, no. 569, 171.

244 Baldriga has indicated.131 Baldriga also points out that the Linceans’ often aversive or antagonistic relationship with courtliness was continually combined with an acute awareness and deft enactment of its principles; as I shall discuss further, we find the same ironic duality at work in the Count of Villamediana’s poems railing against the hypocrisies of the court, an environment in which he was, like many of the Linceans, at once a maverick and a skilled participant. In both Rome and Naples, the perpetual guardedness and self-censorship imposed on public life and conversation were sources of deep tension, and were at base inescapable for anyone operating in the social circles that would match the high-level patronage behind Ribera’s Five Senses. As we shall see, the courtly virtue of prudence was of paramount importance within the specific contexts of both the Oziosi and Lincei academies, and was linked to emblematic and allegorical depictions of the senses. The particular instance of sight, which was both a bodily sense and a figure for self-knowledge (conveyed by the attribute of the mirror) also links

Ribera’s Five Senses to depictions of prudent sight, including his own images of

Socrates. In the remainder of this chapter, I will argue that Ribera’s Five Senses represent sensory experience in terms of prudence, but in a counter-intuitive way, offering quite anti-courtly figures for forms of discussion and appreciation that are themselves courtly in nature.

Nosce te ipsum: sight, prudence, and self-knowledge

131 Irene Baldriga, “Reading the Universal Book of Nature: the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome (1603- 1630),” in Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch (eds.), The Reach of the Republic of Letters. Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, vol. 2 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 359-65.

245 The intersection between the social applications of prudence and its role in the psychology of perception was something that could be managed through self-knowledge.

In discussions of prudence, a core premise was that a person’s external appearances were an index to inner states and intentions. It was this physiological and interpersonal revelation of the inside (temperament, intent, inclination, habit) through the outside

(facial and vocal expression, movement, facial and bodily features, complexion) that disciplines like physiognomy and pathognomy attempted to codify and systematize. In a courtly setting, prudence meant not only smart decisions but careful orchestration not only of one’s expressions, but of expressivity itself, managing or falsifying the transfer from intent to expression. An important aspect of prudence was knowing and controlling one’s own temperament and inclinations so as to compensate for them. The leading example for this self-management was Socrates, who was able to negate the bad dispositions that remained misleadingly stamped in his ugly features, and thus to confound physiognomic expectation by a virtuous practice of philosophy, a radical self- management enabled by self-knowledge and rigorous discipline.

Moralizing literature and sermons incorporated the Socratic exhortation nosce te ipsum into a process of spiritual self-examination with sufficient frequency to merit a resounding parody by Sperone Speroni in a brief but caustic Discorso that decries the pernicious dangers of self-knowledge and the social ruin that will ensue from its application.132 The use of self-knowledge as a path to prudence is the subject of one of

132 Arguing, for instance, that the dictum will raise the self-consciousness of the lower classes and become the cause of seditions and rebellious upheavals, while the imperative to extend one’s self-knowledge to the future as well as the past and present will fill the pockets of chiromancers and cranks to whom people will turn to know their future selves. Sperone Speroni, Discorsi del Sig. Sperone Speroni Nobile Padovano. Sopra le Sentenze NE QUID NIMIS, NOSCE TE IPSUM, ET DELL’AMOR DI SE STESSO (Padua: Lorenzo Pasquati, 1602), 9-14. For a straightforward moralizing discourse on self-knowledge, see for

246 the Dialoghi Piacevoli of a prominent author on civility and conversation, Stefano

Guazzo (1530-1593), whose eleventh dialogue, “Del Conoscimento di se Stesso,” takes this dictum as the starting point for a discussion between Louis of Nemours and

Francesco Pugiella.133 Beginning with the question of whether it is better to know others or oneself, Guazzo discusses the need at once to read and to see beyond the countenances of one’s interlocutors; while much may be gleaned from the face, the study of another’s motives must not be presumed upon too far, since for example the self-indulgent inclinations of Socrates appeared in his countenance but not in his actions.134 Guazzo applies the knowledge of others as a form of self-knowledge to artistic competition and connoisseurship, noting how Apelles, Protogenes, Zeuxiss and Parrhassios strove to outdo one another.135 The primary method of self-knowledge that Guazzo advocates is the judicious use of the mirror, both in the sense of the exemplum virtutis and as a tool for self-examination.136 For the rest of the dialogue, Guazzo draws out this self-examination proceeding through the bodily senses in their capacity to lead into sin: thus the wayward eyes are exhorted not to fall into lust, the curious ears into envy, the unrestrained mouth into gluttony, or the impious hands into avarice.137

Della Porta’s widely-read work on physiognomy was built on the same premise.

The possibility for a mild countenance to conceal a ferocious and treacherous intent appears in the very first paragraph of Della Porta's preface to the Fisonomia; it was for

example Cornelio Musso’s sermon on the subject, preached in Naples in 1549; Cornelio Musso, Prediche del Reverendissimo Monsignor F. Cornelio Musso, Vescovo di Bitonto ... (Venice: Gioliti, 1582), 661-693. 133 Stefano Guazzo, Dialoghi Piacevoli del Sig. Stefano Guazzo Gentil’huomo di Casale di Monferrato (Piacenza: Pietro Tini, 1587), 430-99. 134 Ibid., 435-38. 135 Ibid., 439. 136 Ibid., 456. 137 The nose is omitted. Ibid., 457-59.

247 this reason, he writes, “to put an end to all men's deceitfulness, that Socrates wished above all that there should be a window in the chest, that no double heart could be concealed therein; but that all should there be able to discover the will, the thoughts, the truths, and the lies.”138 Treatises on physiognomy frequently shielded themselves from the censors by underscoring the discipline's limitations with regard to divine providence and human free will, insisting that what could be read in the appearance spoke only to the likely inclinations, and had no predictive force.139 This was in part because the most predictable thing about other people’s expressions was that they would not be direct or innocent reflections of their thoughts, feelings, or intentions. Prudence, in the sense of dissimulation or carefully edited expression, was the raison d’être for physiognomy and pathognomy.

138 “Per desiderò sommamente Socrate, acciòche giamai non s’havesse ad ingannar huomo, che fusse una fenestra nel petto, che cosi non potrebbe star nascosto un cuor doppio; ma ciascun fusse lecito scoprir la volontà, i pensieri, le verità, e le bugie.” Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Della Fisonomia dell’Huomo del Sig. Gio. Battista Della Porta Napolitano Libri Sei. Tradotta da Latino in volgare, e dall’istesso autore, accresciuta di figure, & di luoghi necessarij à diverse parte dell’opera (Naples: Gio. Giacomo Carlino e Costantino Vitale, 1610), “Proemio” (unnumbered pages). 139 As is plain, for instance, from the preface Giovanni Ingegneri’s Physiognomy treatise: “Non è la Fisionomia un’arte, come s’imagina taluno, di giudicare le cose, che possono per l’avenire accadere a gli huomini. Perche à così fatta determinata cognitione non può giungere l’ingegno humano. E s’ingannano coloro, che si credono, che vi sia alcuna facoltà, la quale somministri certa, e vera notitia delle cose, che possono non essere: imperò che’l nostro intelletto, quand’egl’intende la verità, non conosce le cose, nè la natura loro se non in quell’istesso modo, che elle sono. E perche quello ch’è futuro contingente, può essere, e può non essere, noi non possiamo de gli accidenti futuri haver altra cognitione, che questa, ch’essi possono essere, e possono non essere.” (“Physiognomy is not, as some might imagine, an art of judging of things which may in future happen to men. For of such determinations the human mind is not able to attain knowledge. And they are mistaken who believe there to be a faculty controlling certain and true knowledge of things that cannot be: whence our intellect, when it understands the truth, does not know things or their nature except in that same mode in which they have their being. And because what is future is contingent, it may be, or it may not be; we cannot have any other knowledge of future accidents beyond this, that these may be, and may not be.”) Giovanni Ingegneri, Fisionomia Naturale Nella quale con ragioni tolte dalla Filosofia, dalla Medicina, e dall’Anatomia, si dimostra, come dalle parti del corpo Humano, per la sua naturale complessione, si possa agevolmente conietturare, quali sieno l’inclinationi, e gli affetti dell’animo altrui (Naples: Gio. Giacomo Carlino, 1606), 1-2; see also the “Aprobacion” by Fray Jusepe Luquian before the author’s preface in Jerónimo Cortes, Phisonomia y Varios Secretos de Naturaleza ... (Barcelona: Jerónimo Margarit, 1610).

248 By the same token, prudence was also the counterweight to physiognomy, the caveat to the correspondence of external signs to the affetti. This is articulated with specific regard to physiognomy’s applications to artists in the conclusion to Gasparo

Colombina’s 1623 Discorso distinto in quatro capitoli, a drawing manual with studies of features by Philips Esengren in the very genre that Ribera had invoked in his 1622

Studies of Features discussed in chapter 2. Colombina’s Discorso deals in turn with disegno, pittura, ways of coloring, and finally with the drawing and colors that painters should use to “explain the principal affects ... according to the art of physiognomy.”140

Colombina concludes this chapter with the caveat: “Those therefore, who may make other uses of such Physiognomic advice, let them know our purpose in Painting, that such affects argued by external signs may be moderated and corrected by man through prudence.”141 The prudence that safeguards authors of physiognomical treatises from heresy by preserving the sanctity of free will and maintaining the distinction between investigation and predictive divination is also the trait that enables one’s external appearances to confound rather than reveal one’s inner passions, inclinations, and character.

While the bond between sensory experience and prudence is emphasized both in the philosophical literature on the senses and in the literature on civility and conversation, the iconographic tradition demonstrates the overlap between the sense of sight and

140 Gasparo Colombina, Discorso distinto in quattro capitoli; nel promo de quali si discorre Del Disegno, e modi di essercitarsi in esso. nel secondo Della Pittura, e qual deve esser il buon Pittore nel terzo De’ modi di colorire, e sue distintioni nel quarto, et ultimo Con quali lineamenti il Disegnatore, e con quali colori il Pittore deve spiegare gli affetti principali, si naturali, come accidentali nell’huomo, secondo l’Arte della Fisionomia (Padua: Pietro Paolo Tozzi, 1623). Tozzi also published some of Della Porta’s most popular works, including the Fisionomia in 1613. 141 “In oltre quelli, che di tali avvertimenti Fisonomici si serviranno altrimenti, che in Pittura nostro fine sappiano, che tali affetti argomentati da segni esterni possono essere moderati, e corretti dall’huomo con la prudenza.” Ibid., unnumbered pages.

249 prudence in particular. The self-knowledge of Socrates is characteristic of the virtue of

Prudence, which is often personified through self-contemplation in a mirror, as for instance in an engraving by Jan Harmensz. Muller after Adriaen de Vries (figure 3.44).142

The connection between prudence and sensory knowledge - sight in particular - was already an explicit feature of the pictorial tradition for depictions of the five senses, such as Frans Floris and Cornelis de Vos’s printed series drawing on the writings of Juan Luis

Vives, which appear in the captions for each image.143 The figure of Sight from this series

(figure 3.22) has little to distinguish her from contemporaneous personifications of

Prudence; by combining the attribute of the mirror with that of the clear- and far-sighted eagle, the print insists on the moral dimension to the bodily sense, even as the caption stresses the physical workings of sight.144 Again, as in the case of Pencz's series, Floris's designs are far from irrelevant to iconographic approaches to the five senses in seventeenth century Italy, as witnessed by Ripa's Iconologia, which includes, for instance, the eagle staring into the sun in its discussion of sight.145

Ribera’s early works also focus on the philosophical dimension of sight as self- knowledge, tackling the ennobling subject in the humble form of the beggar-philosopher, a sub-genre that he almost singlehandedly popularized in Rome, Naples, and Spain.146

142 This is also one of the attributes given to the emblem for Prudence in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia; “Lo Specchiarsi, significa la cognitione di sè medesimo, non potendo alcuno regolare le sue attioni, se i proprij difetti non conosce.” Ripa also invokes Socrates in particular in the same entry; Ripa, Iconologia, 165, 167. 143 Dackerman (ed.), Pursuit of Knowledge, cat. no. 99, pp. 390-91. 144 “SENSORIUM VISUS EXTERIUS QUIDEM SUNT OCULI INTERIUS VERO DUO NERVI A CEREBRO PERTINGENTES AD OCULOS” (“The external sense organ of sight is the eyes, while the internal [organ] is two nerves extending from the brain to the eyes.”). Juan Luis Vives, A Ioannis Lodovici Vivis Valentini, De Anima et Vita Libri Tres (Basel, 1538), 16-17; trans. Melissa Lo, in Dackerman (ed.), Pursuit of Knowledge, 390. 145 Ripa, Iconologia, 223; as noted in Milicua, Giovane Ribera, 162. 146 Diederik Bakhuÿs, “De Naples à Madrid: Galeries de Philosophes Antiques,” in Diederik Bakhuÿs, Marie-Claude Coudert, et. al., Les Curieux Philosophes de Velázquez et de Ribera (exh. cat. Rouen: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2005), 55-80.

250 Ribera’s depictions of Socrates in particular, which exist in numerous versions and variants and were also popular subjects for printed reproductions (figures 3.45, 3.46,

3.47), sum up the core strategy of the Beggar Philosophers as a genre, emphasizing their poverty in a generally dignified manner, and shrouding the wisdom of the ancients in the unprepossessing appearance of the present-day lower classes.147 Centering the image of

Socrates on the mirror (and thus on the dictum nosce te ipsum), Ribera plays up the philosopher’s iconographic congruence with the virtue of prudence, approaching both with an emphasis on sight. As Milicua notes, the reception of Ribera’s images of the senses by his fellow artists often attests to the slippage between sense and prudence, particularly prudence expressed in the virtue of self-knowledge.148 A Ribera painting of a

Philosopher with a Mirror that is known only from Charles Landon’s illustrated inventory of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s collection (figure 3.48) (and from the later versions and indirect copies just cited), has also been interpreted as a figure of sight. The lost

Giustinani Socrates ties the bodily sense of sight to its philosophical application in the

Socratic motto nosce te ipsum, “know thyself,” as both the physical and the philosophical sight are signalled and exercised in the mirror.149

Although there is much that we cannot say with certainty about Ribera’s painting based on its illustration in Charles Landon’s catalogue of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s collection, we do know that the painting shared with Ribera’s Five Senses an interactive character. Like many of Ribera’s Roman easel paintings, the Giustiniani Philosopher

147 Helen Langdon, “Relics of the Golden Age: the Vagabond Philosopher,” in Tom Nichols (ed.), Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe (Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 157-77. 148 Milicua, “Cinque Sensi,” 158. 149 Charles P. Landon, Galerie Giustiniani, ou Catalogue Figuré ... (Paris: Imprimerie de Chaignieau Aîné, 1812); see also Silvia Danesi Squarzina, La Collezione Giustiniani, vol. 1 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2003), l- li.

251 shares the general layout of the Five Senses, with the added twist of situating the eye contact between viewer and figure in the mirror, so that the philosopher’s gaze is at once inward and outward. The viewer’s act of sizing up the philosopher thus coincides with the painted figure’s self-scrutiny, which would also be read as an implicit challenge to the viewer to direct the same honest look at him or herself (in a clever echo of Guazzo’s question as to whether it was better to know oneself or others). The distinction that

Sagredo draws in his letter to Galileo between seeing a physical thing and seeing an inner quality undergirds Ribera’s approach to the Philosopher; Sagredo’s rhetorical inquiry after a spyglass with which to tell madmen from the wise certainly suggests Ribera’s painting, as Socrates in particular was renowned for the ugly appearance that concealed his wise and virtuous character.150 Another philosopher for Vincenzo Giustiniani,

Ribera’s Democritus (figure 3.49), shows the controversial philosopher whose laughter was often misconstrued as madness, and which the incisive diagnosis of Hippocrates alone recognized as a wise response to human folly.151 Here again, the style and layout of the painting are essentially those Ribera uses in the Five Senses, with a table defining a

150 As Della Porta also notes in the preface to the Fisionomia (unnumbered pp.). 151 This detail appears in vernacular editions of Laertius’s Lives, such as the numerous Brugnolo editions: “Questo suo riso, & quel gran sprezzo che del mondo faceva, lo fece ben per qualche tempo riputar pazzo, si che chiamarono Hippocrate Medico alla sua cura, il qual connobbe, che non per stoltezza, ma per somma sapienza pazzo pareva.” Diogenes Laertius, et al. Le Vite de Filosofi cavate da Laertio et altri. Nelle quali vi sono sentenze, et detti notabili (Venice: Gioachino Brugnolo, 1612), 21r-v. The Lives of the Philosophers were widely read, but it is worth noting that both Vincenzo Giustiniani and Johannes Faber are known to have had Laertius in their respective libraries; Irene Baldriga, “Vincenzo Giustinianis Persönlichkeit im Spiegel seiner Bibliothek,” in Silvia Danesi Squarzina (ed.), Caravaggio in Preußen. Die Sammlung Giustiniani und die Berliner Gemäldegalerie (exh. cat. Berlin and Rome: Altes Museum and Galleria Giustiniani, 2001), 73-80; Brevaglieri, “Libri e Circolazione.” On Democritus’s rising popularity within intellectual circles influenced by the neo-stoic writings of Justus Lipsius (including, again, Vincenzo Giustiniani and Johannes Faber, among others), see also Laurent Salomé, “La Peinture Cherchant un Homme: Portraits Imaginaires de Philosophes Antiques dans l’Europe du XVIIe siècle,” in Diederik Bakhuÿs, Marie-Claude Coudert, et. al., Les Curieux Philosophes de Velázquez et de Ribera (exh. cat. Rouen: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2005) 25-53, esp. 29-37.

252 zone of encounter between a life-sized figure and the viewers with whom he makes eye contact.

These early works in which Ribera refines and popularizes the subject of the so- called beggar-philosopher are relevant here not only for the intellectual culture to whose interests they cater in their content (by representing certain philosophers who were undergoing a resurgence in popularity), but for the type of interaction that they established between picture and viewer. As Oreste Ferrari has indicated, philosopher portraits such as Ribera’s were often exercises in physiognomy for artists and viewers alike, so that the otherwise anonymous traits and expressions of the figures could reveal

(or in cases such as Socrates’ or Democritus’s, conceal) the character of the great thinker depicted; as Delphine Fitz Darby notes, “Ribera’s Sages were so characterized that erudite men could enjoy the sport of discovering their identity.”152 Democritus in particular was at once controversial and freshly popular in the Roman natural philosophy of the 1610s, and Democritan atomism in particular has been identified as a risky but fruitful arena of overlap between Galileo’s natural philosophy and Caravaggio’s painting.153 The neo-stoic interests shared by Vincenzo Giustiniani and several of the

Linceans are matters of note already, and my point in any event is not to emphasize the series’ expression of or affiliation with a particular philosophical trend, but to see how

152 Delphine Fitz Darby, “Ribera and the Wise Men,” in Art Bulletin 44, no. 4 (1962): 279-307, quote p. 291. See also Oreste Ferrari, "Sull'iconografia dei filosofi antichi nella pittura del sec. XVII in Italia," in Storia dell'Arte 57 (1986): 103-181; and Langdon, "Relics of the Golden Age,” 157-77. 153 On the resurgent popularity of Democritus, see Salomé, “La Peinture Cherchant un Homme.” Aspects of Lucretian materialism in particular are presented as shared intellectual ground between Galileo and Caravaggio in Elizabeth Cropper, “Caravaggio and the Matter of Lyric,” in Genevieve Warwick (ed.), Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 47-56; Galileo’s interest in materialist philosophy and science, including Democritus’s, is discussed in in Redondi, Galileo Heretic, 14-20 and passim; and in Paolo Galluzzi, Tra Atomi e Indivisibili: La Materia Ambigua di Galileo (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2011).

253 Ribera calls on his audience to engage in estimates of character before his images of philosophers.

Reformulations of the Philosopher with a Mirror by two artists in and around

Ribera’s own workshop, the Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds (figure 3.50) and Juan Do (figure 3.51), show the ease with which the composition could oscillate between a philosophical emphasis and a personification of the sense of sight. Both probably created in the 1630s or 1640s, Do’s and the Master’s derivations differ, in their confident experimentation with the subject, from the more straightforward and opportunistic copies that either replicated the Riberesque Socrates on his own, or else threw him in with other beggar-philosophers (figure 3.52). Juan Do’s inclusion of a female figure puts his depiction closer to images of vanity in general, but the unadorned and certainly unpretentious appearance of the woman keep the question open as to what her purpose and attitude are in self-contemplation. The Master of the Annunciation to the

Shepherds’s pensive figure is more handsome and better-dressed than the Riberesque philosophers he derives from, and while he may belong to a series of philosophers also, the painting thus far has been identified as a personification of sight.154

We have evidence that seventeenth-century viewers associated this Ribera- derived figure type with the five senses, since further derivations from the Socrates prototype appear in series of Five Senses from the period, such as the one painted in the mid-1650s by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (figure 3.53).155 We can bear in mind this wider iconographic context when approaching Ribera’s Roman Five Senses. The mirror

154 Ferino-Pagden (ed.), Cinco Sentidos, cat. no. VI.6, pp. 154-55. 155 The derivation of this series from Riberesque prototypes, and especially its emphasis on self-knowledge, are demonstrated in Esther Meier, “Nosce te ipsum: Schönefelds Fünf-Sinne-Zyklus,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 35 (2008): 139-52.

254 in the foreground of Ribera’s Sense of Sight, like the telescope in the same painting, appears less as a generic reference to devices for the enhancement of sight than as a way of applying to the discussion of paintings the question of what sight consists of. The mirror was not only an optical aid or an identifying attribute, but a tool for self- knowledge, a device that could steer sight toward prudence or toward vanity according to the manner of its use.

The Academies of the Lincei and Oziosi as courtly social settings

Preoccupation with prudence as a double-edged virtue to be exercised in conversation was not merely a component of the early seicento Roman Zeitgeist; as endemic an aspect of culture as it was, it held specific and immediate interest for the

Lincean intellectual circle, for the diplomats who commissioned Ribera's series, and for

Ribera himself. For all of these actors, conversation represented a key component of their professional activity. To the extent that conversation was the fundamental arena in which owning and knowing about art paid off, it should come as no surprise to find in art a corresponding preoccupation with the pressures bearing on conversation. Prudence thus constitutes an immediate hinge between the Lincean context around Ribera’s Five Senses and the strategies of discussion that applied to art. As I have argued thus far, Ribera articulates the paintings’ sensory theme in terms of the conversational strategies that applied to the consumption of art. Ribera’s recourse to a mode of conversation

(connoisseurship, the paragone, etc.) to articulate a subject (the senses) is entirely germane to the Lincean academic setting that Ribera invokes.

255 We may also note a convergence between Giulio Mancini’s ability to parlay connoisseurship into an ennobling conversational skill, Vincenzo Giustiniani’s joint emphasis on equanimity and taste across a range of situations, and the activities of both men in courtly and diplomatic circles.156 Whether the patron of Ribera’s series was the

Count of Villamediana or Pedro Cosida, the Five Senses were produced for a high- ranking diplomat whose interests in acquiring art cannot be neatly segregated from a larger set of social obligations, no matter how sincere the patron’s concomitant interests in Ribera's art. Both the Oziosi and Lincei academies were themselves courtly settings

(the Oziosi especially so) in which conversation played a fundamental role. The meetings of the Oziosi academy included what one might call a practice of literary connoisseurship: the works of the academicians were submitted to appreciation and evaluation, with public discussion and critique as the default format of the conversation, which would encompass the esthetic and rhetorical merits of a work as well as its subject matter. Presentations at the Oziosi meetings were submitted in advance for review by the

Principe and the secretary, and would be read aloud without naming their authors, after which the merits and shortcomings of the work were the subjects of open discussion.157

One can readily imagine the care and subtlety required to respond with the right mixture of insight, honesty, and flattery to works that could as easily come from the academy’s lowest-ranking members as from the most influential noblemen. In this high-stakes

156 On Mancini’s aptitude in this regard, see Silvia de Renzi, “Medical Competence, Anatomy and the Polity in Seventeenth-century Rome,” in Renaissance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 551-67; Vincenzo Giustiniani’s activities as a diplomat, particularly on his contacts in England, are outlined in Baldriga, “Vincenzo Giustinianis Persönlichkeit,” 76-78; Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey have underscored Vincenzo Giustiniani’s formative role in the development of discourses on civil conversation in its particular application to the Roman art world in “Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Galleria: A Taste for Style and an Inclination to Pleasure,” in Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 90-92. 157 De Miranda, Quiete Operosa, 111-12.

256 practice of literary connoisseurship, sensitivity to social rank combined with an unprejudiced eye for quality would be indispensable skills; the exercise overall recalls the test to which Carducho puts the well-spoken gentleman amateur, who seems to know all about art, but in the collector’s cabinet he cannot discern the quality of what is before him.158

While the Linceans soon became adept at navigating the demands of politics and patronage imposed both by their ambitions and by their Roman seat, the courtly aspect of their activities seems by and large more like a means to an end than the academy’s primary interest. While the Oziosi would sporadically record interventions and submissions in a Libro della Vita, the advancement and diffusion of knowledge as such does not seem to have been a priority for them as it was for the Lincei. If anything, the

Oziosi discussions seem to exemplify the sort of self-serving rehearsal of erudite commonplaces that Federico Cesi had contrasted with the Lincean academy’s intellectual ambitions in a speech delivered in Naples in 1616 “On the natural desire to know.”159 The colloqui held among the Lincei appear to have been far more informal and utilitarian than the elaborately legislated meetings of the Oziosi, which as an academy seems to have existed to speak rather than speaking to exist, as it were.160

The Otiose Academy’s function as a refined cultural outpost of the Viceregal court is also manifest in the Oziosi’s participation in that court’s pomp and ritual hoopla, as Lorenza Gianfrancesco’s research demonstrates.161 On one such occasion, the Viceroy

158 Chapter 2, 90-96. 159 Cesi, “Natural Desiderio;” partially translated in Dooley, Italy in the Baroque, 24-37; see also the discussion in Baldriga, who emphasizes the distinctiveness of the Lincean project from the mainstream of Italian academies; Baldriga, “Book of Nature,” 365-70, 77-83. 160 Baldriga, “Book of Nature,” 372-75. 161 Gianfrancesco, “Propaganda to Science,” 12-14.

257 Antonio Álvarez de Toledo y Beaumont, fifth Duke of Alba, was fêted to mark the seventh anniversary of his reign.162 The Neapolitan Francesco Orilia published an emblematic panegyric commemorating this celebration, in which he approaches the virtue of prudence in terms of sense and judgment.163 Alba’s virtues were each assigned a zodiacal sign and an ornate symbolic archway, gateways into twelve districts of Naples that Orilia describes as deriving from a procession held in Alba’s honor on the feast of

Saint John the Baptist in 1629; each “arch” then forms a section of Orilia’s panegyric to the Duke. The arch dedicated to prudence, Orilia relates, included a full-figure painting of

Alba, wearing a chain with the order of the Golden Fleece, and holding a scepter surmounted by an eye (figure 3.54).164 The moral dimension of giudizio that Sagredo points out to Galileo as lying beyond the power of the telescope is the specific preserve of prudence, which Orilia describes as a compound of perspicacity, decisiveness, and discernment, able “to distinguish the good from the bad, the useful from the harmful, and to separate the just from the corrupt.”165 Orilia then includes six emblems illustrating

162 Ibid., 14. 163 Francesco Orilia, Il Zodiaco, over, Idea di Perfettione di Prencipi: formata dall’heroiche virtù dell’Illustriss. et Eccelentiss. Signore Don Antonio Alvarez di Toledo, Duca d’Alba, vicerè di Napoli: Rapresentata come in un Trionfo dal Fidelissimo Popolo Napoletano Per Opera del Dottore Francesco Antonio Scacciavento suo eletto. Nella Pomposissima Festa di San Gio: Battista, celebrata à 23. di Giugno 1629. per il settimo anno del suo governo. Raccolta per Francesco Orilia e dedicata all’Illustrissimo, & Eccellentissimo Signor D. Ferdinando Alvarez de Toledo Contestabile di Navarra (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1630). 164 “Era questo Arco dedicato alla Prudenza del Duca: & oltre il suo quadro, ove era elgi dipinto in piedi tutto armato con la collana del Tesone, & una bacchetta nella destra, e sovra essa un’occhio.” Ibid, 176. 165 “Ella pondera i momenti delle cose, osserva l’opportunità de tempi, considera le circostanze di mezzi, riguarda le qualità delle persone, penetra i fini dell’attioni, essamina gll [sic] avvenimenti passati, prattica i successi presenti, antevede gli effetti futuri. Ella illustra l’intelletto, el [sic] giudicio con luce chiara, & universale, si che fa conoscere, e penetrare qualunque cosa all’officio di ciascheduno sia appartinente, distinguer le cose honeste dalle cattive, l utili dalle nocive, e separar le giuste dalle prave. Ella è quella, che dà prontezza nelle deliberationi, sceltezza nell’attioni, destrezza nelle essecutioni, & essendo à ciascuna persona norma, e moderatrice della vita humana, à Prencipi è assolutamente l’anima, e la vera vita del Principato.” (“[Prudence] ponders the moment of things, observes the opportunity of times, considers the circumstances of means, looks to the quality of persons, penetrates the goals of actions, examines past events, practices present successes, foresees future effects. [Prudence] makes illustrious the intellect and the judgment with clear and universal light, makes herself known, so that she makes known and penetrates

258 these different aspects, including for instance a mirror with the motto “explorat ad unguem” (figure 3.55), indicating minute self-knowledge, or the sifting of grain related to the discernment of sacred from profane (“secernere sacra profanis”, figure 3.56).166 These emblems emphatically include the physical senses. There is a dog smelling a flower, with the motto “vi sensit odora” (senses the odor strongly), which the commentary explains as an ability in the context of conversation to make wise choices.167 Alongside the emblem of the dog is that of a microscope (figure 3.57), which can show “quae nec oculus videt,” minutiae that even the eye cannot see.168 The explanatory text, which invokes Aristotle’s

all things in whosoever’s office they may belong, [and is able] to distinguish the good from the bad, the useful from the harmful, and to separate the just from the corrupt. It is she who gives quickness in deliberation, decisiveness in action, dexterity in execution, and being a norm for every person, and the moderator of human life, to Princes she is the absoulte soul, and the true life of the Principality.”). Orilia, Zodiaco, 177. 166 Ibid., 203, 208. The motto appended to the mirror emblem is from Ausonius’s Eclogues, “Vir bonus et sapiens [...] iudex ipse sui totum se explorat ad unguem.” (“The upright man and wise [...] sits in judgment on himself and searches out his whole self to a hair’s breadth.”) Hugh Evelyn White (trans.), Ausonius vol. I (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1968), 168-9. 167 “Ma l’accorgimento del huomo Prudente, onde propriamente la Prudenza vien descritta da Filosofanti esser una sagace elettione per cui quelle cose tutte, che giovano alla conversation, & alla conservatione sagacemente altri investiga, & elegge, & con egual sagacità quelle tutte, che gli sono d’impedimento rifiuta, à meraviglia espresse l’impresa del Cane, & molto più il motto, Vi sentit odora; che molto ben si conveniva in riguardo dell’accortissima prudenza del Duca.” (“But the device of the Prudent man, whence Prudence is properly described by Philosophers as being a wise choice (sagace elettione) by which all these things, which enrich conversation, and in conversation wisely investigate others, and chooses, and with equal sagacity refutes all that impede it, is marvelously expressed in the emblem of the Dog, and still more in the motto, Vi sensit odora; which is fitting with regard to the shrewd prudence of the Duke.”). Orilia, Zodiaco, 206. 168 “Questa facoltà di conoscenza, che appartienst [sic] alla Prudenza, non consiste solamente nella cognitione dell’universale; ma famistiere (come dice Aristotele) che l’huomo prudente s’odoperi nella notizia de’ particolari, e deve al minuto discerner l’ultime circonstanze delle cose, onde essattamente avviene, che poscia giudichi: & essendosi ammirato nel Duca sempre un perfetto, e puntual conoscimento intorno a’ publici affari, per cui di qualunque cosa, come appieno informato deliberava; fu levata giudiciosamente l’impresa del Microscopio, seù cannocchialino, novella inventione di veder le cose minime, e tanto nobiltata in questa Patria insieme con altre belle inventioni, e di specchi, e d’occhiali, dal curiosissimo, e gentilissimo Signor Francesco Fontana. Et il motto fu altre sì accomodato al pensiero, come può vedersi nella Figura.” (“This faculty of knowledge, which belongs to Prudence, does not consist only in the cognition of the universal, but as Aristotle says, assures that the prudent man be competent in his knowledge of particulars, and [that he] must minutely discern the ultimate circumstances of things, whence exactly it comes about that he then judges: and since in the Duke a perfect and punctual knowledge of public affairs is admired, by which he could deliberate on any matter as fully informed, the emblem was judiciously put forward of the Microscope or cannocchialino, a new invention for seeing the smallest things, and held in such nobility in this land along with other wonderful inventions, both of mirrors

259 fundamental insistence on the importance of understanding the particular as well as the universal, associates the noble and curious invention with the local artisan and intellectual Francesco Fontana, who had also claimed priority over Galileo in the invention of the telescope, and who was a collaborator in microscopic observations with another Neapolitan Lincean, Fabio Colonna.169

In addition to the Duke’s likeness, Orilia describes and replicates other images that show the arenas in which the Viceroy’s prudent statecraft is manifest, including those of secrecy and politics.170 The ability to dissemble, conceal, and mislead, particularly in conversation, is a key application of prudence that Orilia’s text stringently separates from

Machiavellian manipulation, stressing the Duke’s candor (even though he also makes the

(specchi) and lenses (occhiali), by the most gentle and curious Signor Francesco Fontana. And the motto was furthermore accommodated to the thought, as may be seen in the figure.”). Ibid., 207. 169 An engraver, artisan, and maker of telescopes and other optical instruments born in Naples between 1580 and 1590, Fontana had several contacts in the Neapolitan branch of the Lincean academy, especially Fabio Colonna, who commissioned research and drawings based on microscopic observations from Fontana. He experienced a fall from grace in scientific circles due to insufficient mastery of theory and mathematics, and was a staunch proponent of an artisanal approach to optics. Gabrieli, “Pratica e tecnica,” 362-64; Pamela Anastasio, “Fontana, Francesco,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-fontana_res-4bd6f5e8-87ed-11dc-8e9d- 0016357eee51_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, accessed April 4th, 2016). 170 Orilia, Zodiaco, 197-202. “Dopò questo, con bella inventione, si figurò un personaggio in un altro consimil quadro, per denotar la profession de’ Statisti, de’ qual abbonda hoggi il mondo. Mostrava l’aspetto, el vestimento, età grave, e maturità di senno: e desiguava pre tanto, un huomo Politico; ma non della scuola del Bodino, e del Macchiavelli, perche senza Iddio, e senza Religione, la prudenza humana è vitio essecrando. S’è sforzato lo Scioppio far apparer men empio questo Statista Fiorentino: ma come tutte l’acque non lavarebbeno un Etiopo, così ogni sforzo d’ingegno, non può far, che il Macchiavelli non sia un macchia cervelli. E vero, che gli insegnamenti politici fanno verdeggiar la Prudenza: ma il Prencipi non solo l’apprendono da’ libri, e dalla sperienza delle cose, ma l’hanno per una via occulta, e per una certa cabala, che s’intende solo nelle Corti Reali. La Monarchia di Spagna è la vera chiave di questa scienza, e le maniere adoperate dal Duca sono efficacissime prove del suo gran profitto: fu perciò molto accommodato l’Elogio.” (“Then, with beautiful invention, was depicted a figure in another similar picture, to denote the profession of Statesmen, with which the world today abounds. This showed the aspect, the [manner of] dress, serious age, and maturity of judgment: and designated [?] a Politician; but not of the school of Bodin and Macchiavelli, because without God, and without Religion, human prudence is an excrable vice. Schoppe has gone to much effort to make this Florentine statesman appear less impious: but just as all the waters could not wash an Ethiopian, thus every effort of mind cannot make Macchiavelli other than a stainer of minds (macchia cervelli). It is true that political instruction makes Prudence blossom: but Princes do not learn it only from books, and from the experience of things, but in hidden ways (per via occulta), and by a certain cabal, that is understood only in Royal Courts. The monarchy of Spain is the true key to this science, and the means employed by the Duke are most efficacious proofs of its great profit: the elegy was therefore all the more fitting.”). Quote p. 179.

260 Duke a master of the highest and most occult forms of statecraft). Orilia points to Kaspar

Schoppe, a prominent political theorist with many longstanding connections to the

Roman and Neapolitan Linceans, as a negative counter-example to the Viceroy’s more pious prudence; appropriately enough, this maneuver is itself an object lesson in prudent public relations. It was Schoppe’s reputation as an often strident polemicist on behalf of

Catholicism that left him vulnerable to such denunciations as an unscrupulous political operative; if Schoppe was a Machiavellian, he was not sufficiently skilful in his dissimulations to avoid being pegged as one.

Orilia’s emblems insist on the mutual pertinence of sense and prudence to the particular setting of conversation. The importance of prudence and of discerning the emotions and intentions of others is confirmed in the emphasis across the series on interaction and evaluation. If such matters seem to depart from the astronomical focus that the telescope might seem to invoke, one should bear in mind that, as Mario Biagioli has compellingly shown, social presentation and dissemblance were at least as germane to the Lincean academicians as were physics and astronomy.171

Nor was Galileo the only member of the academy who had need of such prudence: beyond the fact that mere existence in Roman or Neapolitan society of any kind demanded, by all accounts, a healthy mistrust and ability to mislead, several of the

Linceans had more immediate and urgent needs for secrecy. The Neapolitan Linceans

Della Porta and Stigliola both had run-ins with the Inquisition, and had witnessed more directly than their Roman colleagues the dire reversal in the fortunes of their sometime

171 Biagioli, Galileo Courtier; Biagioli, Instruments of Credit.

261 colleague Tommaso Campanella.172 Schoppe was a frequent intermediary between

Campanella and the Linceans, especially Johannes Faber, who maintaned with Schoppe a voluminous correspondence.173 Faber, the Lincean academy’s chancellor, played a notable role in expatriate circles as a subtle advocate for Catholic interests and as something between a public relations expert and a spy.174 Like his colleague and fellow- physician Mancini, Faber enjoyed access to several cardinals who held strategic posts in the second decade of the seicento, whose influence with the Holy Office and the Index enabled Faber to obtain favors and permissions ranging from access to banned books to concessions of leniency for Tommaso Campanella during his imprisonment and torture in the Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples.175

Several historians of science note that the Linceans’ omnipresent concern with political maneuvering, courtly intrigue, and the negotiation of socially or even physically dangerous situations should not be seen as a side issue, but as an integral component of the academy's cultural and intellectual activities.176 The patent importance of prudence to the more diplomatic aspect of the academy’s activity is explicitly stated on several

172 Luigi Amabile, Il Santo Officio della Inquisizione in Napoli (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1892), 327-44 and passim, Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Appunti su G. B. Della Porta e l’Inquisizione,” in Studi Secenteschi 9 (1968), 3-31; Michaela Valente, “Della Porta e l’Inquisizione. Nuovi documenti dell’Archivio del Sant’Uffizio,” in Bruniana & Campanelliana 5 (1999): 415-34. 173 On Schoppe, Campanella, and the Linceans, see Giuseppe Gabrieli, “Fra Tommaso Campanella e i Lincei della Prima Accademia,” in Contributi alla Storia della Accademia dei Lincei, vol. 1 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1989), 385-98; John Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Germana Ernst, trans. David L. Marshall, Tommaso Campanella: The Book and Body of Nature (New York and Dordrecht: Springer, 2010). 174 Silvia De Renzi, “Courts and Conversions: Intellectual Battles and Natural Knowledge in Counter- Reformation Rome,” in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 27, no. 4 (1996): 429-49; Irene Fosi, “Johannes Faber: prudente mediatore o ‘estremo persecutore dei Protestanti’?” in I primi Lincei e il Sant’Uffizio: Questioni di scienza e di fede. Atti del Convegno, Roma 12-13 Giugno 2003 (Rome: Bardi, 2005), 189-206. 175 Fosi, “Johannes Faber,” 193-5; De Renzi, “Courts and Conversions,” 434-5. 176 See for instance Fosi, “Johannes Faber;” De Renzi, “Anatomical science;” Baldriga, “Book of Nature;” Biagioli, Galileo Courtier; and Biagioli, Instruments of Credit.

262 occasions in Faber’s own correspondence: a letter attributed to his fellow-lincean Marcus

Welser outlines Faber’s role as a cicerone, confidant, and potential converter of protestant visitors in Rome, while praising Faber’s “singular prudence.”177 A letter of

July 28th, 1612 to Faber from the Spanish Ambassador in Prague, Baltasar de Zúñiga y

Velasco (appendix 15), begins with a disquisition in a different hand, apparently quoting an earlier epistle from the papal Nunzio in Prague on behalf of Kaspar Schoppe, emphasizing his service to the King of Spain and the importance of recognizing

“Catholics in name but politicians in deed” (“i Cat[toli]ci di nome ma politici in effetto”).178 Schoppe’s defense begins by bringing occasional recourses to falsehood under the wholesome and necessary regulation of prudence: “On occasion human discourse may be false, although well regulated by prudence, and founded in the force of reason ...”179 As many historians have emphasized, the virtue of prudence was a staple of justifications for dissimulation as a necessity of statecraft, but was a far deeper and more

177 “... vorrei che i gentilhuomini tedeschi che vengono in Italia e se ne tornano in Alemagna si partissino sodisfatti di questa provincia et massimamente di Roma et delle terre che son sottoposte alla Chiesa. Voi sapete quanto veleno ha pertorito la mala detta heresia lutherana contro il qual un de più vivi rimedij è il guadagnarsi i cuori di molte persone che vagliano, vadano in quelle parti e che passano. Non entrerò già hor qui a ragionar per quante vie si possano acquistar gli animi altrui, ma sol dirò che vedersi accarezzato e riconoscersi honorato è una di quelle cose che lega gli huomini molto strettamente. ma sono io certo stoltissimo che non m’avvedo di parlar con voi, il qual con maraviglioso sapere e con la singolar vostra prudenza vi siete guadagnato il nome d’un de sette savi d’Italia.” (“I would like the German gentlemen who come to Italy and thence return to Germany to leave satisfied with this province and most especially with Rome and with the lands ruled by the Church. You know how much poison the accursed Lutheran heresy has borne, against which one of the best remedies is to win the hearts of many people who count, [who] come to those parts and who pass through. I will not go here and now into the reasoning of how many ways there are of winning over the souls of others, but I will only say that to see oneself embraced and to recognize oneself as being honored is one of the things that binds men most tightly together. But I am certainly most foolish not to realize that I am speaking to you, who with marvelous knowledge and with your singular prudence have earned yourself the name of one of the seven sages of Italy.”) Biblioteca Corsiniana, Fondo Faber, vol. 414, fols. 273v-274v; quoted and partially transcribed in Fosi, “Johannes Faber,” 194-5. 178 Biblioteca Corsiniana, Fondo Faber vol. 415, fol. 46r. Baltasar de Zúñiga had also been in unofficial contact with Vincenzo Giustiniani during the Marquis’s 1606 trip to England, where Zúñiga was serving as Ambassador at the time; Baldriga, “Vincenzo Giustinianis Persönlichkeit,” 76. 179 “Alle volte i discorsi humani sono fallaci, se bene regolati da prudenza, et fundatisi la forza della ragione ...” Ibid.

263 pervasive issue than politics or reason of state.180 Do Ribera’s less-than-courtly figures fit into this social setting governed by meticulous presentation and subtle speech? I shall argue that they do, not least because their apparent separateness from “correct” society makes them desirable fictions of sincerity, avatars for escape from or disdain for courtly dissimulation.

Escaping the court through the gallery? Ribera’s uncourtly Senses

This fantasy of escaping or scorning courtly dissemblance, well-anchored in a reality of doing the opposite, is a frequent theme of the poetry written by the Five Senses’ probable patron, the Count of Villamediana.181 For instance, his sonnet “Against the pretensions of the Court” (appendix 16) starts by inverting the attractive and repulsive effects of illusion and disillusion (“Ya no me engañaran las esperanzas, / ni me disgustarán los desengaños”); by reversing the effects of esteem and disdain (desprecio),

Villamediana is able to detach himself from the backwards value system of the court.182

His poems on this theme range in tone from lyric to satire, and while most are themselves refined laments over the deceptiveness and hypocrisy of life at court, some, like his unpublished Romance a un Borracho (appendix 17) take a more satirical tone and gritty

180 Rosario Villari, Elogio della Dissimulazione: La Lotta Politica nel Seicento (Bari: Laterza, 1987), 1-48 and passim; Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying. Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1-14 and passim; Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Dis/simulations: Jules-César Vanini, François La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, Louis Machon, et Torquato Accetto: religion, morale et politique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2002), 11-38, 332-69; Jon Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: Unviersity of California Press, 2009), 27-44 and passim. 181 Villamediana’s poems on this topic are far too numerous to even reproduce, let alone discuss meaningfully, in the present context, but see for example Juan de Tassis, Conde de Villamediana, ed. José Francisco Ruiz de Casanova, Poesía impresa completa (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994), no. 226 p. 306, no. 235 p. 315, no. 247 p. 327, no. 250 p. 330, no. 251 p. 331, no. 356 p. 446-47, no. 363 p. 454, no. 380 p. 479, no. 390 pp. 527-37, no. 407 pp. 702-9, no. 413 pp. 725-27, no. 414 pp. 728-34, no. 415 p. 735, no. 416 p. 739- 41, no. 417 pp. 742-44, no. 421 pp. 750-52, no. 422 pp. 753-57, and no. 423 pp. 758-60. 182 Tassis, Poesía Impresa, no. 252, p. 332.

264 setting as points of departure. The Romance to a Drunkard is set in a tavern (reminiscent of Ribera’s Five Senses), and celebrates Toribio, whose eyes are at once “glassy” and bloodshot, revealing “más cuero que carne,” where cuero is at once a wineskin and slang for the drunkard himself.183 The refreshing sencillez of Villamediana’s endearing drunkard is completely contrary to the refined shams that he denounces repeatedly in courtly life. That his poems condemning the lies and vanities of the court are themselves extraordinarily refined manipulations of language and emotion makes them all the more accurate representatives of the cultural setting in which Villamediana spent his career.184

This vein in Villamediana’s poetry confirms his exceptional nimbleness in prudent dissemblance under a suitable guise of forthrightness; what better way for the courtier par excellence to demonstrate his sincerity than by bemoaning the machinations and falsehoods of the court?185 The count’s biography is itself a study in ambivalence towards courtly life, in which Villamediana was resoundingly at once a success and a failure, an adept and avid gambler, a theatrically conspicuous and even scandalous figure in the Spanish royal court, a man rumored to have let fall a diamond jewel worth 600 ducats and disdained to stoop to pick it out of the mud, preferring to lose the jewel than his countenance.186 Narciso Alonso Cortés remarks that Villamediana’s “prodigalities and

183 Tassis, Poesía Inédita, no. 89, pp. 231-32. 184 The laments of courtly hypocrisy are also, of course, interspersed with numerous exercises in well- placed political flattery, for instance in poems praising the Duke of Alba (no. 220), the Infante Don Carlos (no. 214), and numerous poems to the Kings of Spain, past and present. Tassis, Poesía Impresa, 300, 294. 185 The omnipresent necessity of not only dissembling but concealing one’s own dissemblances is noted in Snyder, Dissimulation, 38. 186 This episode is one of many incidents in the compilation of biographical sources surveyed in Narciso Alonso Cortés, La Muerte del Conde de Villamediana (Valladolid: Imprenta del Colegio Santo, 1928), 68- 69; see also the timeline in José Francisco Ruiz de Casanova’s introduction to his own edition of Tassis, Poesía impresa, 14-20, and José Francisco Ruiz de Casanova, “Tassis y Peralta, Juan. Conde de Villamediana (II),” in Icíar Gómez Hidalgo, Diccionario Biográfico Español, vol. 47 Solé i Sabarís - Tolosa Latour (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2009), 651-54.

265 ostentations” made him a perfect fit for Naples, and discusses the many farfetched but entertaining rumors that circulated around him: that the Count was assassinated at Philip

IV’s behest, that he was romantically involved either with queen Isabelle of Bourbon or with Philip’s mistress Francisca de Tavora, and that he committed arson in order to

“rescue” the Queen of Spain from a fire.187 His career in royal circles, first in Lemos’s entourage and then with the post of correo mayor in Madrid, speaks to a degree of courtly success, while one might surmise that his career as a courtier was at best a succès de scandale and at worst a fatally flawed one; liaisons and over-successful gambling apparently prompted his many departures from the Royal court, and his debts and indiscretions resulted in the sequestering of his goods by his creditors and an exile lifted only on Philip III’s death in 1621, followed by the Count’s implication in a sodomy trial in 1623.188

Might there be a parallel between the Count of Villamediana’s combined use of shocking and refined behavior, and Ribera’s refined depictions of social inferiors? We might hearken back to Mancini’s praise of the Five Senses as “cose di squisitissima bellezza,” appealing to an audience that could perceive their quality as works of art without being distracted by the rough edges of the figures themselves. This is a speculative point, but what is certain about Ribera’s series is that the figures both demand and subvert the kind of social and emotional analysis that was always required of one’s interlocutor.

Ribera’s most flagrant obfuscation of his figures’ emotions is in the most visibly emotional of the Five Senses, the weeping protagonist in Smell (detail figure 3.58) While

187 Alonso Cortés, Muerte, 5-59, passim. 188 Ibid., 52-67; on the sodomy trial, 78-95.

266 Spinosa found in the countenance of Ribera’s Smell a melancholy and pathetic plea for compassion, the man’s expression is made up of contradictory cues.189 A dimpled, lopsided grin, slightly raised eyebrows, and a good-humored glance are accompanied by a delicate yet conspicuous tear running from the corner of his right eye, while a glint of light on the left eye hints at a second tear hidden under the shadow of the man's hat.

Playing the expression against what ought to be its most persuasive sign, Ribera opposes tears to affect, separating the internal moti dell’anima from the external physiological signs in which they would normally be legible. Tears are explicitly invoked as bearers par excellence of expression in painting, notably in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura, in which the rhetorical efficacy of painting is verified in its capacity to make a picture’s viewer share in the emotions depicted: “we weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving ...”190

Whereas ordinarily, there would be no need to specify a distinction between tears and weeping, Ribera’s Smell seizes on a rare case in which the two are quite unrelated: the disjuncture between the figure’s tears and his equanimity is readily explained by the sliced onion that has prompted the emotionless “crying” of the figure. The figure’s tears are more likely to cause laughter than empathetic weeping, and they parody the traditional pattern of prompt and response to which Ribera and his patrons were closely

189 Spinosa describes him as follows: “Un viejo mendigo, ropas andrajosas, remendadas de mala manera, pelirrojo y piel arrugada, sombrerucho calado sobre la frente, ojos enrojecidos y humecidos por el olor acre de una gran cebolla (!qué idea tan increíble para aludir al olfato!), artida por la mitad y sujeta entre las manos, rugosas y encallecidas, como si se tratase de un objeto raro y precioso, dirigiéndose a nosotros con melancolía, esperando quizà una señal concreta pero improbable de solidaridad humana [...].” Nicola Spinosa, Ribera. La Obra Completa (Madrid: Villar Mir, 2008), 45. 190 John R. Spencer (ed. and trans.), Leon Battista Alberti On Painting (Revised 2nd edition, Avon: The Bath Press, 1966), 77; “Interviene da natura, quale nulla più di lei si truova rapace di cose a sé simile, che piagniamo [sic] con chi piange, e ridiamo con chi ride, e dolianci con chi si duole.” Leon Battista Alberti, ed. Lucia Bertolini De Pictura (Redazione Volgare) (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2011), II.17, p. 279.

267 attuned in depictions of tears. While the importance of weeping and the rhetorical power of tragedy reaches back to classical sources and to early Renaissance texts such as

Alberti’s just cited, Spain and Italy in the early seventeenth century were sites of heightened sensitivity to depictions of emotion. These had taken on strategic importance within a defense of the utility of religious images. That this was of paramount importance in tying the value of art to its capacity to convey and cause emotions to and in the viewer becomes clearest in Gabriele Paleotti’s Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images: in chapter 25 of book 1, Paleotti argues that “Christian images have great power to move the feelings of persons,” and quotes from Metaphrastes’ life of Saint Terasius:

Who is not drenched with tears upon viewing, expressed in color, one who fights on, scorning the clouds of whips and the fire, confident in his creator? Who, upon seeing a man surrendering to the lictors for Christ and standing up stoutly under torture, does not marvel at his patience and the unconquered virility of his lofty soul? Who does not melt with commiseration as he gazes at another taking a whipping on his sides and back rather than utter a single word unworthy of piety?191

This was only one recent and prominent manifestation of a longstanding preoccupation with depictions of weeping as a litmus test for art’s capaicty to stir the feelings, a capacity that Paleotti’s treatise most explicitly parlays into a social utility in the case of religious images, the primary purpose of which is “to move the hearts of observers to devotion and the true cult of God.”192

In Ribera's depiction of Smell, the usual indicators of deep emotion become signs of a prosaic bodily reaction, as the sensation with which we are asked to identify is not a movement of the soul but an almost mechanical response to a mere onion. The external rather than internal cause of the tears is playfully extended to the viewer, as the

191 Gabriele Paleotti, trans. William McCuaig, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 119. 192 Ibid., 48.

268 meticulously rendered white and pink flesh of the onion prompts one to recall the stinging sensation that a cut onion can produce. In Ribera’s image of Smell, the reciprocity between figure and viewer applies to smell, and not to the tears themselves: instead of weeping with those who weep, one smells with those who smell. The joke would certainly not be wasted on a Roman or Spanish audience in 1615. Ribera, whose bread and butter for several decades consisted of penitent Saints, martyred saints, and

Pietas such as the Christ being taken down from the Cross that Giulio Mancini mentions in the same breath as the Five Senses, practically built his career on such depictions of earnest and difficult emotion. The Penitent Saint Peter, a subject explicitly identified with tears and designed to cause empathy and emulation as the apostle, having recognized his betrayal of Christ, “wept bitterly,” was a particular speciality of Ribera’s from an early date, and his various compositions of the sujbect (such as his etching of

1621, figure 3.59) were widely copied.193

The sting of Ribera’s joke is the inversion of the type of reaction that the tears demand from the viewer. Empathy and emulation such as a Penitent Saint Peter would provoke would be misplaced to say the least when there is no repentance or grief with which to empathize. Instead, the viewer’s activity becomes again a form of evaluation, and the ordinarily expressive tears prompt us to discernment, not compassion. The display of emotion in the form of tears is offered in this painting not only for recognition, but for detection as a veneer. At the same time, the veneer is, in a sense, of the viewer’s own making: the man is reacting quite straightforwardly to the sensory experience that he is having. The contrast between the viewer’s expectation (attuned to reading emotion)

193 Jonathan Brown, Jusepe de Ribera: Prints and Drawings (exh. cat. Princeton: Princeton University Art Gallery, 1973), cat. no. 6, pp. 68-69.

269 and the prosaic lack of emotion (and lack of dissimulation) on the painted figure’s part create together a kind of parody of courtly prudence, with the ideal viewer ready to read what is there (a tear) as something it isn’t (a sign of emotion), and seeing all the sensitive perspicacity demanded of court life brought to nonsense by a mere onion.

In this sense, Ribera’s figures subvert the conversational imperatives of prudence and managed expression by invoking conversation and evaluation in the first place.

Ribera’s attentiveness to the expressions and countenances of his figures, and his placement of the ideal viewer “at table” with each of them, form an open invitation for viewers to figure out who and what they are interacting with, however figuratively. The prompts to unwind the riddles of the figures’ social standing and expressions are themselves red herrings, in the sense that the figures, unlike the inhabitants of courtly settings, can simply feel what they feel. One can surmise that the lower social rank of

Ribera’s Five Senses expresses some nostalgie de la boue that looks wistfully, or at least with a modicum of respect, at the blithe directness with which sensations are received and expressed by social outsiders. The pointe of Ribera’s wit is that there is no dissemblance to unmask: the tear in Smell is not just a “fake” tear in the sense of not really showing emotion, but a real tear, a sincere reaction that is nothing more nor less than what it pretends to be. Simplicity and truthfulness, in the conversational space of the gallery, become wild interlopers in a setting of courtly conversation.

270 Chapter 4: Discernment and prudence in Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob

a) Isaac not blessing Jacob: spurious evidence and evaluation

b) Eucharist and Engaño

c) Dissemblance and the prudence of Rebecca

d) Jacob’s “blessed deceptions”

Unless we are mistaken, connoisseurs of art have no patron saint. But if one had to be chosen, there is no doubt that the choice would fall on Isaac.1

Alberto Frigo

Logicians tell us - and they are not people to be easily gainsaid - that the terms "true" and "false" can only be applied to statements, propositions. And whatever may be the usage of critical parlance, a picture is never a statement in that sense of the term. It can no more be true or false than a statement can be blue or green. Much confusion has been caused in aesthetics by disregarding this simple fact.2

E. H. Gombrich

Therefore, from none of the apostolic acts or utterances do [the Priscillianists] bring forth examples of lying for imitation. They do appear to have something to bring forth from the prophetic deeds or words, because they think that predictive figures which are sometimes like lies are actually lies. But, when the figures are referred to those things for the signification of which they were done or said in such a way, they are found to be true significations and, hence, by no means lies. For, a lie is a false signification told with desire to deceive. But, that is not a false signification where, even though one thing is signified by another, that which is signified is nevertheless true if rightly understood.3

Augustine of Hippo

1 “Sauf erreur de notre part, les connaisseurs d’art n’ont pas de saint patron. Mais s’il fallait en choisir un, nul ne doute qu’il s’agirait d’Isaac.” Alberto Frigo, “Jalons pour une histoire de l’oeil du connaisseur,” in Conférence 37 (2013): 391-430, quote p. 391. 2 Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Phaidon Press: London and New York, 1960), 67-68. 3 Saint Augustine, Against Lying, Chapter 12 (26), trans. Harold B. Jaffee, in Roy J. Deferrari (ed.), Saint Augustine. Treatises on Various Subjects (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), 125-79, quote p. 160.

271 Can a painting be true or false? And can that question ever be or ever have been less absurd than asking whether a statement is blue or green? Were anyone foolhardy enough to go up against Ernst Gombrich’s logicians, they might invoke the authority of connoisseurs, who, in the current usage of the term, could be said to devote their entire expertise to whether pictures are true or false. Does the picture under examination announce its identity truthfully, or does it claim, like Isaac’s younger son, the name and appearance of someone else in order to obtain benediction? Alberto Frigo recounts how

Bernard Berenson would invoke the words of Isaac, finding in certain paintings that while the hands were Esau’s hands, the voice was that of Jacob: the pictures could be called false because they were not what they purported to be.4 The logicians will easily counter that the question does not apply to the paintings themselves, but to an external hypothesis about them: asking “is this a true or false something else?” is not the same as asking whether the picture inherently is true or false. The logicians will overrule the connoisseurs, whose inquiry is essentially not about the painting itself.

As a thought experiment, one might turn for a counter-argument to Ribera’s depiction of the moment in which Isaac earns his status as patron saint of connoisseurs, when he examines and passes judgment on his younger son’s claim on the firstborn’s blessing. In 1637, Ribera painted Isaac Blessing Jacob (figure 4.1), depicting a biblical episode in which Jacob, at his mother Rebecca’s instigation, deceives his blind father

Isaac, passing himself off as his brother Esau to obtain the paternal blessing. This particular painting demands from its ideal viewer a figurative version of the evaluation that Jacob receives from Isaac. Ribera's image, like Jacob, conceals an inner identity that

4 Frigo, “Jalons,” 393-5.

272 must be listened for, a thematic underside concealed beneath the narrative of Genesis chapter 27. The painting is signed and dated, and invites a manner of “connoisseurship,” if one can call it that, which has nothing to do with authorship or chronology, and everything to do with truth and falsehood. As Rebecca and Jacob conspire to deceive blind Isaac, onlookers may well apply these categories to judge their actions: are they lying or bringing about a larger truth? This passage from Genesis is one of several Old

Testament episodes that Saint Augustine addresses when he condemns the possibility of lying for a good cause, an idea for which this text could be taken as a Biblican precedent.

His answer to the Priscillianists quoted above might conceivably satisfy even Gombrich's logicians, or it might be tantamount to agreeing with them: to ask whether something is true or false is irrelevant unless one understands the mode in which it is to be read, the relationship that it is supposed to bear towards reality.

In Ribera's Isaac Blessing Jacob, what is it that one sees when looking at the hands of Isaac buried in the fur on Jacob's arm, at the gleaming eyes of Rebecca, or at the impeccably rendered meal in the foreground? The question itself is one of the painting's primary themes. One of the most striking features of Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob is the luxuriant fur covering Jacob’s arms (detail figure 4.2). Exploiting the impasto and the material likeness between the brush bristles and the matter depicted (as he was often wont to do), Ribera revisits the contrast between sight and touch first explored in the Roman

Five Senses.5 As in his earlier explorations of this theme, Ribera’s blind protagonist investigates with his hands what we in turn investigate with our eyes. The vivid tactility of the painted surfaces, the illusionism that Ribera’s impasto imparts to the textures of

5 As is noted by Gabriele Finaldi, “Sueño de Jacob. Jusepe de Ribera,” in Javier Portús (ed.), Obras Maestras del Museo del Prado (Madrid: Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, 1996), 182-191, p. 187.

273 hair and skin, and the potent sense of concentration conveyed by the figures, all conspire to bring the depicted acts of probing into comparison with our active looking. Like Isaac, we must judge what is before us not only based on the evidence given our senses, but sometimes against that evidence. In the biblical story, touch, that most seemingly concrete and reliable of the senses, conveys the false identity of Esau, whereas Jacob’s true identity must be perceived beyond the physically perceptible. Like Isaac, we are challenged not only to probe physically, but to judge what we believe to be true. Ribera’s painting, which proffers what seems to be a physically compelling set of figures and objects from a biblical narrative, enacts a double metaphor. What we see is a figure for what we don’t see, and the whole point of the thing we don’t see is that it can only be perceived properly through belief.

As in the cases explored earlier in this dissertation, the process of retreiving these layers of meaning is itself an essential feature of Ribera’s painting. Isaac Blessing Jacob runs, as on a silent internal motor, on the collaboration of an ideal viewer, whose task is to draw out the painting’s full significance through evaluation. I will argue that Ribera draws on a certain interpretive strategy that was widely applied to scripture to endow the illusions and deceptions (engaños) of his Isaac Blessing Jacob with the “blessed deception” of the Eucharist, imbuing the art of painting itself with the sanctifying and supernatural properties of the sacrament. The examination of evidence that Isaac performs in Genesis 27 dovetails with the ideal viewer’s experience of the painting, so that the act and process of viewing becomes analogous to the process by which Isaac attempts to discern what he has before him, to decide between the voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau.

274 From this central argument, several other points arise: first of all, Ribera is not only invoking a specific interpretation of Genesis 27, but an entire exegetical tactic. The figural reading of the biblical passage was not only what enabled Isaac’s deception to signify the mystery of the Eucharist, but it was also an unassailable safeguard against any negative view of the protagonists’ deceitful behavior. The deceptions of Rebecca and

Jacob, which Ribera also revisits in other compositions such as his two versions of Jacob with the Flocks of Laban, become exemplars of prudence. As we have seen, this courtly and princely virtue was central to a discourse of raison d’etat and of the necessity of deception to good government and wise decision-making. The issues of discernment and prudence, which Ribera places at the center of his Isaac Blessing Jacob, are also interpretive keys to Ribera’s other depictions of Jacob. These paintings, like Isaac

Blessing Jacob, become exercises in recognition, and can be seen as catering to a period eye on the lookout for hidden significance, for gold disguised as dross and vice-versa.

The paintings thus fashion their ideal viewers as discerning and prudent, making the ownership and active connoisseurship of Ribera’s paintings into demonstrations of prudence and good government. The subtle means by which Ribera conveys the figural significance of the biblical episodes that he paints are an affirmation of the potential for deceit itself to be a positive force.

a) Isaac not blessing Jacob: spurious evidence and evaluation

Patronage and iconography of Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob

Ribera’s painting, generally referred to as “Isaac Blessing Jacob,” was painted during the viceregal tenure in Naples of Ramiro Felípez Núñez de Guzmán, the first

275 Duke of Medina de las Torres, viceroy from 1637 to 1644, and son-in-law and political protégé of Philip IV’s valido Don Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares.6 The circumstances of the commission are unknown, but it is not unlikely to have originated either with Medina de las Torres or with his predecessor and relative by marriage,

Olivares’s brother-in-law Manuel de Acevedo y Zúñiga, the sixth count of Monterrey.7

Both men were dedicated patrons of Ribera, and both were adept at turning their Italian art acquisitions into political capital. The subsequent apperance of the Isaac Blessing

Jacob in the Royal collections is consistent with both Viceroys' lavish gifts of art to

Philip IV.8 The painting was among those rescued from the fire in the Royal Alcázar in

1734; its current repository, the Museo Nacional del Prado, has given it the more general title Isaac and Jacob. Strictly speaking, this is more accurate than the title that I am using, of Isaac Blessing Jacob, but one might also amend it more precisely to “Isaac,

Rebecca, Jacob, and Esau;” given their prominence in Ribera’s composition, one could even expand the list of protagonists to encompass the goat’s skin on Jacob’s arms and the meal in the painting’s foreground. The designation “Isaac Blessing Jacob” is an expedient one insofar as it categorizes the painting as a treatment of the complex episode described in Genesis 27 (appendix 18):

6 Spinosa, Obras Completas, cat. A212, 415; Madrid 1992, cat. 79, 308-9. 7 The transition from Monterrey to Medina de las Torres was orchestrated by Olivares upon the latter Viceroy’s second marriage to Ana Carafa, the Princess of Stigliano. R. A. Stradling, “A Spanish Statesman of Appeasement: Medina de las Torres and Spanish Policy, 1639-1670,” in The Historical Journal 19, no. 1 (1976): 1-31, esp. 5-7. 8 Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, “Ribera and Spain: His Patrons in Italy and Spain; His Influence on Spanish Artists,” in New York 1992, 35-50; María Jesús Muñoz González, El Mercado Español de Pinturas en el Siglo XVII (Madrid: Fundación Caja Madrid, 2008), 148-53.

276 bless thee before I die. And when Rebecca had heard this, and he was gone into the field to fulfill his father’s commandment, She said to her son Jacob: I heard thy father talking with Esau thy brother, and saying to him: Bring me of thy hunting, and make me meats that I may eat, and bless thee in the sight of the Lord, before I die. Now, therefore, my son, follow my counsel: And go thy way to the flock, bring me two kids of the best, that I may make of them meat for thy father, such as he gladly eateth: Which when thou hast brought in, and he hath eaten, he may bless thee before he die. And he answered her: Thou knowest that Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am smooth. If my father shall feel me, and perceive it, I fear lest he will think I would have mocked him, and I shall bring upon me a curse instead of a blessing. And his mother said to him: Upon me be this curse, my son: only hear thou my voice, and go, fetch me the things which I have said. He went, and brought, and gave them to his mother. She dressed meats, such as she knew his father liked. And she put on him very good garments of Esau, which she had at home with her: And the little skins of the kids she put about his hands, and covered the bare of his neck. And she gave him savoury meat, and delivered him bread that she had baked. Which when he had carried in, he said: My father? But he answered: I hear. Who art thou, my son? And Jacob said: I am Esau thy firstborn: I have done as thou didst command me: arise, sit, and eat of my venison, that thy soul may bless me. And Isaac said to his son: How couldst thou find it so quickly, my son? He answered: It was the will of God, that what I sought came quickly in my way. And Isaac said: Come hither, that I may feel thee, my son, and may prove whether thou be my son Esau, or not. He came near to his father, and when he had felt him, Isaac said: The voice is indeed the voice of Jacob; but the hands are the hands of Esau. And he knew him not, because his hairy hands made him like the elder. Then blessing him, He said: Art thou my son Esau? He answered: I am. Then he said: Bring me the meats of thy hunting, my son, that my soul may bless thee. And when they were brought, and he had eaten, he offered him wine also, which after he had drunk, He said to him: Come near me, and give me a kiss, my son. He came near, and kissed him. And immediately as he smelled the fragrant smell of his garments, blessing him, he said: Behold the smell of my son is as the smell of a plentiful field, which the Lord hath blessed. God give thee the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, abundance of corn and wine. And let peoples serve thee, and tribes worship thee: be thou lord of thy brethren, and let thy mother’s children bow down before thee. Cursed be he that curseth thee: and let him that blesseth thee be filled with blessings. Isaac had scarce ended his words, when Jacob being now gone out abroad, Esau came, And brought in to his father meats made of what he had taken in hunting, saying: Arise, my father, and eat of thy son’s venison; that thy soul may bless me. And Isaac said to him: Why! who art thou? He answered: I am thy firstborn son Esau. Isaac was struck with fear, and astonished exceedingly: and wondering beyond what can be believed, said Who is he then that even now brought me venison that he had taken, and I ate of all before thou camest? and I have blessed him, and he shall be blessed. Esau having heard his father’s words, roared out with a great cry: and being in a great consternation, said: Bless me also, my father. And he said: Thy brother came deceitfully and got thy blessing.9

9 Gen. 27: 1-35, Douay-Rheims version; see appendix 18 for Vulgate.

277 While the entire family intrigue can be given the umbrella title of “Isaac blessing Jacob,” the actual blessing is only one moment, albeit a climactic one, within the Genesis 27 narrative. We shall return soon to the question of which moment in the story Ribera depicts. The first point to note when one sets Ribera’s handling of this episode alongside the wider pictorial tradition is that practically all of the other images of this scene do, in fact, show Isaac in the act of blessing Jacob.

Narrative emphasis and the pictorial tradition

Among the most renowned precedents was the treatment of the scene in the

Vatican Loggie, frescoed by Raphael’s workshop (figure 4.3) and widely diffused in print. Agostino Veneziano’s c. 1522-24 engraving of the composition (figure 4.4) is often linked with his more enigmatic Lycaon and Jupiter print of 1523 (figure 4.5);10 the two compositions share several features with Ribera's, particularly in the figure of Esau arriving from the far left with his staff propped over one shoulder. Beyond Ribera's fundamental differences in approach, one may see in his image enough echoes of these sixteenth-century models to again justify Jusepe Martínez’s assertion that Ribera swore by Raphael’s works in the Vatican as a master class in composing an istoria.11 The general setup of the space, with its sudden switch from an open background to a nondescript back wall, the bed with the canopy and the reclining old man, feet outstretched, the arrival of the other figures from the left, and the table with the meal anchoring the composition at the lower right, are free derivations from what Ribera’s

10 See the respective catalogue entries in Grazia Bernini Pezzini, Stefania Massari, & Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Raphael Invenit. Stampe da Raffaello nelle collezioni dell’Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1985), Logge I. 10, p. 73; Mito VIII.1, p. 249. 11 Quoted in chapter 1, p. 37, note 77.

278 contemporaries would have recognized as Raphaelesque sources. These had been reinvigorated in print series during Ribera’s Roman sojourn, by two artists of whose works he would have been inescapably aware, Orazio Borgianni (figure 4.6) and

Giovanni Lanfranco (figure 4.7).12

Ribera’s general nod in the direction of this highly pedigreed approach to the subject makes the manner of his divergence from it all the more noteworthy. The salient difference is in the central action taking place: in the Vatican loggia, this is quite clearly the act of blessing. Isaac’s upraised hand, two fingers held aloft in the gesture of benediction above the kneeling Jacob, is at the center of the image. By contrast, the horizontal center of Ribera’s wide image is held together by three sets of arms: in an almost magnetically active zone at the middle of the painting, Jacob receives opposing pressures from the hands of each parent. At the center of this area of heightened energy, we find again Isaac’s right hand, but not upraised in blessing: instead, the founding gesture from which the rest of the scene radiates is the probing of Jacob’s arm, as Isaac buries his fingers in the goat’s fur that covers his youngest son’s smooth skin.

It is not only in the Vatican loggia that Isaac was shown blessing Jacob in depictions of this episode: across a wide range of visual sources, produced on both sides of the Alps, the blessing was the narrative crux of depictions of Genesis 27. Printed examples, which often included the scene within series on the life of Jacob, tended to

12 Bernini Pezzini, et. al., Raphael Invenit, Logge II.18, pp. 77-8; Logge IV.18, p. 82. Both artists were in Rome during Ribera’s early years in the Eternal City, and were his fellow academicians at the Accademia di San Luca; Orazio Borgianni, residing in Via Frattina, even lived in the same neighborhood as Ribera. I am grateful to Jonathan Bober for pointing out Borgianni’s exemplary importance as an etcher to Ribera’s own practice in that medium. Harold E. Wethey, "Borgianni, Orazio," in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/orazio-borgianni_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ , accessed 16 July, 2015); Erich Schleier, "Lanfranco, Giovanni," in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-lanfranco_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ , accessed 16 July, 2015).

279 refer to the markers of Isaac’s deception (the meal and the goat skins) in passing, as for instance in Maarten de Vos’s treatment of the scene (figure 4.8), plainly dominated by the figure of Isaac, right hand upraised in blessing. Isaac’s left hand rests on the goat skin covering Jacob’s neck, alluding to the manner in which the blessing was obtained, but more as an afterthought or a detail than as the main theme of the image. Isaac’s blindness is more heavily emphasized in an earlier print after Maarten van Heemskerck (figure 4.9), in which Isaac’s hand rests on Jacob’s shoulder next to the goat’s hair at his collar, and the superabundance of furs throughout the print, particularly in the foreground, with the cat and dog, presses home the contrast of touch with sight. Yet the act of touching, even in this case, appears incidental to Isaac’s interaction with his son Jacob; what matters, even here, is the blessing. Sometimes Isaac holds hands with Jacob, as in Frans Floris and

Cornelis Cort’s engraving of the scene (figure 4.10), which emphasizes the gravity of the moment; sometimes Isaac’s touch is more tender, imbued with poignant irony, as in a drawing from the mid- to later 17th century by Domenico Maria Canuti (figure 4.11).

Perhaps the most relevant point of comparison is the Florentine Francesco Curradi's version of the episode (figure 4.12), currently in the Quadreria dei Girolamini in Naples: the narrative is efficiently compressed into an exchange between Jacob, who holds up a dish of food, and Isaac, who is already delivering the blessing, and touches Jacob on the arm in a way that feels natural for such a momentous and emotionally rich interaction with his son.

In Ribera’s picture, by contrast, the touching is a deliberate and focused action:

Jacob holds out his arm for the purpose, and Isaac’s left hand both feels and steadies

Jacob’s wrist as the fingers probe the question of Jacob’s identity. The act of blessing

280 affirms the divine choice of Jacob over Esau that was prophesied at the birth of the twin brothers.13 Jacob’s appointment to his foundational role in the Messianic line was read as a figure for God’s favoring of Ecclesia over the elder Synagoga.14 In most depictions of the subject, the narrative emphasis on Isaac’s act of legitimation of his younger son downplays Jacob and Rebecca's deception, making it both a past event and a side issue, secondary to its divinely sanctioned result. Ribera’s unprecedented emphasis on Isaac’s examination of Jacob’s claim to the status of firstborn shifts the focus onto the more ethically and dramatically suspenseful moment of Isaac’s indecision as to whether to accept the evidence before him. Ribera’s painting places greater emphasis on the proffering and analysis of that evidence than on Isaac's final verdict.

“The voice is the voice of Jacob:”the exception of hearing

The scene as recounted in Genesis includes two moments in which Isaac asks

Jacob to approach him, resulting in at least two different moments of physical contact.

Ribera, so far as I have been able to discover, is unique in focusing on the first of these, which occurs after Isaac in verse 21 asks Jacob to “come hither, that I may feel thee, my

13 “But the children struggled in her womb: and she said: If it were to be so with me, what need was there to conceive? And she went to consult the Lord. And He answering said: Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be divided out of thy womb, and one people shall overcome the other, and the elder shall serve the younger. And when her time was come to be delivered, behold twins were found in her womb. He that came forth first was red, and hairy like a skin: and his name was called Esau. Immediately the other coming forth, held his brother’s foot in his hand, and therefore was called Jacob.” Gen. 25: 22-25. 14 This widespread interpretation is succinctly formulated by St. Augustine: “... ‘The elder shall serve the younger,’ is understood by our writers, almost without exception, to mean that the elder people, the Jews, shall serve the younger people, the Christians. And truly, although this might seem to be fulfilled in the Idumean nation, which was born of the elder (who had two names, being called both Esau and Edom, whence the name Idumeans), because it was afterwards to be overcome by the people which sprang from the younger, that is, by the Israelites, and was to become subject to them; yet it is more suitable to believe that, when it was said, ‘The one people shall overcome the other people, and the elder shall serve the younger,’ that prophecy meant some greater thing; and what is that except what is evidently fulfilled in the Jews and Christians?” Augustine, trans. Marcus Dods, The City of God, vol. 2, Book XVI, ch. 35 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871), 151-2.

281 son, and may prove whether thou be my son Esau or not.” Another moment of touch may occur when Isaac, in verse 24 “blesses” Jacob even as he continues to challenge him

(“then blessing him, he said: Art thou my son Esau? He answered: I am.”); in Alonso de

Villegas’ Flos Sanctorum, which I shall discuss in more detail in the following section, the small blessing in question is rendered as a “touch of peace” (osculo de paz).15 The more substantial blessing, for which Jacob has presented himself in Esau’s guise, however, occurs only in verse 26, after Isaac has eaten. A last and momentous physical encounter takes place as Isaac prepares to deliver the blessing, and confirms his acceptance of Jacob rather than pressing him to demonstrate his identity: “Come near me, and give me a kiss, my son.” It is as he kisses Jacob and smells Esau’s garments that

Isaac spontaneously begins to utter the benediction, which the smell both prompts and shapes: “Behold, the smell of my son is as the smell of a plentiful field, which the Lord hath blessed.” The smell of the field becomes a metaphor for the entire blessing, which is to bear fruit like a field, giving Jacob “the dew of heaven, ... the fatness of the earth,” and

“abundance of corn and wine.”

The frequent collapse of this embrace with the meal, the blessing, and the testing of Jacob’s skin and voice elide what Ribera’s composition amplifies and articulates, viz.: the carefully strategized deception of Isaac through his various senses, and the chain of decisions - on the part of each of the four protagonists - leading up to the blessing itself.

Several scholars have rightly noted the importance of the senses to Ribera’s treatment of

15 Alonso de Villegas, Flos Sanctorum. Segunda Parte, y Historia General, en que se Escrive la vida de la Virgen sacratissima madre de Dios, y Señora nuestra: y las de los Santos antiguos, que fueron antes de la venida de nuestro Salvador al Mundo: colegidas assi de la Divina Escritura, como de lo que escriven a cerca de esto los sagrados Doctores, y otros Autores graves, e fidedignos. (Barcelona: Sebastian de Cormellas, 1612), 119v.

282 the scene: Gabriele Finaldi argues that the biblical story serves the artist as a narrative conveyance for the subject of the five senses, which as we have seen, caught and sustained Ribera’s creative interest from an early date.16 The painting was included in the exhibition held in Madrid and Cremona on the five senses in art, with a commentary that follows Finaldi in treating the five senses as co-protagonists with the biblical characters, and tracks the various means by which Isaac is deceived by his senses: by sight, through his blindness; by touch, through the goat’s skin; by smell, through Esau’s clothes, which

Rebekah has given Jacob to wear; by taste, through the meal.17

What of hearing? The fact that the deception of Isaac only works through four senses is a clue to the whole painting, and a strong indication that the five senses are not the main subject. While the five senses have rightly been noted as important thematic elements of Ribera’s painting, their importance has been misconstrued: they are means to an end, and should not be regarded in and of themselves as the thematic crux of the painting. The point of the senses is to activate the viewer’s discernment: not only to underscore their own capacity to deceive, but to point beyond themselves to an extra- sensory level of reality in which the painting’s true theme is to be sought. To understand the role that the senses play in Ribera’s image, one must consider the particular words spoken by Isaac, and the exception of hearing in Isaac’s deception through his senses.

In Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob, Isaac’s open mouth, his air of concentration, and the alertness conveyed in his hands, forehead, and posture, all plainly signal that he is speaking. Given the numerous instances of reported speech in the passage, it is important

16 Finaldi, "Jacob,” 186-7. 17 Jesús Saenz de Miera, in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (ed.), Los Cinco Sentidos y el Arte (exh. cat. Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1996), cat. no. VI.3, 176-7.

283 to determine which of these Ribera has depicted. Finaldi sees Isaac as simply asking

Jacob who he is, but this query comes too early in the account to be uttered while Isaac is feeling Jacob’s arms.18 The question “Who art thou, my son?” is an understandable and not necessarily suspicious query from any blind man to a person entering his room and addressing him as “father.” The moment that Ribera depicts might correspond better to the second time that Isaac poses the question to Jacob, with a more pointed emphasis, in verse 24: “Art thou my son Esau?” This later question is of a quite different nature, and is posed after Isaac’s suspicions have been aroused by Jacob’s voice and by the speed with which the meat was procured; “art thou really my son Esau? I am not convinced that you are” would be an apt paraphrase.

On the one hand, this challenge to Jacob’s identity might be said to fit the general sentiment conveyed in Isaac’s slight frown and questioning demeanour. On the other hand, the “osculo de paz,” or small blessing that is given in passing at this point in the narrative, hardly corresponds to the gestures of father and son, as Jacob holds out his arm for examination, and Isaac takes it up for scrutiny like a doctor feeling for a diagnosis.

Given the attention and emphasis that Ribera lavishes on Isaac’s hands, the most unforced reading of the painting is that what Isaac is saying relates to his act of touching.

The passage in the biblical narrative that most fully corresponds to what Ribera has painted is verse 22: “He came near to his father, and when he had felt him, Isaac said:

The voice is indeed the voice of Jacob; but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

This utterance, by which Isaac passes judgment on what he feels, also represents the narrative turning point at which he relinquishes the evidence of his ears in favor of

18 Finaldi, “Jacob,” 186.

284 that of his hands. The only sense through which Isaac is not deceived is hearing, yet he is misled by deciding to rely on the ostensibly more concrete proof of touch. This exception is a crucial one, since the separation of hearing from the rest of the senses was itself a particular argument about the reliability and limitations of all the senses. The idea that the sense of hearing bears a privileged relationship to faith emerges from several sources, and is linked to the Pauline claim that “we walk by faith, and not by sight” (per fidem enim ambulamus, et non per speciem, 2 Corinthians 5:7), as well as the idea in Hebrews 11:1 that faith is “the evidence of things that appear not” (argumentum non apparentium).19

This idea of fides ex auditu had a particular application to Genesis 27, drawing on an exegetical tradition that saw in the deception of Isaac by Jacob a figure for the deception of the senses in the eucharistic sacrament.

b) Eucharist and Engaño

Painting as exegesis: Ribera’s sources and the Flos Sanctorum tradition

While the few art historians to have devoted sustained studies to this painting have not failed to note the prominence and exquisite execution of the still life in the right foreground of Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob, its paramount significance has been overlooked.20 The relevance of this emphatic inclusion of the elements of the eucharist is

19 Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21; Ernst von Dobschütz, “Die Fünf Sinne im Neuen Testament,” in Journal of Biblical Literature, 48 (1929): 378-411, esp. 398-402. 20 Finaldi notes that the still-life completes the painting’s thematic allusion to the five senses, while Jesús Saenz de Miera and Nicola Spinosa see the still-life as a show of Ribera’s mastery of the bodegón within a narrative composition; Finaldi, “Jacob,” 186; Saenz de Miera, in Cinco Sentidos, 176; Spinosa, Obras Completas, 415. The sole study to look at the painting more closely in terms of exegetical literature is Michael Tomor, “Jusepe de Ribera’s Isaac’s Benediction of Jacob: Spanish Cross-Currents in Seventeenth Century Naples,” in Jeanne Chenault Porter & Susan Scott Munshower (eds.), Parthenope’s Splendor: Art of the Golden Age in Naples (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993), 312-21. Tomor rightly notes that the still life has eucharistic significance, due mainly to the resemblance of the table to an altar;

285 as plain as it is far-reaching in light of contemporary interpretations of Genesis 27. While

Finaldi has speculated, not indefensibly, that Ribera is likely to have had access to a vernacular Bible, there is no evidence to confirm or disprove this hypothesis.21 What

Ribera certainly would have had access to is the voluminous and widely-read hagiographic literature that circulated in both Spanish and Italian, particularly the Flos

Sanctorum compendia of Pedro de Ribadeneyra and Alonso de Villegas.22 In Villegas’s

Flos Sanctorum. Segunda Parte, y Historia General, en que se Escrive la vida de la

Virgen sacratissima madre de Dios, y Señora nuestra: y las de los Santos antiguos, que fueron antes de la venida de nuestro Salvador al Mundo (the second volume of his magnum opus in nearly all of its many editions), the life of the Virgin Mary is followed by those of the Old Testament patriarchs, including Isaac and Jacob. The life of Isaac is divided into three chapters. The first is mostly devoted to the story of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son, and also covers Eliezer’s encounter with Rebecca and her marriage with Isaac. The second chapter begins with the birth of the twins, Jacob and

Esau, and includes Esau’s sale of his birthright to Jacob in exchange for a bowl of lentils, and Isaac’s exile and conflicts with Abimelech, all interspersed with commentary, and much of the chapter is given over to a close paraphrase of Genesis 27 (appendix 19). The

beyond this comment, however, his study completely overlooks the centrality of Isaac’s meal to the painting as a whole. 21 Gabriele Finaldi, Ribera: La Piedad (exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2003), 21. 22 These hagiographic compendia enjoyed an immense readership in both Spain and Italy, and both Villegas’s and Ribadeneyra’s Flos Sanctorum were translated into Italian, the former under the title Nuovo Leggendario. The cultural potency and significance of these compendia should not be underestimated: Jonathan Greenwood (whom I thank sincerely for sharing his unpublished research with me) relates, for instance, how an imitator (not to say plagiarist) of Miguel de Cervantes, Juan Fernández de Avellaneda, had his own Don Quixote turn to Villegas’s Flos Sanctorum - which went through no fewer than 48 editions in 3 decades - as an efficacious remedy for that knight’s diseased imagination and addiction to chivalric romance. Jonathan E. Greenwood, “The Use and Abuse of Hagiography for Early Modern Life: Pedro de Ribadeneyra and his Flos Sanctorum,” unpublished seminar paper, the Johns Hopkins University, 2012, 1-2.

286 third chapter is a gruesome antisemitic polemic applying a highly contrasted interpretation of Jacob and Esau as figures for the Christian and Jewish nations to a contemporary Spanish social scenario.23

Both in its local political applications and in its ambition to encompass a pre- digested overview of the Old Testament, Villegas’s life of Isaac is in keeping with a figurative exegetical tradition going back to Saint Augustine and reaffirmed in Saint

Thomas Aquinas, which recognized the coexistence of a “spiritual sense” alongside the literal meaning of scripture.24 Villegas’ text exemplifies the way scriptural interpretation was at once standardized and given an easily understandable context and purpose in hagiography.25 Not only was Villegas’s text itself ubiquitous, it exemplified a still more widespread and deeply-rooted approach to biblical subject matter, and drew on an abundant sixteenth-century hagiographic tradition that included a host of Toledan publications.26 What is remarkable about Ribera’s work is not his likely recourse to this specific text, but his deft and strategic application of the exegetical principles that such texts represented.

Figurative meaning and hidden identity

23 This is also the case in the Italian translation; Alonso de Villegas, Nuovo Leggendario della Vita di Maria Vergine, Immacolata Madre di Dio, et Signor Nostro Giesu Christo; Delli Santi Patriarchi, & Profeti dell’antico Testamento, & delli quali tratta, & fa mentione la sacra Scrittura (Venice: Giovanni Battista Ciotti, 1596), 248-52. 24 Concise overviews with further bibliography are in William Yarchin, History of Biblical Interpretation: A Reader (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), 61-75, 93-96. 25 See the discussion of the functions of hagiographic reforms in post-tridentine Italy in Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Post-Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 117-134 and passim. 26 As Julio Martín Fernández notes, “Alonso de Villegas joins this [hagiographic] tradition of pious works as a compiler and systematizer, not as an innovator.” (“Alonso de Villegas se sumará a esta tradición de obras piadosas como recopilador y sistematizador, no como innovador.”). Julio Martín Fernández, El Maestro Alonso de Villegas: Vida y Obra, Ediciones del Flos Sanctorum (Ph.Diss. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1981), 11.

287 The eucharistic significance of the scene in Genesis 27 is a prominent feature of

Villegas’s second chapter, but before discussing this in more detail, it is worth noting the author’s immediate emphasis on the figurative value of the entire biography. Villegas introduces the life of Isaac with a comparison between Moses’ descent from Mount Sinai with a face too bright for the people to behold, and Christ’s descent to earth and redemptive death and resurrection, both of which are blinding to those who look into them, too glorious to be contemplated and comprehended directly.27 Villegas presents the biography of Isaac as fulfilling the same role as the veil before Moses’ face: “thus as a

27 “De Moyses dize la divina Escriptura en el Exodo que baxando del monte de hablar con Dios, salia de su rostro tan grande resplandor que tuvo necessidad como dize San Pablo escriviendo a los de Corintho, de ponerse un velo delante para poder tratar y conversar con los hombres. El baxar Moyses del monte figura la baxada que hixo el hijo de Dios de los cielos a la tierra a hazerse hombre. El resplandor y claridad que salia del rostro de Moyses denotan las obras que hizo Iesu Christo en el mundo, que deslumbran y ciegan la vista de los que atentamente las consideran, porque subir al monte Calvario acompañado de verdugos, con pregoneros delante, con una soga al cuello, y sobre sus hombros una Cruz para morir en ella, el Señor que crió los cielos y la tierra, a quien adoran los Angeles, temen las Potestades, y sumamente reverencian los mas levantados Cherubines, cosa es que deslumbra y dexa sin vista a los que mas acicalada y viva la tienen. Pues que remedio para que se dexe ver y tratar semejante obra pongase un velo delante, venga una sombra y figura en que poniendo primero los ojos y el rostro de Moyses no nos ciegue, y las obras de Dios se dexen considerar. Figura y sombra de la subida de Iesu Christo al monte Calvario a morir con una Cruz sobre sus ombros y siendo esto la voluntad de su Eterno padre, es la que hixo Isaac al mismo monte Calvario segun dize S. Hieronymo, y S. Augustin, llevando leña sobre sus espaldas y su padre el cuchillo y fuego para sacrificarle mirando esto algo se dexa mirar aquello. La vida del mismo Isaac se ha de escrivir, collegida de la divina escriptura y de lo que exponiendo della dizen los Sanctos, y es en esta manera.” (“Of Moses the divine Scripture says in Exodus that, coming down from the mountain from speaking with God, there came from his face such great splendor that it was necessary, as Saint Paul says when writing to the Corinthians, to place a veil over it so as to be able to deal and converse with men. The descent of Moses from the mountain figures the descent undertaken by the son of God from heaven to earth in becoming man. The splendor and clarity that came from the face of Moses denote the works that Jesus Christ wrought in the world, which dazzle and blind the sight of those who consider them attentively, for climbing to mount Calvary in the company of executioners, with prisoners before him, with a rope around his neck, and on his shoulders a cross upon which he was to die, the Lord who created the heavens and the earth, whom the Angels adore, the Powers fear, and the loftiest Cherubim most reverently laud, is a thing that dazzles and leaves without sight those who keep it most brightly polished and vivid. Thus, as a remedy so that such a work may let itself be seen and dealt with, be there placed a veil before it, let there come a shadow and a figure in which, placing it before the eyes and face of Moses, we may not be blinded, and the works of God may allow themselves to be considered. A figure and shadow of the ascension of Jesus Christ to Mount Calvary to die with a Cross upon his shoulders, this being the will of his Eternal father, is [seen] in that Isaac, according to Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, did upon the same mount Calvary, carrying wood upon his shoulders, and his father [bearing] the knife and fire with which to sacrifice him; in seeing this something may be seen of the other. The life of this same Isaac is to be written, compiled from the divine scripture and from what the Saints have said in exposition thereof, and it is as follows.”) Villegas, Flos, 117r.-117v.

288 remedy, in order to be able to see and handle such a work, a veil is put before it, let there come a shadow and figure before which the eyes and face of Moses may not blind us, and the works of God allow themselves to be considered.”28 The sacrifice of Isaac, which

Villegas describes as occurring on the same Mount Calvary as Christ’s crucifixion, is not only a veil that makes Christ’s salvific sacrifice bearable to look upon, but is also a metaphor for how the rest of Isaac’s life is to be approached. In Ribera’s painting, the dish of meat, pierced with the knife that suggests how easily it might have protruded from

Isaac’s own back, is juxtaposed against an inverted background with the bread and wine that represent the accomplishment of Christ’s sacrifice, fully in keeping with the way

Villegas introduces Isaac in the Flos Sanctorum.

Readers in Ribera’s time, and readers of Villegas’s life of Isaac in particular, would begin from the premise that every character in a given Old Testament narrative has a hidden identity and a paratextual role to play. This exegetical approach cannot be overemphasized in the case of the present story, which hinges on one character assuming the identity of another. Such an action was seen as a small-scale rehearsal of what the text overall was doing. By way of example, we may consider the basic premise that Jacob and

Esau, the “two nations” that are in conflict in Rebecca’s womb, stand respectively for the

Christian and Jewish “nations.” Augustine’s commentary on this point in the City of God makes a note of the unanimous acceptance of this interpretation, as well as its non-literal and counterintuitive nature, given that Jacob is none other than Israel the patriarch.29 The

28 Ibid., 117v. 29 Augustine, City of God, op. cit. note 14. In subsequent chapters of the same book, Augustine draws out the further implication that divine election may favor an outwardly unassuming person, relating the figurative identities of Jacob and Esau to Paul’s notion of divine election in Romans 9, and emphasizing the point that one ought not to judge others based on human estimation: “We may also learn this, not to compare men by single good things, but to consider everything in each; for it may happen that one man has

289 actions and even identities of the figures depicted are not to be judged using common understanding, but are manifestations of a divine scheme for salvation. The immediate appeal, therefore, is to the viewer’s discernment.

Ribera provides ample hints that there is a figural reading to be found in the painting: a series of links and consonances creates chains of connection and simile across the wide, narrow image. For instance, the figures in the painting are arranged in depth on a taut diagonal from Esau, furthest in the back and to the left, to the meal that is purportedly his concoction, in the extreme right foreground. The visual collapse of this diagonal into a contiguous chain, as the viewer sees all of the painting’s components head-on, is accentuated by the (two-dimensional) contiguity among the figures and by the physical contact among the three protagonists whose arms and hands bridge the central space of the painting. Ribera subtly telegraphs the importance of Jacob’s clothing - through which he takes on the guise of his brother - by an idiosyncratic coloristic choice.

Jacob’s sleeve, rolled up so as to expose the skin to Isaac’s testing, reveals an ochre lining under the blue tunic. The exact same shade of ochre is repeated , again as an underside to a different color of fabric, in the cover of the bed, near Isaac’s foot. Darker and more muted so as to imply distance, the same brass ochre appears in the greatest quantity in the background at left of the painting, as the color worn by (and thus identified with) Esau. Beyond the reminder to viewers that both tunics belong to Esau,

Ribera skilfully conveys the sense of a hidden kinship among the three male figures, giving them through the simple means of color an inner identity that differs from the surface appearance. By situating the color on a revealed underside, Ribera gives it an

something in his life and character in which he exceeds another, and it may be far more excellent than that in which the other excels him.” Augustine, City of God, book 16, ch. 36, 153.

290 added significance within a narrative that was read in Ribera’s lifetime as a double dissimulation, an inversion of deception in which the false appearance was itself a concealment of divine truth.

The careful overlapping of Esau’s hands with Rebecca’s back, and of the dish of meat with Isaac’s, drives home the point suggested in Ribera’s use of ochre on Jacob and

Esau’s clothing, and on the underside of Isaac’s bedclothes: the painting exposes connections and hidden kinships among the five characters it presents, the fifth of course being the table of food in the right foreground. This meal (detail figure 4.13) has four components to it, arranged on two metal plates, atop a white linen tablecloth which, as

Michael Tomor indicates, resembles an altar cloth.30 The “savory meat” that Isaac requests of Esau and that Rebecca instead prepares, is a brown concatenation of odd lumps and bony edges, whose most notable feature is the knife that protrudes from it, emphasizing the motif of substitution and sacrifice. The proximity of the meat to Isaac, by association of ideas, invokes his own near-sacrifice in his youth, an incident which was a prefiguration of Christ’s passion. The sacrifice of Isaac was treated far more frequently in the visual arts than the blessing of his sons, and inspired several theatrical works, such as the libretto for a 1637 “attione sacra,” Isacco, on the Italian side, or the anonymous Auto del Sacrificio de Abraham on the Spanish side.31 Next to the meat, half an orange, sliced through the center, calls to mind not only Ribera’s native Valencia, but a particular use of oranges in Valencian art. Consistently across Juan de Juanes’s

30 Tomor, “Spanish Cross-Currents,” 315-6. 31 Carlo Francesco Della Porta, Isacco. Attione sacra da rappresentarsi nel Seminario Romano nella distributione de’ premii, che si fa nelle vacanza di questo carnevale, 1637. (Rome: Francesco Corbelletti, 1637); Anonymous, “Auto del Sacrificio de Abraham,” in Eduardo Gonzales Pedroso (ed.), Autos Sacramentales, desde su origen hasta fines del Siglo XVII (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1865), 16-22.

291 depictions of the Last Supper (see for instance the panel from the Retablo de San

Esteban, figure 4.14, detail figure 4.15), the first communion that Christ shares with his disciples is accompanied by an orange, sliced in half and resting on the table near the bread and wine just as in Ribera’s painting.32 This particular panel doubled as a cover for the tabernacle, and would have appeared directly above the altar, since it occupied the middle of the retablo’s lower register. Juan de Juanes’s insistent identification of locally recognizable points of pride within the institution of the eucharist is plain both from the oranges, and from the chalice, which of course corresponds in appearance to the relic in

Valencia cathedral. In Ribera's Isaac Blessing Jacob, closer still to the viewer, the vividly painted bread and wine occupy the spot in the painting that feels the most accessible.33 In

Ribera's painting, the eucharistic elements of bread and wine are set apart visually through a calculated switch in background between the fleshy rose color of the bedspread and the white pillow, which forms a visual bracket full of accentuated contours, such as the the light-against-dark of the white bread against the darker end of the pillow, or the red-against-grey inversion at the point where the neck of the carafe intersects with the line between the pillow and the deep pink hangings. Inversion itself is an aspect of the bread and wine as Ribera presents them.

32 Fernando Benito Doménech, Joan de Joanes. Una nueva visión del artista y su obra (exh. cat. Valencia: Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, 2000), cat. nos. 61-62, 148-51, 159-61; see also two earlier depictions of the Last Supper, in the Museo de Bellas Artes and the Cathedral of Valencia, respectively, which also feature sliced oranges on the table: cat. nos. 2, pp. 48-9, and 24, pp. 104-5. 33 In this connection, one should consider Michael Fried’s remarks on the potential for the lower right corner of easel paintings in particular to offer a strong sense of notional access, proximity, and contiguity, both with the painter and with the viewer; Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 65ff. Saenz de Miera also rightly notes that Ribera gives the table with the meal both importance and visual autonomy, through its execution and its placement on the canvas; Saenz de Miera, Cinco Sentidos, 176.

292 Genesis 27 as a figure for the Eucharist

If, as is likely, Ribera referred to Villegas's Flos Sanctorum in approaching the theme of Isaac's blessing of Jacob, he would have encountered immediately a reading of the episode that is sustained across several Spanish sources from the time. The tremendous visual prominence and illusionistic rendering of the meal in the foreground give concrete shape to the scene's function as a figure for the eucharistic sacrament.

Villegas’ synopsis of the entire incident, from Isaac’s decision to bless Esau to his prophetic blessings of both sons, diverges very little from the Vulgate. The particular portion of the passage from Genesis 27 that Ribera paints (with such lavish attention to

Isaac's tactile assay of Jacob's arm) is also articulated by Villegas with great emphasis. In

Villegas's paraphrase, Isaac’s questioning of Jacob and his verification of his son’s claim through touch appear even more simultaneous, with the verb “tocar” in the simple past, the past participle, and the gerund within the space of two short sentences: “Mandole que se acercasse a el y tocole para ver si era Esau. Tocado dixo: la voz, voz es de Jacob, aunque las manos, manos son de Esau, esto dixo, tocando las pieles de los cabritos, que

Iacob traya rebueltas a sus manos.”34 The figural reading is pursued in greater detail following the account: first, Villegas invokes St. Augustine’s parallel between Jacob’s assertion that he is Esau and Christ’s assertion that John the Baptist was Elijah.35 Ribera’s coloristic indication of a hidden kinship between the fraternal twins should also be seen in light of this remark: Jacob has an aspect of Esau's identity, though in his bodily form he is not Esau. Nor is it incidental that this hidden identity should be indicated through

34 "He commanded him to come close and touched him to see if he was Esau. Having touched him, he said: the voice is the voice of Jacob, although the hands are the hands of Esau; this he said, touching the skins of the kids, which Jacob wore over his hands." Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 119v. 35 Ibid. 120r.

293 the brothers’ clothing. According to Villegas, Jacob’s robing in Esau’s clothes to receive the blessing is a figure for the Christian’s robing in the righteousness of Christ, our true elder brother.36

Most importantly, the entire incident, particularly the deception of Isaac through the senses, is presented as a figure for the Eucharist:

In this deed of Jacob was figured the most high mystery of the holiest sacrament of the altar: in which most of the senses are deceived. The eyes see accidents of bread and wine, as do smell and taste. Hearing alone, informed by faith, knows that the bread is transsubstantiated into the body of Jesus Christ, and thus the touch is of Esau, and the voice, of Jacob.37

The deception of Isaac through every sense except for hearing thus corresponds to the deception of the senses through the “accidents of bread and wine” pictured so vividly and so prominently in the foreground of Ribera’s painting. Ribera's selection of the moment of evaluation (“The voice is indeed the voice of Jacob; but the hands are the hands of

Esau”) is itself specific to the eucharistic significance of the scene.

This symbolic subtext to Jacob’s deception inverts the ordinary, intuitive roles of truth and falsehood in dissimulation. The veneer which appears to be a lie (Jacob’s claim that he is Esau) is the hidden truth, and that which appears to reveal the truth (verified by touch, taste, smell, and sight) is a conveyance for the deception. Just as the bread and wine themselves, so vividly present and familiar, are in fact veneers concealing the true essence of Christ’s body and blood, so too the seeming falsehood of Jacob’s actions

36 Ibid. The figural significance of Jacob’s garments could also be read the other way around: In Augustine’s commentary on this passage in the City of God, Jacob “put himself in his father’s hands, having covered himself with kid-skins, as if bearing the sins of others,” making Jacob’s masquerade a figure for Christ’s “clothing” in mankind’s sins, rather than mankind’s clothing in Christ’s righteousness. Augustine, City of God, book XVI, ch. 37, 153. 37“ Figurose en este hecho de Iacob el mysterio tan alto del Sanctissimo Sacramento del altar: en el qual los mas de los sentidos se engañan. Los ojos veen accidentes de pan y vino, el tacto, el olfato, y gusto lo mismo. El oydo solo informado por la fee conoce que està transsubstanciado el pan en el cuerpo de Iesu Christo, y assi el tacto es de Esau, y la voz de Iacob.” Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 120r.

294 conceals a figurative truth, exonerating him of culpability for what are lies in appearance only. The eucharistic sacrament, as Villegas explains, inverts the role of all the senses except for hearing in the determination of truth and falsehood, and in the appraisal of essence and appearance.

The exceptional status of hearing as the sense of belief is explored more fully in

Melchior Prieto's 1622 Psalmodia Eucharistica, dedicated to the fifth Princess of

Squillace, Ana de Borja de Aragón Pignatelli.38 The third wife of Ana's father Pedro de

Borja de Aragón, Lucrecia de Cárdenas, also happens to have been one of Ribera's patrons, having paid the artist for unspecified paintings the very same year.39 Prieto's eucharistic psalmody, rooted in the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas, devotes considerable attention to Genesis 27 in its treatment of psalm 80, a psalm “for the winepresses,” which begins with an injunction to “sing aloud to the God of Jacob.”40

Prieto's text expounds in greater detail the reading of Genesis 27 as a eucharistic figure that is put forward in nuce by Villegas (appendix 20): Christ's dissimulation under the appearance of bread and wine is prefigured by Jacob's dissimulation before his father.

The subtler argument advanced in the Psalmodia Eucharistica, however, directs the

38 Melchior Prieto, Psalmodia Eucharistica compuesta por el M. Rde. P. M. Fr. Melchior Prieto Burgense, Vicario G.al del Orden de N.ra Senora de la Merced Redemp.on de Captivos en todas las Provincias del Peru (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1622). Ana de Borja was married to the poet, Second Count of Mayalde, and Prince of Squillace (or Esquilache) Francisco de Borja y Aragón, who as Prieto's dedication reflects, had until recently been viceroy of Peru (from 1614 to 1621). See also Ewald M. Vetter, Die Kupferstiche zur Psalmodia Eucharistica des Melchior Prieto von 1622 (Munster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1972), esp. 5-15. Many thanks to Felipe Pereda for this bibliographic reference. 39 Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, “Ribera and Spain: His Patrons in Italy and Spain; His Influence on Spanish Artists,” in New York 1992, 35-50, p. 37. Transactions between the Princess and Ribera are documented for 1622, 1623, and 1626, in Gabriele Finaldi, “Documentary Appendix: The Life and Work of Jusepe de Ribera,” New York 1992, 231-56, pp. 239, 241. Forthcoming work on Prieto with regard to this particular aspect of Ribera’s painting and to both works' wider relevance for the Spanish art of the period, is to be anticipated from Alexandra Letvin, to whom I am thankful for her input on this topic, and for referring me to Prieto’s Psalmodia Eucharistica. 40 Ps. 80: 2.

295 figural reading of Jacob's story to the senses' problematic role in discerning the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic sacrament. The crucial point that Isaac's hearing alone does not deceive him is applied more explicitly to the problem of unbelief in the bread and wine's transsubstantiation into Christ's body and blood. The corruption of the senses through disobedience in the garden of Eden is redeemed by the senses' blessed deception in the sacrament of the altar.41

The same interpretation is put forward in less refined prose, in a two-volume moral treatise based entirely around the lives of Isaac and Jacob, and written the same year that Ribera painted his Isaac and Jacob, Fray Diego Niseno’s 1637 El Politico del

Cielo. Divided into two parts, the “heavenly politician” is a verbose meditation on the lives of the patriarchs Isaac and Jacob as sacred mysteries from which a code of conduct, suited to the politics of God’s kingdom, can be extrapolated.42 Niseno’s often meandering text gives uneven and often startling weight to different episodes in the patriarch’s lives

41 This point is summarized by Prieto as follows: “Pues de la misma manera en este Sacramento, como en misterio que es de Fè, solo la Fe del coraçon, y del entendimiento es la que dize verdad, y reconoce a Christo en el altar debaxo de las especies sacramentales de pan y vino, pero los sentidos se engañan, Sensus deficit, que solo juzgan las exterioridades, y lo visible, que es pan y vino, y este engaño, que los sentidos en este Sacramento padecen, le merecieron en el daño que ocasionaron al entendimiento en la primera comida. Y de todo lo dicho concluimos con mucha razon, que a Christo sacramentado le podemos llamar Dios de Iacob, que dissimulandose, como se dissimulò este Patriarca, engaña nuestros sentidos. Pues a este Señor y Dios de Iacob, nos manda David en nuestro Psalmo, Iubilate Deo Iacob, que le festejemos, y hagamos fiesta.” (“Thus in the same manner in this sacrament, as in the mystery that is of faith, only the faith of the heart and of the understanding is that which speaks the truth, and recognizes Christ upon the altar under the sacramental species of bread and wine; but the senses are deceived, Sensus deficit, which judge only that which is exterior and visible, which is bread and wine; and this deception, which the senses suffer in this sacrament, they deserve in the damage that they occasioned to the understanding in the first meal. And of all that we have said we conclude quite rightly, that Christ in the sacrament may truly be called the God of Jacob, who, concealing himself, as this patriarch concealed himself, deceives our senses. Thus to this Lord and God of Jacob does David direct us in our psalm, Iubilate Deo Iacob, rejoice in the God of Jacob, may we celebrate him, and rejoice.”) Prieto, Psalmodia, 478-9. 42 Diego Niseno, El Politico del Cielo. Primera Parte. Hallado en las misteriosas Acciones del Sagrado Patriarca ISAC (Madrid: Pedro Coello, 1637); Diego Niseno, Segunda Parte del Politico del Cielo. Hallado en las misteriosas acciones del sagrado Patriarca Iacob (Barcelona: Sebastian de Cormellas, 1638); the work was translated into Italian as early as 1639: Diego Niseno, trans. Biasio Cialdini, Il Politico del Cielo. Formato sopra le Azioni Misteriose Del Santo Patriarca Isaac (Venice: Cristoforo Tomasini, 1639).

296 (the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, for instance, receives next to no attention, whereas the verse that describes Isaac as “living near a well” in his youth is spun out into several chapters of moral lessons).43 The climax of the work, however, is the episode of the blessing from Genesis 27, which Niseno presents under the separate heading of an “Acto

Sacramental” with four characters in the ninth and last book of Part I (appendix 21). This section of the Politico del Cielo is entirely concerned with the eucharist: its significance, its salvific potency, the dangers of receiving it unworthily, and the state of purity to be attained in preparation for its reception. The blessing of Jacob and its eucharistic significance provide an introduction for this discourse, in which Niseno echoes the interpretations presented in Villegas and, more systematically, in Prieto.

Ascribing primary authorship to Thomas Aquinas, and presenting himself as merely amplifying the thought of the Angelico Doctor, Niseno launches into a caricatural paraphrase of Genesis 27 with a preface that pins its full significance to the hidden eucharistic meaning of the story, for which he claims total consensus among exegetical authorities. Niseno ascribes to each of the story’s protagonists a symbolic identity in a eucharistic metaphor, as one might assign parts in a play: with Isaac and Rebecca as the human body and soul (respectively), and Esau and Jacob as the bread and as the body of

Christ, in turn.44 The physical self’s reliance on the bodily senses corresponds to Isaac’s love of Esau, while Rebecca’s love for Jacob becomes a figure for the soul’s perception through faith of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament.45 The particular moment of

43 Niseno, Politico del Cielo, 1r.-25v., passim. 44 Ibid., 217v. 45 “Representa pues Isac el cuerpo, Rebeca el alma. I con raçon el onbre (dice el Angel Dotor) hace el papel del cuerpo: Quia magis solet esse manifestus, & exterioribus plus intendit. El onbre en la familia es el que fuera de casa acude a todos los negocios i cuidados que se ofrecen, assi el cuerpo vive en esto esterior de sus sentidos. Rebeca representa el alma que es la muger, i con mucha raçon dice santo Tomas, porque de la misma suerte que la muger en la familia bien regida i concertada, en el buen economico gobierno sienpre

297 the narrative that Ribera depicts, Isaac’s declaration that “the hands are the hands of

Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob,” is also the pivot of Niseno’s account, and the only passage of the Genesis text to be given as a direct quotation rather than reported speech. As Villegas and Prieto had done, Niseno highlights the deception of the senses, noting in his turn that Aquinas singles out hearing as the “sense of faith,” and associates the “hands of Esau” with the “accidents of bread and wine” that present themselves to taste, touch, sight, and smell, while only the “voice of Jacob” declares the true substance of Christ’s body.46

Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob replicates, between painting and viewer, one aspect of the rapport that exists between sacrament and communicant, insofar as the true nature of what is being received must be discerned beyond superficial appearances. The

ha de estar en casa, acudiendo de las puertas adentro della a lo necessario de su familia, como dice el Real Profeta: Uxor tua sicut vitis abundans in lataribus domus tuae. La muger ha de ser vid abundante, que nunca desampare el retiro de la casa: assi el alma fiel i Cristiana ha de cuidar de regir i gobernar el onbre interior, traer bien concertada su republica, quietas las potencias i en paz los sentidos. Esau, à quien amaba Isac, esto es el cuerpo (porque comia de sus viandas i guisados) representa en este Acto la sustancia del pan con sus accidentes, color, sabor, i los demas: Esau significat substantiam Panis cum suis accientibus, scilicet calore sapore, & caeteris. I que bien repartidos los papeles, i los amores, i como es natural à cada uno buscar a su semejante! Isac que significa el cuerpo, amaba a Esau que representa el pan, Rebeca que hace el papel del Alma amaba tiernamente a Iacob que representa à Cristo; lo material se va tras lo material, lo espiritual busca lo espiritual: Isaac amabat Esau, & Rebeca diligebat Iacob; que como dice el Espiritu santo: Omne animal diligio sibi simile.” (“Isaac thus represents the body, Rebecca the soul. And rightly does the man (as the Angelic Doctor says) play the part of the body: Quia magis solet esse manifestus, & exterioribus plus intendit. The man in the family is he who, outside of the household, attends to all the matters and cares that offer themselves, thus the body lives in this exterior of its senses. Rebecca represents the soul, which is the woman, and with great reason, says Saint Thomas, for in the same manner in which the woman in the well-ordered and -disposed family, in its good economical government, has always to be in the home, turning her attention within its doors for the necessities of her family, as declares the Royal Prophet: Uxor tua sicut vitis abundans in lataribus domus tuae. The woman is to be an abundant vine, which never abandons the shelter of the home: thus the faithful Christian soul must take care to rule and govern the inner man, to maintain in a well-ordered state its republic, its powers quieted and its senses at peace. Esau, whom Isaac loved, is the body (for he ate his meats and his cooking) and represents in this act the substance of bread with its accidents, color, taste, and the rest: Esau significat substantiam Panis cum suis accidentibus, scilicet calore sapore, & caeteris. And how well distributed are the roles, and the loves, and how natural to each of them to seek out their kind! Isaac who signifies the body, loved Esau who represents the bread, Rebecca who plays the role of the soul tenderly loved Jacob who represents Christ; the material goes after the material, the spiritual seeks the spiritual: Isaac amabat Esau, & Rebeca diligebat Iacob; so that as the Holy Spirit says: Omni animal diligo sibi simile.”) Ibid, 219r.-219v. 46 Niseno, Politico del Cielo, 219v.

298 illusionistic engaños that Ribera achieves, in particular in the rendering of the meal and of the fur-clad arm, become figures for the deception of the eucharistic species. The painting thus becomes a figure in the same way that the story it depicts is a figure.

Because the point of the metaphor is to draw out the invisible miracle that can only be discerned through faith, the painting, like the Eucharist, places on its recipient a burden of discernment, an obligation to understand its imperceptible aspects. In both painting and sacrament, the physical proofs are misleading accidents, concealing the true nature of what they pretend to show. The paradoxical nature of painting itself as a truthful fiction is thus sanctified by association with the holy deception of the Eucharist.47

c) Dissemblance and the prudence of Rebecca

Rebecca’s deception as “heavenly politics”

This concealment of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist is the example par excellence of the positive potential of dissemblance and trickery. The title given to the theatrically presented first chapter of Niseno’s final book in his meditations on the life of

Isaac is “El Engaño mas Dichoso,” the most blessed deception. The paradoxical embedding of the miraculous within the banal exemplifies God’s mysterious approach to salvation, which stands in contrast with the “crippling and costly deceptions” (lastimosos y costosos engaños) of the devil.48 Niseno also applies the opposition of good deception with malicious deception explicitly to Rebecca, whom he praises for her prudence in

47 One instance of the widespread idea of painting as a truthful lie or a lying truth in Spanish art theory is in Juan de Jáuregui, “Diálogo entre la Naturaleza y las dos Artes, Pintura y Escultura, de cuya preminencia se disputa y juzga. Dedicado los práticos y teóricos en estas artes,” in Franciso Calvo Serraller (ed.), La Teoría de la Pintura en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Cátedra, 1981), 151-6. 48 Niseno, Politico del Cielo, 218v.

299 seizing the opportune moment to bring about what had been prophesied about her two sons. Rebecca’s actions, in turn, are justified not only with reference to the symbolic and prophetic aspects of her situation, but also by invoking a contemporary example of legitimate deception:

This deception is so far from being worthy of condemnation, that it should first be applauded, and thus according to law, this word, Dolus, deception, is not always to be taken negatively, for as there are deceptions that one should condemn, so too there are deceptions that one should praise. As is seen in the ruses and stratagems of war. Which, though they are deceitful, the more subtle and effective they are, the more plausible and praiseworthy.49

Niseno here takes for granted Rebecca’s status as a biblical precedent for resorting to lies and stratagems in the face of an extraordinary necessity or higher purpose.

His position on this question comes as no surprise, particularly given that this first volume of the Politico del Cielo was dedicated to a career diplomat, the Bolognese bishop of Senigallia, Lorenzo Campeggi. Having been sent to Madrid in 1632 as one of a triad of extraordinary envoys from pope Urban VIII, Campeggi remained in Spain in his ambassadorial role until his death in 1639.50 Along with the ostentatious contrast that

Niseno draws between earthly standards and motivations and those of his “heavenly politician,” there is a careful deference to the expectations and the professional realities of the actual politician to whom the book is dedicated. The premise of the dedication,

49 "Aquel engaño tan ageno està de condenarse, que antes debe aplaudirse, i assi dice la lei del derecho, que esta palabra Dolus, engaño, no sienpre se ha de tomar en mala parte, porque como ai engaños que se condenan, tanbien ai engaños que se alaban. Como se ve en los ardides i estratagemas de guerra. Que aunque son engaños, cuanto mas sutiles i utiles son mas plausibles i loables." Niseno, Politico del Cielo, 218r. 50 Born in Bologna in 1574, Campeggi rose through the clerical and diplomatic ranks under Urban VIII. His career at the Spanish court would seem to have been a frustrating one, spent largely reiterating the Pope's assertions of neutrality with regard to France, and being roundly out-maneuvered by the Count-Duke of Olivares; Gaspare De Caro, “Campeggi, Lorenzo (1574-1639),” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (online version: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/lorenzo-campeggi_res-92ff59de-87e9-11dc-8e9d- 0016357eee51_(Dizionario-Biografico)/, accessed July 7th, 2015); David García Cueto, Seicento Boloñés y Siglo de Oro Español: el Arte, la Época, los Protagonistas (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2006), 141-47.

300 presenting Campeggi as the embodiment of the divine politics described, is that the virtues found in and extrapolated from the life of Isaac - holding temporal authority as a patriarch, and exercising it to the furtherance of divine purpose - are reflected in the papal nunzio’s work. Since prudent recourse to subterfuge was the most basic professional exigency for any courtier or diplomat, the en passant endorsement of Rebecca’s prudent actions, along with the more belabored contrast beeween beneficial and malicious forms of engaño, invite obvious and flattering comparisons with Campeggi’s role at the court of

Philip IV.

Niseno’s text calls attention to another aspect of Ribera’s painting that has escaped attention thus far: the particular resonance of Genesis 27 for an audience whose professional life is carried out in courtly and diplomatic settings. The discernment of

Isaac and the prudence of Rebecca are both ways of approaching social interchanges and negotiating the relationship of outer appearance to inner intent. As has been argued for the other works of art under consideration, Ribera’s approach to Isaac blessing Jacob posits an interchange with an ideal viewer, for whom the painting provides a series of signposts for discussion and evaluation. The direct and challenging eye contact of

Rebecca is the plainest possible cue for this interchange to begin, and it is Rebecca whom

Ribera has imagined in the most dynamic part of the conversation with his presumptive audience.

Sins of the Fathers? Coping with deceit in the lives of the Patriarchs

The second chapter of Villegas’s “Life of the Patriarch Isaac” addresses the unspoken question of the morality of the deeds described. From Esau’s sale of his

301 birthright to Jacob in exchange for a bowl of lentils to Jacob and Rebecca’s conspiracy to deceive Isaac and disenfranchise Esau, none of the protagonists, on the face of it, conducts themselves in an altogether exemplary manner. Villegas’ text shows that this was true in Ribera’s time also, as the moral implications of the episodes that he recounts are a recurring theme throughout the text. Villegas draws on the authority of the Church

Fathers to address the semblance of sin,51 while also emphasizing the ultimate exemplarity of the lives of Isaac and Jacob in particular, based on their invocation (along with Abraham) within the New Testament as figures for the covenant whose salvation is secure.52

This inarticulate but persistent concern to clarify the morality of the actions described also underlies Villegas’ insistence on the figural reading of the Life of Isaac.53

In chapter two, much of the action discussed (covering Genesis 25-28) hinges on

51 For instance with reference to the potential accusation of simony that could attach to Jacob over the purchase of Esau's birthright for lentils; Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 119r. 52 Ibid., 120r. Villegas cites Matthew 8:11, in which Jesus declares, “And I say to you that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” 53 A vicious application of this interpretive strategy emerges in the third chapter, in which Villegas, under the auspices of applying the figural anticipation of Christ’s sacrifice in Isaac’s, gives vent to a lengthy antisemitic excursus. At the center of this polemic are a series of violent stories that fit an all too familiar pattern of antisemitism, denouncing wicked “Judaizers” who are described as perpetually reenacting the crucifixion and rejection of Christ. The first and most detailed of these very grisly tales is set in 1491 Toledo, and recounts the theft and desecration of a consecrated host and the graphic and ritualized murder of a small boy in an effort to devise through witchcraft a deadly curse upon all Christians. Leaving aside the politics of the passage, the particular point that gives the hate-incitement some anchor to the two chapters that precede it is the perception that Villegas attributes to the Jews of Christ as a “deceiver” and “enchanter.” (“Y assi quando le acostavan dezian: traydor, engañador, y predicador de mentiras ... y dezianle ... a vozes, crucifica a este encantador que se dize nuestro Rey ...” Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 120v.-121r.) Villegas’ main purpose in putting these reproaches in the mouths of the Jews is undoubtedtly to elicit outrage at their blasphemies, and not to suggest the need for a defense against the idea that Christ would be capable of deception. Yet the specific choice to let the “evil” characters in his story denounce deception can perhaps also be seen as an extreme application of a defense of the deceptions recounted in the passage, and a subtle way of making any readers who might not understand the exegetical principles that mitigate the deceptions in the life of Isaac back away from the reproach uttered by the designated baddies of chapter 3.

302 deception, which is the main theme treated in the commentary that justifies the actions.54

A first hint as to the writer’s position on the issue of dissimulation is in the lack of any explanatory comments or justification around Isaac’s false assertion to the Palestinian

King Abimelech that Rebecca was his sister, beyond the justifications given in the biblical text itself.55 The same strategy had been pursued twice by Isaac’s father

Abraham, prompted by the same fear that he would be killed on account of his wife’s beauty.56 When Villegas relates the first of these in his life of Abraham, he makes a particular note of the mitigating factors to Abraham’s misrepresentation:

The scripture then recounts that famine came to that land in which Abraham dwelt, and to escape from it it behooved him to go to Egypt; he spoke with Sara his wife, and aware of her beauty, and so that the Egyptians might not kill him on her account, [he] told her to say that she was his sister, that with this title for her sake they might do him good. It was customary among the Hebrews for relatives to call one another siblings, and for this reason, Sara being Abraham's niece, she did not lie in calling him brother, and thus Abraham did not sin, as St. Thomas says, in giving this counsel to Sara: earlier he teaches us that the truth may at times be hidden without fault.57

54 The main exception is the possible reading of Jacob’s sale of his birthright as simony; op. cit. note 51. 55 Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 119v. The passage from Genesis reads, “So Isaac abode in Gerara. And when he was asked by the men of that place, concerning his wife, he answered: She is my sister; for he was afraid to confess that she was his wife, thinking lest perhaps they would kill him because of her beauty. And when very many days were passed, and he abode there, Abimelech king of the Palestines looking out through a window, saw him playing with Rebecca his wife. And calling for him, he said: It is evident she is thy wife: why didst thou feign her to be thy sister? He answered: I feared lest I should die for her sake. And Abimelech said: Why hast thou deceived us? Some man of the people might have lain with thy wife, and thou hadst brought upon us a great sin. And he commanded all the people, saying: He that shall touch this man's wife, shall surely be put to death.” Gen. 26: 6-11. 56 Gen. 12: 10-20; Gen. 20: 1-14. 57 “Cuenta luego la escriptura que vino hambre en aquella tierra donde Abraham estava, y para librarse della le convino yr a Egypto, hablo con Sarra [sic] su muger, y dixole, que atento a que era hermosa, y los Egypcios por ocasion suya no le matassen, que dixesse ser su hermana, y con este titulo por su causa le harian bien. Costumbre era entre los Hebreos llamarse hermanos los parientes, y por esto siendo Sarra Sobrina de Abraham no mentia llamandole hermano, y assi no pecò Abraham como dize S. Thomas, en dar este consejo a Sarra: antes nos enseña que la verdad sin culpa puede algunas vezes encubrirse.” Villegas, Flos Sanctorum 105r. Earlier in the life of Abraham, Villegas also accounted for the lien de parenté between Abraham and Sara, with the explanation that such unions were permitted in those days (“... y [Sara] casò con Abraham su tio: porque a la sazon no era prohibido en los casamientos semejante grado de parentesco.” ("And [Sara] married Abraham her uncle: for in that period it was not forbidden for people to marry who bore such a degree of family relationship."). Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 104r.

303 Villegas here embraces the idea that certain situations legitimize the use of dissimulation, such as the perceived threat to Abraham’s life. Abraham is excused from culpability on two counts: first, because what he tells Pharaoh (that Sarah is his sister) is not strictly inaccurate in the parlance of the time; secondly, because the dissimulation of the truth

(that Sarah is his wife) is deemed a life and death necessity. Thus, when in the life of

Isaac a similar situation arises with King Abimelech, the issue of Isaac’s dissimulation is not even addressed as a potential misdemeanor, and as was the case in Abraham’s encounter with Abimelech, the narrator takes more interest in underscoring the blameless conduct of the foreign king than in addressing the patriarch’s misrepresentation of his spouse.58

When in Villegas’s “Life of Isaac” we arrive at the incident of the blessing, the issue of dissimulation receives a great deal more attention. As in the case of Abraham’s dissimulation, Villegas strategically invokes patristic authorities to emphasize and preserve the exemplarity of the Biblical patriarchs, and exonerates them of lying on several grounds. In addition to the figural and eucharistic readings of the passage just described, Villegas goes on to address the moral implications of Jacob and Rebecca’s actions:

Saint Augustine excuses Jacob from culpability in this deed, for the same reason as he excused him when he bought the primogeniture, that is for it having been ordained by God, and by his particular inspiration: which the blessed Saint Jerome tells us that Rebecca also received, for if she had not she would have sinned in bringing about the damage done to Esau in taking from him the blessing.59

58 The second occasion on which Abraham in exile presents Sarah as his sibling is narrated in Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 107r. 59 “S. Augustin escusa de culpa a Iacob en este hecho, por lo mismo que le escusò quando comprò la primogenitura, esto es por ser ordenado por Dios, y particular inspiracion suya: la qual dize el bienaventurado S. Hieronymo que tuvo Rebeca, por que si no la tuviera peccara en ser medio de que se le hiziesse a Esau agravio de hurtarle la bendicion.” Ibid., 119v.-120r.

304 Where on the face of it, Rebecca and Jacob would both be judged guilty of wrongdoing, both in lying and in bringing about harm to Esau, they are excused on the grounds of the

“particular inspiration” on the basis of which they bring about God’s prophetically revealed will.

In support of this exoneration, Villegas cites Augustine’s chapter on Genesis 27 in the City of God (documentary appendix 22).60 Augustine begins by presenting the primogeniture as rightfully and legally due to Jacob, following Esau’s foolish sale of his birthright through his undue vulnerability to fleshly desires with regard to food.61

Interpreting the description of Jacob as one who “lives in tents” as indicative of honest dealings, he tackles the problem of the apparent dishonesty of this honest man: “... in the receiving of that blessing, what is the guile of the man without guile? What is the guile of the simple, what the fiction of the man who does not lie, but a profound mystery of the truth?”62 The truth itself is mysterious, and the very mystery of the actions described is also invoked by Villegas as the first clue to their interpretation. Augustine goes on to translate Isaac’s blessing of Jacob point by point into a prophetic synopsis of God’s blessings to and through Christ. The ultimate basis for evaluation of the deeds recounted in Genesis 27 is the accomplishment of divine purpose, confirmed by Isaac’s refusal to curse Jacob or to rescind his blessing: “Who would not rather have expected the curse of an angry man here, if these things had been done in an earthly manner, and not by

60 Augustine, City of God, book XVI, ch. 37, 153-5. The text was also readily available in Spanish translation, which in this passage renders “guile” as engaño: “qual es el engaño que hizo en tomar esta bendicion este hombre sin engaño? Que engaño, ò cautela ay en este senzillo, que ficcion en este que no miente, sino un misterio profundo de la misma verdad?” Saint Augustine, trans. Antonio de Roys y Roças, La Ciudad de Dios del Glorioso Doctor de la Iglesia S. Agustin, Obispo Hiponense, en veynte y dos libros (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1614), 493. 61 Augustine, City of God, book XVI, ch. 37, 153. 62 Ibid., 154.

305 inspiration from above?”63 Isaac confirms and acknowledges a kind of divine raison d’état at work in the situation, and allows himself to be overruled, confirming and justifying the outcome of Jacob’s deceit.

Figures, not lies

In addition to Augustine, Villegas refers to Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on

Genesis. The latter reference seems somewhat misplaced, insofar as the Hebrew

Questions on Genesis do not address the point under discussion with regard to Genesis

27.64 The choice of these two preeminent Latin church fathers to reinforce each other is suggestive nonetheless, given their renowned disagreement on the very subject addressed, that is, on whether there are situations in which it is acceptable to lie.65 On this issue,

Genesis 27 was a locus classicus, an instance from scripture in which figures who are unequivocally held up as exemplary (as Villegas is careful to underscore by citing

Matthew 8:1166) engage in what might on the face of it be called anything from

63 Ibid., 155. 64Saint Jerome, trans. C. T. R. Hayward, Saint Jerome's Hebrew Questions on Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 63. 65 The debate focused specifically on the interpretation of Galatians 2: 11-14, in which Paul recounts his confrontation with Peter over public behavior towards Jews and Gentiles: “But when Cephas was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. For before that some came from James, he did not eat with the Gentiles : but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them who were of the circumcision. And to his dissimulation the rest of the Jews consented, so that Barnabas also was led by them into that dissimulation. But when I saw that they walked not uprightly unto the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all: if thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, and not as the Jews do, how dost thou compel the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?” Jerome had read the quarrel itself as a feint with the laudable purpose of keeping the peace among Christians of two ethnic communities, while Augustine vehemently resisted the idea that any part of scripture condones lying. Augustine’s position in the matter is included in chapter 5 of his treatise De Mendacio, Jerome’s in his Epistulae, 112, 9-11; the debate is summarized, with further bibliography, in Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying. Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Eary Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 16-20. Villegas's invocation of Augustine rather than Jerome to defend Rebecca and Jacob in this situation is a canny mode in which to defend dissimulation, on the authority of its most rigorous opponent. 66 Op. cit. note 52.

306 misleading omissions or concealments of the truth to outright lies.67 Augustine refers to

Genesis 27 in both of his treatises on the subject, On Lying and Against Lying, the latter of which Villegas also cites.68 The figural reading of the passage, on which Villegas insists so pointedly, is for Augustine the key basis on which the protagonists of Genesis

27 should be exonerated from wrongdoing, as the Latin Father’s treatise on lying spells out (appendix 23).69

When Ribera articulates in visual form the eucharistic significance of Jacob’s deception, or when he manifests the figural and hidden identity between Jacob and Esau through their clothing, he is also making a case for a non-literal approach to the figure’s actions. However commonplace the figural reading of Old Testament episodes was, in this instance (as in others such as Lot’s seduction by his daughters) the exegetical angle alleviates the apparent immorality of the actions depicted.70 The instigator, both in the text of Genesis and in Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob, is Rebecca: when Jacob fears that his father will curse him if he discovers the subterfuge, it is Rebecca who takes on the full responsibility for the scheme (“Upon me be this curse”). Within Ribera’s painting, while

Esau’s approach from the background in the far left provides suspense, pulling the scene back like a slingshot into a taut expectation of release, it falls to Rebecca to embody forward motion and narrative momentum, as her physical push of Jacob towards Isaac encapsulates her larger agency in setting the rest of the action in motion.

67 Ibid., 20-25. 68 Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 120r. 69 Saint Augustine, Lying, Chapter 5, trans. Harold B. Jaffee, in Roy J. Deferrari (ed.), Saint Augustine. Treatises on Various Subjects (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), 60-66. 70 In his life of Lot, Villegas describes that patriarch's drunkenness and seduction by his two daughters in turn, following their flight from the destruction of Sodom, and draws on patristic sources that mainly alleviate their moral shortcomings. Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 115r.-115v.

307 Rebecca makes piercing eye contact with the viewer, and while her right hand urges Jacob forward, her left hand indicates him, as though justifying the unfolding event by reiterating her son’s divine election with a pointing index finger (detail figure 4.16).71

As direct as it is, Rebecca’s gaze is also cryptic, ambiguous. One can see it as a plea for solidarity and cooperation, but one can just as easily see it as defiant, the unapologetic seal on a momentous decision. The overwhelmingly positive interpretations of Rebecca’s plan to gain the blessing for Jacob defend her actions as prudent. Rebecca embodies many aspects of the debate about the legitimate use of dissimulation: the lines along which the discussion was drawn often equate prudence with recourse to subterfuge.72 For instance, in one of the many moral treatises on the practice of Christian virtue published in Spain, the Jesuit Pedro Sanchez’s Libro del Reyno de Dios, y del camino por do se alcança, the chapter on prudence contrasts biblical examples of “false prudence” (such as

David’s arrangements to send his lover Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to the front lines) with the “admirable prudence” exercised by Rebecca, or by the Hebrew midwives who deceive Pharaoh in Exodus 1: 19-20 (appendix 24).73 In addition to the prominent inclusion of Rebecca, the examples of positive prudence feature Jacob twice - first, in connection with the flocks of Laban, and again regarding his appeasement of Esau with gifts in Genesis 32: 3-21.

71 Finaldi also observes that Rebecca engages our complicity in her actions through this eye contact: “La astuta Rebeca nos hace cómplices del engaño mirándonos rectamente, a la vez que empuja a su hijo a recibir la inestimable bendición paterna.” (“The astute Rebecca makes us accomplices of the deception, gazing direclty at us, while at the same time she pushes her son to receive the inestimable paternal blessing.”) Finaldi, “Jacob,” 186. 72 Jon Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: Unviersity of California Press, 2009), 8-10, 16-18; Zagorin, Ways of Lying, 25-27 et passim. 73 Pedro Sanchez, Libro del Reyno de Dios, y del Camino por Do se alcança. Confirmado con exemplos y sentencias de Santos (Barcelona: Juan Simon, 1605), 264r.

308 From Isaac’s proper right hand at the center of the painting, Ribera lets the scene unfold outward in a series of carefully orchestrated symmetries and parallelisms.

Beginning with the hands of Rebecca and Isaac, Ribera orchestrates the components of the image into meaningful counterparts like chords, such as the fore and aft inward angles of Esau’s staff and of the knife in the foreground, which bracket the diagonal along which the figures are arranged. The symmetry between Isaac and Rebecca exacerbates the many contrasts between them: Isaac’s blindness and Rebecca’s bright, sharp gaze mutually reinforce one another, as do the differing qualities and purposes of their gestures as they each put their right hand on Jacob. The contrasted pairings running through the entire situation, in which each parent favors a different son and the fraternal twins are opposites in appearance and personality, inform and infuse the structure of Ribera’s painting. While blind Isaac’s active evaluation of Jacob defines the character of the scene (and clarifies its eucharistic significance), it is Rebecca’s actions that are subject to evaluation from outside.

Isaac and Rebecca are thematically as well as visually complementary, and approach the issue of Jacob’s dissimulation, literally and figuratively, from two different standpoints and directions. Rebecca exemplifies the prudence that takes legitimate recourse in dissimulation, whose purposes are so secure through special revelation and divine appointment that they defy literal reading and justify deceitful means. Isaac enacts an exemplary response to dissimulation, striving to discern what value to ascribe even to the physical proof. Both protagonists drive home the point that deception is to be understood positively, due to the counterintuitive, invisible and mystical truth underlying it. Both figures likewise prompt our own interpretive actions as we approach the painting:

309 like Isaac, we are asked to probe and to discern what is presented to us, to discover the hidden significance under the physical appearances and “accidents of bread and wine.”

Rebecca, meanwhile, confronts us with the younger son who, according to God’s prophecy, will be chosen over his elder brother; her gaze forces us to take sides with or against her, and to acknowledge the necessities and difficulties of her decision, as she secures the prophesied outcome on her own responsibility.

d) Jacob’s blessed deceptions

Discerning patrons, creative pairings: Jacob and Peter

Within the same decade, Ribera depicted scenes from the life of Jacob on at least three other occasions. His earliest engagement with the patriarch, the 1632 Jacob with the

Flocks of Laban (figure 4.17), is commonly held to correspond to the “Giacob con diverse pecore” listed among the paintings of the Duke of Medina de las Torres, along with a Liberation of Saint Peter (figure 4.18), both of which are currently in the Royal

Monastery of San Lorenzo in El Escorial.74 During the years of Medina de las Torres’ tenure as Viceroy of Naples, and close on the heels of Isaac Blessing Jacob, Ribera painted another version of Jacob with the Flocks of Laban, of which a substantial autograph fragment survives in the London National Gallery of Art (figure 4.19) and an early copy of the entire composition in the Museo Cerralbo, Madrid (figure 4.20). This circa 1638 Jacob was soon followed by The Dream of Jacob (figure 4.21), currently in the Museo Nacional del Prado, which was also paired with a Liberation of Saint Peter

74 See nos. 73 & 77, appendix: Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Consejos Suprimidos, leg. 51182/1/5, in Fernando Bouza, “De Rafael a Ribera y de Nápoles a Madrid: nuevos inventarios de la colleción Medina de las Torres Stigliano (1641-1656),” in Boletín del Museo del Prado 27, no. 45 (2009): 44-71, p. 64.

310 (figure 4.22), both painted in 1639.75 This was by no means a usual pairing of subjects: what I will argue in this section is that the pairing itself, which was the subject of emulation within the collecting practices of high functionaries in Philip IV’s court, was key to the interpretation of both subjects, and that Ribera marshalled the expectation of comparison to draw out certain aspects of both biblical accounts.

Within the Genesis narrative, the dream of Jacob occurs almost immediately after the episode of the blessing. Esau plots to kill his brother once Isaac dies, and Rebecca warns Jacob to flee, and sends him to her brother Laban, a departure endorsed also by

Isaac.76 Most of Genesis 28 describes the prophetic dream that Jacob receives as he sleeps in the wilderness, using a stone for a pillow, and the covenant that he subsequently

75 Madrid 1992, cat. nos. 60, 95 & 96, pp. 272-3, 338-41; Finaldi, “Jacob,” 183, 188-90. 76 “Esau therefore always hated Jacob for the blessing wherewith his father had blessed him: and he said in his heart: The days will come of the mourning of my father, and I will kill my brother Jacob. These things were told to Rebecca: and she sent and called Jacob her son, and said to him: Behold Esau thy brother threateneth to kill thee. Now therefore, my son, hear my voice: arise and flee to Laban my brother to Haran: And thou shalt dwell with him a few days, till the wrath of thy brother be assuaged, and his indignation cease, and he forget the things thou has done to him: afterwards I will send, and bring thee hence from hither. Why shall I be deprived of both my sons in one day?” Gen. 27: 41-45. One can also note here a further manifestation of Rebecca’s prudence, not only in sending Jacob away, but in bringing about his departure in such a way as to conceal its real purpose: the very end of Genesis 27 is Rebecca’s declaration to Isaac that she cannot bear the thought of Jacob marrying a Canaanite woman, and the start of Genesis 28 sees Isaac sending Jacob to his brother-in-law in search of a wife. This aspect of Rebecca's prudence does not escape Niseno (Politico del Cielo, 217r.). That this aspect of the story was also read in light of Spanish cultural politics is again plain from Niseno’s paraphrase in Part II of El Politico del Cielo, which is strongly inflected with contemporary notions of primogeniture as a legal and social status, and of limpieza de sangre: “[Iacob] llegò a Mesopotamia de Siria en casa de su tio Laban hermano de Rebeca su madre, para huir de la colerica ira de su mal enojado hermano Esau, a causa de haverle hurtado la bendicion, inmunidades, i privilegios, que a ella se consiguen; i juntamente para tomar estado, uniendose con el sagrado laço del matrimonio con una de las hijas de sui tio, por no mezclar la noble i catolica sangre suya con la infame i perfida de la idolatra Cananea.” (“[Jacob] arrived in Mesopotamia in Syria at the house of his uncle Laban, brother of Rebecca his mother, so as to flee from the choleric wrath of his enraged brother Esau, for having taken from him the blessing, immunities, and privileges that pertained thereto; and also in order to contract marriage, uniting himself in the sacred bond of matrimony with one of the daughters of his uncle, so as not to mix his noble and catholic blood with the infamous and perfidious [blood] of the Caananite idolaters.”) Diego Niseno, Segunda parte del Politico del Cielo hallado en las misteriosas acciones del sagrado Patriarca Iacob (Barcelona: Sebastian de Cormellas Mercader, 1638), 1r.-1v. Rebecca’s prudence in this matter is praised explicitly; ibid., 9r.-9v.

311 makes with the God of his forebears.77 The flocks of Laban come into a much later moment in Jacob’s story (Gen. 30: 25-43), when after having worked for his uncle for fourteen years, Jacob makes an agreement to take as severance pay any speckled animals from among the flocks, which Jacob then contrives to breed in great numbers, so that he leaves with great wealth of his own (appendix 25).78 Ribera’s innovative approaches to these subjects represent further developments in the same ambitious intellectual and artistic project that we have seen him set forth in Isaac Blessing Jacob. The potential for painting in particular to assert the positive capacities of deception, both through the virtue of prudence and as a eucharistic figure, culminates in Ribera’s Dream of Jacob, which, like his depictions of Jacob with the Flocks of Laban, bears a rich set of thematic ties to

Isaac Blessing Jacob beyond their common protagonist.

The Escorial Jacob with the Flocks of Laban and Isaac Blessing Jacob may also have shared an owner, although the evidence is inconclusive. While both paintings are

77 “But Jacob being departed from Bersabee, went on to Haran. And when he was come to a certain place, and would rest in it after sunset, he took of the stones that lay there, and putting under his head, slept in the same place. And he saw in his sleep a ladder standing upon the earth, and the top thereof touching heaven: the angels also of God ascending and descending by it; And the Lord leaning upon the ladder, saying to him: I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac; the land, wherein thou sleepest, I will give to thee and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth: thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and IN THEE and thy seed all the tribes of the earth SHALL BE BLESSED. And I will be thy keeper whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back to this land: neither will I leave thee, till I shall have accomplished all that I have said. And when Jacob awaked out of sleep, he said: Indeed the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. And trembling he said: How terrible is this place! this is no other but the house of God, and the gate of heaven. And Jacob, arising in the morning, took the stone, which he had laid under his head, and set it up for a title, pouring oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of the city Bethel, which before was called Luza. And he made a vow, saying: if God shall be with me, and shall keep me in the way by which I walk, and shall give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, and I shall return prosperously to my father’s house: the Lord shall be my God: And this stone, which I have set up for a title, shall be called the house of God: and of all things that thou shalt give to me, I will offer tithes to thee.” Gen. 28: 10-21. 78 Having fallen in love with Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, Jacob agrees with Laban to work for seven years for her hand, at which point Laban deceives his nephew and weds him to his older daughter Leah. Jacob agrees to work for another seven years, and is given Rachel as a second wife, and eventually also marries the respective handmaids of the two sisters, and has children by all four wives. See Gen. 29:6- 30:23.

312 likely to have come to the Royal collections from that of the Duke of Medina de las

Torres, there is no proof as to the former painting’s provenance prior to 1681, when it appears in Fray Francisco de los Santos’s Descripcion of the Royal Monastery of San

Lorenzo de El Escorial, including both Ribera’s Liberation of Saint Peter and his Jacob with the Flocks of Laban among the paintings in the Eastern upper gallery.79 Medina de las Torres is known to have owned both a “Jacob with various sheep” and a liberation of

Peter by Ribera, as noted earlier.80 While the inventory does not stipulate that the paintings are pendants, the entries do suggest the sort of pairing evident in the Museo del

Prado’s 1639 Dream of Jacob and Liberation of Saint Peter.81 These two paintings were subsequently assigned a provenance from the collection of Philip IV's secretary Don

Jerónimo de la Torre.82 While these two paintings in the Prado register visually and thematically as clear pendants, the Jacob with the Flocks of Laban and the Liberation of

St. Peter in the Escorial are mismatched in several ways. The condition, quality of execution, and probable dates of the two Escorial paintings are all at variance, and it is implausible to think of them as having been executed within less than five years of each other, let alone for the same commission.83 Regardless of the exact provenance of the

79 Francisco de los Santos, Descripcion del Real Monasterio de S. Lorenzo del Escorial, unica maravilla del mundo, fabrica del Prudentissimo Rey Filipo Segundo coronada por el Catholico Rey Filipo Quarto el Grande, con la Magestuosa obra del Pantheon, y translacion de los Cuerpos Reales, reedificada por nuestro Rey, y Señor Carlos II despues del incendio (Madrid: Bernardo de Villa Diego, 1681), 82. Cited in Bonaventura Bassegoda, El Escorial como museo. La decoración pictórica mueble en el monasterio de El Escorial desde Diego Velázquez hasta Frédéric Quillet (1809) (Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2002), cat. nos. PG2, PG3, pp. 262-3. 80 Bouza, “Rafael a Ribera,” 48-49, 64. 81 Marcus Burke had concluded as much in his study of the Medina de las Torres collection, from which he supposed the Prado pendants to proceed: “Paintings by Ribera in the Collection of the Duque de Medina de las Torres,” Burlington Magazine 131, no. 1031 (1989): 132-6. 82 For further bibliography, see Madrid 1992, 338. Further light is shed on Jerónimo de la Torre’s activities as a collector in the recent study by Juan María Cruz Yábar, “El Rembrandt del Museo del Prado y su relación con don Jerónimo de la Torre,” in Boletín del Museo del Prado 30, no. 48 (2012): 62-71. 83 The dire state of conservation of the Liberation of Saint Peter leaves a degree of uncertainty to the comparison, and it would be a welcome surprise if future conservation treatment on the painting were to

313 four paintings under investigation, we know that two pairs of paintings by Ribera (and/or his workshop) featuring Jacob and the liberation of Peter were in the collections of

Medina de las Torres and Don Jerónimo de la Torre, and subsequently entered the royal collections. All four paintings, like Isaac Blessing Jacob, certainly were acquired, if not verifiably commissioned, by high functionaries in the court of Philip IV, before entering the Royal collections. Regardless of his expectations from his paintings' audience, and regardless of that audience's actual understanding of the paintings, Ribera contrives to include in his work a level of subtlety that would take a certain amount of refinement to recognize. This level of sophistication, to whoever picked up on it, would instantly redound credit on the paintings' owners. The more the paintings invoked themes of prudence and perspicacity, the more they held the potential to function as advertisements for the prudence and perspicacity of whoever happened to have bought them.

The two pendants now in the Museo del Prado both go out of their way to reward close scrutiny. The most remarkable feature of the Dream of Jacob is the barely-visible ladder of angels delicately painted into the cloud above Jacob’s head (detail figure 4.23), while the rose and gold raiment and forward-leaning posture of the angel in the

Liberation of Peter would have immediately called to mind the archangel Raphael in the eponymous painter’s Madonna of the Fish (figure 4.24) which Medina de las Torres had removed the previous year from the Neapolitan church of San Domenico Maggiore.84

reveal a higher degree of quality than can be discovered there now. In its current state, however, while Jacob with the Flocks of Laban is a magisterial autograph work from 1632, I would estimate that the Liberation of Saint Peter is at best an inferior workshop product from much later in the decade, and quite probably from the 1640s. Oddly, this painting is not mentioned anywhere in Nicola Spinosa’s catalogue raisonné. My most sincere thanks go to Almudena Pérez de Tudela at the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, for generously enabling me to examine The Liberation of Saint Peter firsthand. 84 Muñoz Gonzáles, Mercado, 199. The painting was in Spain as of 1644, and was in El Escorial as of the following year; Bassegoda, El Escorial como museo, cat. no. AM2, p. 140-1.

314 Beyond these superficial appeals to a broad form of connoisseurship, the tone set by

Isaac Blessing Jacob for sustained investigation and observation is carried on in Ribera’s other depictions of Jacob.

If the provenances currently attributed to these four paintings of Jacob and Peter are correct, might one surmise that when Medina de las Torres acquired the separately painted Jacob and the Flocks of Laban and Liberation of Saint Peter, he (or his agent) was aware of the Prado pendants? And what might this pairing tell us about the paintings themselves? The visual and thematic unity between Ribera’s 1639 Dream of Jacob and

Liberation of Saint Peter (figures 4.21 & 4.22) has been noted and described as a play of complements between day and night, sleep and waking, articulated through the inverted poses of the two protagonists and the light/dark contrast between the backgrounds.85 The salient contrast, however, is between two different visionary encounters involving angels, inverted so that the vision that comes to Jacob in a dream is set by Ribera in daytime, while the waking, bodily encounter of Peter with the angel who ushers him out of prison is a night scene. This reversal is compounded by the respective Biblical texts’ specifications as to the nature of each encounter. Genesis 28 stipulates that the ladder of angels is what Jacob “saw in his sleep;” a full paraphrase of the passage in Antonio de

Roys y Roças’s translation of Augustine’s City of God gives a specific sequence of sleeping, dreaming, and seeing: Jacob “slept in that place, and dreamt: and saw a stairway

...”86 Villegas’s Flos Sanctorum, in which the life of Jacob of course follows the life of

Isaac, says that Jacob “... went to sleep. While asleep, had a revelation or marvelous

85 Finaldi, “Jacob,” 183-4. 86 “dormió en aquel lugar, y soñó: y vió una escalera ...” Augustine, Ciudad de Dios, 495.

315 dream ...”87 Whereas Jacob’s vision first required him to go to sleep, Peter’s encounter required him to wake up, and Acts 12 specifies that Peter mistakenly thought himself to be experiencing a vision, and failed at first to recognize the reality of his encounter with the angel.88

The contrast between the character of Jacob and Peter’s experiences is further accentuated in visual terms. The Dream of Jacob, which Finaldi has described as “one of the most convincing depictions of slumber in the history of western painting,” makes physically manifest to its viewers that which the scene’s protagonist experiences as a dream, an inner vision.89 Jacob’s closed eyes and unconscious state counterbalance the heightened visual awareness that is required of the viewer to see the angels, which by virtue of the daylight setting and subtle presentation, appear far more physically manifest than the more palpably supernatural angels that populate the pictorial tradition. Whereas

Jacob has a vision in his sleep, the wakeful and wide-eyed Saint Peter fails to see, despite his immensely dilated pupils. He gropes in the dark and empty space, and stares past the angel, who seems to float in from the right, ushered in on a small chariot of cloud without touching the ground. While Peter’s angel appears far more like a supernatural apparition than do the shimmering cloud-forms of Jacob’s dream, the angel that Peter misconstrues as a dream is quite concretely present. The angel frees him physically, acting on Peter’s

87 “... se durmió. Dormido, tuvo una revelacion o sueño maravilloso ...” Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 123r. 88 “Peter therefore was kept in prison. But prayer was made without ceasing by the church unto God for him. And when Herod would have brought him forth, the same night Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains: and the keepers before the door kept the prison. And behold an angel of the Lord stood by him: and a light shined in the room: and he striking Peter on the side, raised him up, saying: Arise quickly. And the chains fell off from his hands. And the angel said to him: Gird thyself, and put on thy sandals. And he did so. And he said to him: Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me. And going out, he followed him, and he knew not that it was true which was done by the angel: but thought he saw a vision.” Acts 12: 5-9. 89 “... una de las representaciones más convincentes de un durmiente que hay en la historia de la pintura occidental.” Finaldi, “Jacob,” 184.

316 bodliy surroundings, causing the chains to fall from his wrists, and instructing Peter to put on his shoes and clothes, and to hurry out of the prison.

Because of this contrasted pairing, the two paintings together negate any assumption that there is a straightforward relationship between looking and seeing. The paradoxical nature of each experience (sleeping Jacob sees what isn’t “really” there, wakeful Peter does not see what is) becomes the decisive component in the viewer’s relationship with the two paintings. Ribera draws out and caters to an interest in close looking that is also a way of assessing what it means to look, and to see, in the context of a certain type of experience. The exhortation to see with more-than-physical sight, and to recognize not only the form of the things beheld but the nature of the perception that reveals them, is itself a theme of both biblical episodes. This is most explicit in Villegas’s comments on Jacob’s dream:

The visible sun had set, and the invisible sun, which is God, appeared to him, the true sun of justice. The rays of the sun that illuminate the body had departed for the other hemisphere, and the rays of the sun that illuminates the soul had come. The light moved from the senses to the understanding. Exterior clarity turned into interior. The created sun disappeared, and the sun that created it came forth: the divine sun, from whose splendor the clarity of the material sun proceeds as from its source.90

The luminous daylight in which Ribera has set the scene has been insistently associated with a changing fashion in Neapolitan painting from a tenebrist approach derived from

Caravaggism to a neo-Venetian and Bolognese-inspired high baroque.91 This interpretation, while not necessarily inaccurate, discounts the larger thematic contrasts

90 “Aviase puesto el sol visible, y apareciole el sol invisible, que es Dios, sol verdadero de justicia. Aviansele ydo al otro hemispherio los rayos del sol que alumbran el cuerpo, y vido los rayos del sol que alumbran el alma. Mudosele la lumbre de los sentidos al entendimiento. Trocosele la claridad exterior por la interior. Desapareciole el sol criado, y vido el sol que lo criava: vido el sol divino, de cuyo resplandor procede como de fuente la claridad del sol material.” Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 123r.-123v. 91 Madrid 1992, 338; Finaldi, “Jacob,” 184-5; Spinosa, Obras Maestras, 415.

317 between the Dream of Jacob and the Liberation of Saint Peter, among which the difference between daytime and darkness is a crucial element. A more pertinent reason for the daylight might be to enact the distinction between the “created sun and the sun that created it,” and to illustrate the centrality of this distinction to understanding God’s revelation to Jacob. The soft, fading daylight with which Ribera suffuses the scene is at once literally visible to the viewer and a figure for the non-literal character of the vision.

Ribera’s subtle handling of the subject matter in both the Dream of Jacob and the

Liberation of Peter is exposed and, in a sense, brought to fruition through the creative pairing and comparison of the two pictures as paired art objects. The dynamism of the handling in each case is evident mainly in Ribera’s orchestration of comparison and contrast. As noted in chapter 1, several Italian precedents exist for commissions of pendant images that aligned a contest or discussion across subjects with a staged paragone between the works themselves (and, by extension, the artists).92 Closer to

Ribera’s series in time and in geography, we find a more relevant precedent for such a pairing on the artist’s own initiative in Diego Velázquez’s pendant paintings of The Tunic of Joseph (figure 4.25) and The Forge of Vulcan (figure 4.26), both painted in Rome in

1630.93 The pairing of the images in particular exposes Velázquez’s interest in a range of issues surrounding truth and honesty, as Joseph’s brothers (in a narrative situation with strong parallels and ironic echoes of the deception of Isaac in Genesis 27) present to their father Jacob the coat that he had given to his youngest son Joseph, stained in the blood of an animal to support their tale that he met an accidental death, covering their own crime

92 Chapter 1, 54-57. 93 Javier Portús, Las Fábulas de Velázquez. Mitología e Historia Sagrada en el Siglo de Oro (Exh. cat. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007), 317.

318 in having sold their brother into slavery.94 The Forge of Vulcan makes a highly innovative connection between a Biblical story and a mythological one, and pairs the false reports by the sons of Jacob with the episode of Apollo revealing to Vulcan his wife’s adultery. Focusing on the respective reactions to being told an unpleasant lie and an unpleasant truth, Velázquez also articulates much of the pairing’s interest through what we might call “connoisseurial” devices, aspects of the paintings that viewers would most readily uncover by comparing the images as works of art, such as the ranges of expressions and affetti.95 There is no evidence to either prove or disprove that Velázquez and Ribera met in Italy, but the Sixth Count of Monterrey (who was Viceroy of Naples until 1637 and may have had a hand in the commission of Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob) had previously been the Spanish Ambassador in Rome, and was one of Velázquez’s most important contacts in the Eternal City on the trip during which he painted The Tunic of

Joseph and The Forge of Vulcan.96 The point at issue is not Ribera’s specific familiarity with Velázquez’s pendants so much as their import as precedents and comparanda for the intellectually and artistically daring combination of two subjects that would not normally go together, and that would each lose much of their meaning aside from the juxtaposition.97

Prudence and prophetic appointment: Jacob’s princely virtues

94 An incisive analysis is in Fernando Marías, “La túnica de José: la historia al margen de lo humano,” in Svetlana Alpers, Trinidad de Antonio, et. al., Velázquez (Madrid: Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, 1999), 277-96. 95 As noted in Javier Portús, “Velázquez: Mitología e identidad artística,” in Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien 11 (2009): 88-101, p. 94. 96 Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, “Der Graf von Monterrey, Neapel und der Buen Retiro,” in Petra Kruse, Javier Portús, and Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos (eds.) Velázquez, Rubens, und Lorrain. Malerei am Hof Philipps IV. (Exh. cat. Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungs Halle der Republik Deutschland, 1999), 84-101. 97 Many thanks to Felipe Pereda for drawing the parallels with Velázquez to my attention.

319 The Dream of Jacob also relates thematically both to Jacob and the Flocks of

Laban and to Isaac Blessing Jacob, again in ways that far exceed the paintings’ shared protagonist. Augustine’s comments on Genesis 28 in The City of God contain in their

Spanish translation a full rendering of the biblical account of Jacob’s dream. Augustine takes the sincerity of Jacob as a point d’appui and sees his dream as prophetically referring to Christ. The honesty of Jacob, defended in Villegas with reference to Saint

John Chrysostom’s view of Isaac’s blessing as justly conferring the birthright where it was legally and morally due,98 has a prophetic dimension of its own in Augustine’s reading of the episode:

“And Jacob arose, and took the stone that he had put under his head there, and set it up for a memorial, and poured oil upon the top of it. And Jacob called the name of that place the house of God.” This is prophetic. For Jacob did not pour oil on the stone in an idolatrous way, as if making it a god; neither did he adore that stone, or sacrifice to it. But since the name of Christ comes from the chrism or anointing, something pertaining to the great mystery was certainly represented in this. And the Saviour Himself is understood to bring this latter to remembrance in the gospel, when He says of Nathanael, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!” because Israel who saw this vision is no other than Jacob.99

98 This additional commentary on Isaac’s benediction of Jacob appears after a short recapitulation of the event in Villegas’s “Life of Jacob:” “Despues desto, pretendiendo Isaac dar su ultima bendicion a Esau a quien el tenia por su mayorazgo, y queria bien, mandole que fuesse al campo, y le truxesse que comiesse de sus caças, y le bendeziria: Rabeca [sic] que lo entendió, avisó a Iacob dello: assi porque (segun dize S. Iuan Chrysostomo) fue ordenacion del cielo, como porque estando avisada de la venta del mayorazgo, siendo la bendicion anexa a el, quiso que uviesse su derecho Iacob, pues la avia comprado, sin engaño ni fuerça, ni entendiendo que en ello hazia mal, sino que redemia su vexacion, pues aviendole Dios dado la investidura del mayorazgo, y quitadola a su hermano, a el le era licito aver la bendicion de la manera que mejor pudiesse, y todo lo a el perteneciente.” (“After this, Isaac having decided to give his last blessing to Esau, whose it was to be by reason of his primogeniture, and because Isaac loved him, he ordered Esau to go into the countryside, and bring him of his hunting, and that he would bless Esau: Rebecca who heard this, advised Jacob of this: thus, because (according to St. John Chrysostom) it was ordained by heaven, as though on account of being advised of the sale of the primogeniture, the blessing being attached to it, she wished for Jacob to have what was rightfully his, for he had purchased it, without trickery or force, nor awareness that he did wrongly thereby, but only that he redeemed his vexation; thus, God having invested him with the primogeniture and taken it from his brother, it was licit for him to obtain the blessing, and all that belonged thereto, however best he could.”) Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 123r. The honesty of Jacob is emphasized across early modern sources, as for instance Niseño describes him as the very “drawing and design of the just and the servant of the Lord,” (“dibujo i diseño del justo i siervo del Señor”) in contrast with his brother, who is the image of the sinner. Niseño, Politico del Cielo, 34r. 99 Augustine, City of God, book XVI, ch. 38, p. 156.

320 The “true Israelite,” Israel himself, is a recipient and conveyer of revelation who is free of guile, engaño. The straight and virtuous dealings of Jacob are best visible when his actions are perceived in the supernatural light of prophetic revelation. Whether in purchasing Esau’s birthright for a bowl of lentils, obtaining his father’s blessing under false pretenses, or subsequently enriching himself at his uncle’s expense in the matter of the speckled flocks, Jacob’s apparent deceptions were read in the seventeenth century as virtuous and true, disguising Jacob’s honest dealings as deceit, and hiding under a veneer of narrative plainness a prophetic import.

In like vein, Jacob’s deal with Laban and his breeding of the speckled flocks constituted a biblical precedent for honest prudence, while Laban’s own deception of his nephew in the matter of Rachel and Leah was an instance of false prudence.100 Just as

Rebecca’s actions were instances of positive and justifiable deception, so too Jacob’s management of his uncle’s flocks towards his own profit was not read as embezzlement but as good management. In both of his known compositions depicting Jacob with the

Flocks of Laban (figures 4.17, 4.19 & 4.20), Ribera casts Jacob as a humble and prayerful recipient of divine directives, whom one would never associate with self-interested scheming. While Jacob’s hands and actions are tenderly attentive towards the animals in his care, his eyes are turned expectantly heavenward in an earnest dialogue with God.

Ribera’s 1632 rendering of the scene now in El Escorial draws an unmistakable link between the sincerity that Jacob had prophetically manifested as a recipient of the dream

100 Villegas also points out in his life of Jacob that “Jacob did not sin in making the most of this business, for Laban owed him a great deal for having served him very well, and there being no other means by which to obtain it, he sought repayment thus.” (“... Iacob no pecó en aprovecharse desta industria porque Laban le devia mucho por averle muy bien servido, y no siendole posible de otra manera quiso por esta pagarse.”) Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, 124v.

321 in Genesis 28, and the equally honest nature of his actions in the breeding of the speckled livestock.

Ribera subtly inserts the earlier episode of the dream into the dramatic and physically vivid depiction of Jacob with Laban’s flocks (figure 4.17). The scene that unfolds with such solid and tactile concreteness in the rocky foreground, as Jacob buries a hand in the fur of a sheep and directs a searching gaze towards his creator, is subtly bracketed by a sleeping figure and an angelic vision. Jacob’s prayerful encounter with

God over his uncle’s flocks is the resumption of a conversation begun two chapters earlier with God’s promise and revelation through the dream of the ladder of angels, one of which can be seen, on close inspection, above the head of the brown ram at the far right (detail figure 4.27). This delicate, nebulous vision belongs to the tiny slumbering figure of Jacob, whose pose anticipates that of the 1639 Dream of Jacob, nestled above the proper left heel of the figure’s larger counterpart (detail figure 4.28).

Ribera’s inclusion of the earlier incident in this painting prompts two points of consideration: first, if the Duke of Medina de Las Torres acquired the 1632 Jacob with the Flocks of Laban along with a Liberation of Saint Peter probably painted a minimum of 5 years later, then we may assume that he thereby either emulated or prompted the pairing of the two biblical subjects that Ribera explored more deliberately in 1639. In either case, Ribera’s atypical combination of two episodes shows a refined mutual appreciation and a high bar of what one might call interpretive expectation between painter and collector. Under the heading of “collector,” I include not only Medina de las

Torres, but his advisors in matters pertaining to painting, notably Juan Rubio de Herrera, who had also aided the collecting and patronage in Italy of another of Ribera's patrons,

322 Fernando Afán de Ribera, the third Duke of Alcalá, who had held the post of Viceroy of

Naples from 1629 to 1631.101 As in the Isaac Blessing Jacob, Ribera’s Jacob with the

Flocks of Laban, his Dream of Jacob, and especially his 1639 Liberation of Saint Peter each offer an occasion to recognize and enact certain kinds of perspicacity; the paintings depict but also rehearse the virtue of prudence. As Bouza has noted with regard to

Medina de las Torres’s collection, the choice and judgment that went into acquiring works of art were manifestations of good government, of princely virtues.102 This would be all the more palpably the case for a painting like the Escorial Jacob with the Flocks of

Laban, in which the patriarchal protagonist displays his true prudence and wise management, and in which a subtle and exegetically rich pairing with an unexpected New

Testament subject invites further appreciation of the collector’s perspicacity, in matters spiritual, artistic, and worldly.

Ribera’s decision to blend the subject of Jacob’s dream with that of the flocks of

Laban could not be more apropos to such a collector. The worldly matters that consistently required both deception and discernment are combined with the heavenly deception and discernment of the Eucharist. Immediately before the commentary on

Isaac's blessing of Jacob in Prieto’s Psalmodia Eucharistica, the ladder of angels that

Jacob beholds in his dream is also read as a figure for Christ in the eucharistic sacrament.103 Long before the discussion of Genesis 27, however, Prieto (as always,

101 Rubio de Herrera had also remained present at court under the intermediate Viceroy, the Count of Monterrey. Muñoz Gonzáles, Mercado, 152-3. 102 Bouza, “Rafael a Ribera,” 46. 103 “Y podemos dezir, que Christo en el santissimo Sacramento se llama Dios de Iacob, porque como ya queda dicho, alcançò por revelacion el misterio del altar, en aquella misteriosa escala, por donde subian, y baxavan Angeles, pues en consagrando que consagra el Sacerdote la hostia, baxan millares de Angeles a adorarla, que ocularmente los vio san Iuan Chrisostomo ... pues veis aqui Angelos descendentes, que los Angeles desde el cielo baxan por la escala deste santissimo Sacramento, y su veneracion; tambien hallareis, Angelos ascendentes, Angeles que suben por este Sacramento, pues en su virtud los hombres buelan, como

323 relying mainly on Thomas Aquinas) addresses with “natural examples” the problem of unbelief in the doctrine of transsubstantiation (appendix 26). The acknowledged difficulty of recognizing a physical presence against the grain of what is physically perceived to be there requires understanding rather than outright resolution.104 To lessen the intellectual obstacle, Prieto proceeds by analogy with the natural phenomena of water's transformations, through condensation and evaporation; if one can believe in the one, one can believe in the other. The power of the Word of God to transsubstantiate the bread and wine into Christ's flesh and blood is the same power and the same Word through which “the terrestrial vapours are converted, here into water, there into snow, there into crystal, and these same then unmake them, and are converted into water. So that they are here condensed, there liquid, and transparent, sometimes clear, other times

Angeles al cielo, porque comen este pan celestial, y gozan deste Sacramento, Et futura gloria nobis pignus datur, que se nos dà por prenda de gloria, que es panis filiorum, pan de hijos, pan de herederos de bienaventurança, que aquella tierra de vivos Dios la dà por este manjar, Nisi manducaveritis carnem filij hominis, & biberitis eius sanguinem, non habebitis vitam in vobis. Y assi como Christo, Pacificans per sanguinem crucis eius, sive qua in coelis, sive qua in terris sunt; pacificò, y hizo amistades entre los hombres, y los Angeles; assi en este Sacramento por su sangre los junta, pues suben y baxan por una misma escalera, y todos se unen para alabar, y engrandecer a Dios: y porque todos estos misterios estan significados en esta escala santa de Iacob, David para alabar al santissimo Sacramento, de que trata en este Psalmo, atendiendo a esto le llama Dios de Iacob, Iubilate Deo Iacob, y nos manda, que le reconozcamos.” (“And we may say that Christ, in the most holy Sacrament, is called the God of Jacob, for as has already been said, the mystery of the altar achieved revelation in this mysterious ladder, by which Angels ascended and descended; thus in the consecration by which the Priest consecrates the host, thousands of Angels descend to adore it, which Saint John Chrysostom saw with his eyes ... thus behold here Angelos descendentes, that the Angels descend from heaven by the ladder of this most holy Sacrament, and its veneration; you shall also find Angelos ascendientes, Angels ascending by this Sacrament, thus in its virtue do men fly, like Angels to heaven, because they eat this heavenly bread, and enjoy this Sacrament, Et futura gloria nobis pignus datur, which is given to us as a robe of glory, which is panis filiorum, the bread of sons, bread of heirs of blessedness, which God has given for food to this land of the living, Nisi manducaveritis carnem filij hominis, & biberitis eius sanguinem, non habebitis vitam in vobis. And just as Christ Pacificans per sanguinem crucis eius, sive qua in coelis, sive qua in terris sunt; made peace and friendships between men and Angels; so in this Sacrament does he join them by his blood, so that they ascend and descend by a same ladder, and all join together to praise and magnify God: and because all of these mysteries are signified in this holy ladder of Jacob, David, to praise the most holy Sacrament of which this Psalm treats, attending to this calls him the God of Jacob, Iubilate Deo Iacob, and directs us to recognize Him as such.”) Prieto, Psalmodia, 474. 104 A point advanced by Stephen Justice, “Eucharistic Miracle and Eucharistic Doubt,” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012): 307-332.

324 obscure.”105 In light of this passage, Ribera's decision to blend the angels so seamlessly with the surrounding cloud appears far from incidental. The remarkable angels, both in

Ribera's 1632 Jacob with the Flocks of Laban and in his Dream of Jacob, prefigure the

Eucharist in all its visible mystery: perceptible yet incomprehensible, present to the senses yet misleading and elusive, Ribera's angels are visible signposts to what is invisible, no less than the bread and wine of the altar. The delicate forms built up from the color of sky and seemingly precipitating before our eyes from the clouds surrounding them address the difficulties of relying on the senses to see the subtler miracle to which they point.

When Ribera returned to the subject of Jacob with the Flocks of Laban in 1638, he may or may not have pursued the same interpretive avenue again: of that composition, the only autograph version known to survive is the fragment in the London National

Gallery (figure 4.19), of which the left half of the painting has been cut away and lost. An early copy or workshop version of the entire image survives in the Museo Cerralbo, and betrays no shimmering angels precipitating from the clouds above the heads of the sheep

(figure 4.20). The blue and pink color scheme selected for these clouds, however, is of a piece with the color scheme through which Ribera rendered the angels in the Prado and

Escorial paintings just discussed. It is by no means impossible that Ribera might have included similar angels in the original; those in the Escorial Jacob with the Flocks of

Laban have escaped the attention of generations of copyists. In the 1638 version of this subject, the lamb in Jacob's lap, which sits up and gazes directly at us, certainly would

105 “... que los vapores terrestres se conviertan, ya en agua, ya en nieve, ya en cristal, y essos mismos despues los deshaze, y convierte en agua. De manera que aqui estan condensados, aculla liquidos, y transparentes, unas vezes claros, y otras obscuros.” Prieto, Psalmodia, 199.

325 have started in seventeenth century viewers a train of thought towards the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Be this as it may, Ribera's depictions of Jacob bring to full fruition the artist's longstanding interest in approaching the process of looking at pictures as an integral component to their understanding. Ribera's paintings parlay both the conventions and the natural assets of their medium into a subtle and appealing riddle about the nature of looking, seeing, and knowing, founded on that most paradoxical of physical presences, the eucharistic sacrament. To perceive this dimension of their meaning, the paintings demand a heightened sensory awareness, together with an understanding that the most important thing to see is that one can't see what is important. The engaño or deception without which neither paintings nor conversations could function properly is elevated from a lie to a prophetic figure. Filtered through the paradox of the Eucharist, Ribera's paintings present themselves as blessed deceptions, and insist that deception itself is a blessing.

Ribera’s treatments of the life of Jacob, painted at the peak of the artist’s maturity in the 1630s, represent a climax in his creative engagement with the ways in which paintings could be viewed and discussed. These paintings demand and reward both close viewing and comparative appreciation for what one sees, whether it is admiration of the astonishingly tactile illusionism of the fur on Jacob’s arms, or detection of the angels that crystallize out of the very atmosphere around the patriarch. The esthetic appreciation of painterly accomplishments that were “connoisseurial” (in the sense of being valued and readily quantifiable in the art critical vocabulary of the time, from citations of Raphael to illusions of relief) becomes inextricable from an exegetical practice that complicates the

326 ideal beholder’s relationship to what is seen. The more illusionistically present things appear, the more they are cues to a larger illusion, as the stories themselves are figures for what cannot be seen. The capacity of painting to make things appear present that are not and to convey truth through deception becomes, not only a defense of painting, but an unassailable defense of deception itself. In recognizing that each biblical episode could function as a prophetic figure pointing beyond itself Ribera achieves two remarkable things: first, he makes his paintings, to those who would find such figurative meanings therein, proof against the most stringent critiques of dissimulation. Even Saint Augustine, who did not allow one inch of tolerance towards lying, recognized that a lie is not the same as a prophetic figure; concealment and dissimulation beneath the veil of Moses aligns, in Ribera’s paintings, with a classic array of positive examples for Biblical raison d’etat, as it were. Second, Ribera places his work in the endlessly potent role of prophetic figures, which attain the dignity of the holy mysteries and are the more blessed the more they deceive: the more ragged the appearance, the more noble the underlying truth; the more deceptive the hands, the truer the voice.

327 Conclusion: Blind virtue and the limits of interpretation

Now this our art of painting cannot imitate nor depict these first substances [that are] principal parts of the world, since these are not subject to our senses, nor to our eyes: so that the first [among the] Philosophers with the pens of their intellects, and with the colors of their thoughts, could make no effigy nor imitation of them; for in their contemplation, according to the Philosopher, our internal eyes are like the eyes of the bat, which is incapable of looking at the sun: and thus also for the same reason we cannot make effigies of our souls.1

Federico Zuccaro

Across his long career, Ribera showed a vested interest in the shifting practices and expectations that went into looking at pictures, tackling in visual terms the question of what looking at art could mean and accomplish, spiritually, socially, and intellectually.

I argue that Ribera probed art’s ability to mediate between seeing and knowing, by emphasizing and anticipating the ways in which his viewers could probe his paintings.

This dissertation also seeks to reconsider and redefine connoisseurship as a set of historical practices through which pictures were understood, not only as collectible objects but as bearers and producers of meaning. Ribera cared about how people looked at paintings, and his works both anticipate and creatively redirect the discussions that could take place in front of them. Connoisseurship, to Ribera, was relevant because it was something his patrons cared about, but it was also intellectually potent, an active ingredient in his approach to his pictures.

1 “Hora l’arte nostra della Pittura non può imitare, ne effigiare queste prime sostanze parti principali del mondo, non sottogiacendo loro à nostri sensi, ne à gli occhi nostri: anzi, che i primi Filosofi con pennelli de gl’intelletti loro, e con i colori de lor pensieri non le potero effigiare, ne imitare; perche gli occhi nostri interni alla contemplatione loro, secondo dice il Filosofo, sono come gli occhi della nottola imponenti à rimirare il Sole: e cosi anco per l’istessa ragione non potiamo effigiare l’Anime nostre.” Federico Zuccaro, L’Idea de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti del Cavalier Federico Zuccaro. Divisa in 2 libri (Turin: Agostino Disserolio, 1607), II, 6.

328 In the redefinition of connoisseurship presented here, the term encompasses practices of evaluation and avenues of inquiry that we might tend to classify under the heading of epistemology rather than as any kind of art criticism or attributional analysis.

When Isaac probes Jacob’s fur-clad arm in Ribera’s Isaac Blessing Jacob, the rich illusion of his hands buried in the goat’s fur on Jacob’s arms overlays the painting’s illusion not only with the illusion of the goat skins within the narrative of Genesis 27, but the deeper illusion of the eucharist for which Genesis 27 was a figure. To a certain extent, there is no such thing as “merely” looking at this painting: as is often the case in Ribera’s art, any engagement on the viewer’s part with the picture’s esthetic qualities and effects tends to turn into a fraught inquiry as to the nature and truth or falsehood of what one sees. Connoisseurship, as Ribera deploys it, becomes the means by which viewers can be faced with ambitious questions and claims as to what pictures have the authority to be and say.

Ribera’s interest in how people looked at pictures and his readiness to expand the horizons of what such looking could entail, also underline the differences between seeing and knowing rather than asserting their equivalence. While Ribera explored the potential for pictures to make the world knowable in different ways, he was also respectful of the inherent resistance of pictures to a simple transformation into knowledge. Perhaps the most vivid depiction of sensory experience that Ribera ever produced, the remarkable

Studies of a bat and two ears from around 1622 (figure C.1), arranges in more-than- emblematic symmetry a meticulously observed bat and two ears that hearken back to the etched Studies of Features from 1622. The taut cohesiveness of the bat with the ears within the space of the page is at striking odds with the light that hits the bat and the ears

329 from opposite directions. Two left ears emerge, at different angles and with different qualities of light, from a page on which they are nonetheless arranged as though flanking an absent face, at the distance from each other that they would be with a head between them. The bat seems to thrust forward from the page, both in its deft illusion of relief and with a sense of outward momentum, yet it also remains tethered to the page and to a more neutral graphic presence by the very two-dimensional scroll and motto between its feet.

The caricatured profile of a human face hovers about the shadow cast by the bat’s own head, but without enough conviction to become a full component of the image. The ears create a powerful suggestion of sensory awareness, with which the bat’s blindness seems to combine to undercut the idea of sight’s primacy, but the relationship between sight and hearing remains an open question. The entire drawing is a finely tuned performance that seems unconcerned with letting its audience in at all. Every component of the work is as carefully planned as it is baffling, as each detail seems to undercut another. If this is an exercise in connoisseurship, it is one that seems designed to defeat the sequence of looking and knowing; even for a seventeenth-century audience with the cultural apparatus to unpack the riddle, the drawing would unquestionably have been a riddle.

The harder one looks at the Studies, the less one sees. Here too, Ribera calls attention to the bridge between sensory experience and its interpretation, but in a wholly negative key.

The striking attention to detail and fine rendering of the bat invoke a genre and practice of animal drawings perfected by Jacopo Ligozzi in his work for the Bolognese natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi. The context of scientific illustration, as we might call it nowadays, would appear to be strengthened by the bat’s frontal pose and centered

330 framing within the image, and by the fact that Aldrovandi’s Ornithology appears to have inspired the Latin motto that the bat delicately clutches on a scroll between its feet, as I shall discuss presently. The motto, in any case, seems an apt one for the idea of scientific inquiry fueled and advanced by meticulous drawing: FULGET SEMPER VIRTUS,

“virtue shines forever.” A tour de force of observation, Ribera’s bat adopts the format of zoological illustrations (such as Aldrovandi’s, figure C.2) while radically sharpening their focus. The drawing, together with the motto, seems to instantiate the Lincean principe

Federico Cesi’s ideal of pittura filosofica, of images as enablers of knowledge. The confident and light-flooded declaration about eternally shining virtue calls to mind both

Cesi’s Linceographum, and the Oziosi academy’s virtuous eagle staring into the sun, a motif that also had its source in Aldrovandi.2 Connoisseurship, brought to bear on this drawing, might align it with Ligozzi or recognize its roots in zoological illustrations such as the woodcut from Aldrovandi, and the upshot would appear to be that art claims a certain prerogative to advance and enable knowledge.

The passage of the Ornithologia in which Aldrovandi associates shining virtue with bats, however, hardly plays out in the bats’ favor. Where the eagle’s virtue makes it impervious to the rays of the sun, the bat exemplified the reverse reaction, shunning the light:

Thus bats are like all heretics, because being full of wickedness, they are unable to behold the dazzling light of virtue (“virtutis fulgentissimum lumen,” italics mine), as those flying creatures are unable to behold the sun, and to gaze upon the most beautiful parts of the church and to encompass them with their minds.3

2 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae Hoc est de Avibus Historiae Libri XII (Bologna: Francesco de Francesco Senese, 1599), 25. 3 Trans. Peter Mason, to whom I am deeply grateful both for this rendering of this passage and for his generous and stimulating help throughout this project. “Sic Haereticis omnibus Vesptertiliones comparantur, quod scelerum pleni, virtutis fulgentissimum lumen aspicere [italics mine], tanquam solem illae volucres, haud possint, & Ecclesiae formosissimas partes intueri & mente circumlustrare.” Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae, 582.

331

There is no reason to suppose that the bat is a literal statement of nicodemism, or that it has anything to do with heresy. What is more suggestive, and harder to segregate from the structure of the drawing overall, is the broader idea of concealment, of an intellectual blindness that would appear negative being embraced as though it were illumination. The triumphant note that both the bat and the motto strike in Ribera’s drawing may, of course, mean that the comparison of bats to heretics in Aldrovandi is historically irrelevant, a misuse on the historian’s part of a thin coincidence. The irony of this problem is that, to the extent that we can interpret Ribera’s bat, it would seem to point us to the limits of interpretation, to spiritual, intellectual, and artistic aporia. The bat’s inability to bear the sun’s light is used as a figure in Federico Zuccaro’s Idea (not a text that is generally shy about the capacities and prerogatives of art) to signal the philosophical limits of representation, and the bat appears in Sebastiano de Covarrubias’s Castillian dictionary as a figure for curiositas, a mascot for the dangers of pressing one’s inquiry into the secrets of nature too far.4

What this dissertation has tried to demonstrate is that Ribera anticipated and directed the ways in which people looked at and evaluated pictures, making the process of connoisseurship (in its broad and neologistic sense) a creatively fruitful component in

4 “MURCIEGACO, ... en Castellano le llamamos murciegalo [sic], q[ue] vale ta[n]to como mus caetus alatus: y assi el Valenciano le llama Rat pennat, que quiere dezir raton alado, o con alas. Es simbolo del malhechor que se anda escondiendo, o del q[ue] està cargado de deudas, que huye de no venir a poder de sus acreedores. Ta[m]bien suele sinificar unos Filosofos demasiadamente escudriñadores de los secretos de naturaleza, que en la mesma especulacion se desvanece[n] y ciegan.” (“MURCIEGACO, ... in Castillian we call it murciegalo [sic], which amounts to “blind winged mouse”; and thus the Valencians call it “rat pennat”, which means winged rat. It is a symbol of the evildoer who goes about in hiding, or of him who is laden with debts, who flees lest he fall into the hands of his creditors. It is also used to signify those philosophers who are too scrutinizing (escudriñadores) of the secrets of nature, who in this speculation wither away (desvanecen) and go blind.”) Sebastiano de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lingua Castellana o Española. Compuesto por el licenciado Don Sebastian de Cobarruvias Orozco, Capellan de Su Magestad; Mastrescuela y Canonigo de la Santa Yglesia de Cuenca y Consultor del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1611), 559r.

332 what his pictures do and show. The caveat on which I wish to conclude is that one of the things Ribera’s pictures reveal through such connoisseurship is their own licence to defy the very estimations and analyses that they invite. The light of virtue that shines forever can also blind. The ears may hear, but they may not understand. The connoisseur, the natural philosopher, or the art historian, no matter how broad or incisive their inquiries, may be merely prying too closely into what was not meant to be accessible to the understanding. No matter how prudent and wise the artist, he cannot depict the soul. And if he could, would he be so eager always to let people see into it? Rome, Naples, and

Spain in the seventeenth century were hardly safe spaces for such candor. If Ribera was so readily attuned to strategies of conversation and to painting’s appeal to prudence, it may have been in part because such prudence and strategies were necessary parts of life.

The history of painting in seicento Naples, of which Ribera’s art is a cornerstone, is riven with a struggle between control and resistance; to painting was assigned a task of emotional and intellectual manipulation in a society that had bankrupted itself of the capacity for sincerity. “In Naples too,” writes Romeo de Maio, “the pedagogy of the

Counter-reformation showed itself to be afraid of what might stray from the certain and definite ...”5 Against Ribera’s blind virtue and inscrutable silence, such pedagogy had no recourse.

5 “La pedagogia della Controriforma anche a Napoli mostrava di temere ciò che sconfinasse dal certo e dal definito ...” Romeo De Maio, Pittura e Controriforma a Napoli (Rome: Laterza, 1983), 190.

333 APPENDIX

1. Letter from Ludovico Carracci in Bologna to Ferrante Carlo in Rome, 11 December, 1618.

Ludovico Carracci al sig. Ferrante Carlo.

Mi è stato di grandissimo gusto sentire dalla sua lettera, copiosa d'avvisi intorno alli quadri di V. S., che vi è la furia di giorno e di notte, e sentire li pareri di quelli pittori che hanno un gusto eccellentissimo, particolarmente quel pittore Spagnuolo che tiene dietro alla scuola di Caravaggio. Se è quello che dipinse un S. Martino in Parma, che stava col signor Mario Farnese, bisogna star lesto che non diano la colonia al povero Lodovico Caracci: bisogna tenersi in piedi con le stringhe. Io so bene che non trattano con persona addormentata. Il signor Sinibaldo debbe avere qualche martello che V. S. abbia scoperto una mano di pitture come le sue, e per quanto intendo, non le venderà per li prezzi alti, e poi come non si attacca alla prima, sono poi sbancheggiate affatto, e restano. Mi piace poi che si sia aiutato, che il Presepio sia di mano del cugino Annibale; la Madonna la Nonnata, e finalmente il Cristo del Facino, di mano del Pordenone. È scoperta la ragia da chi conosce. È per interesse che vagliano più. Orsù buon pro li faccia. Io consiglierei V. S. se li venisse il taglio nobile di dar via le sue operate, o tutto in ogni modo; al tempod;adesso beato chi ha strada di fare il danaro, se bene qua si dice che è andata apposta V. S. per far esito delle sue pitture, e io li vorria far dire il vero. Circa alli quadri della signora Barbara non li ha mai avuti appresso di lei. Il signore Achille Poggio ha inviato ogni cosa alla volta di Roma in una cassa: così mi ha detto il signor Ottavio Casali. Non mi sono poi preso altra cura, se V. S. non comanderà altro. E con tal fine le bacio le mani come facciamo tutti di casa e stanza; che il signor Iddio la feliciti, e conservi. Il signor Bartolommeo Dolcini saluta V. S., e mostrò di avere questo particolare delle parole dello Spagnuolo. Disse: io vorria poterli mostrare le mie pitture per vedere quello che dicesse. Ma bisogna scusare il signor Bartolomeo, che è innamorato delle sue cose.

Da Bologna, dì 11 di dicembre, 1618.

Giovanni Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi, eds. Raccolta di Lettere sulla Pittura, Scultura ed Architettura Scritte da’ Più Celebri Personaggi dei Secoli XV, XVI e XVII, vol. I (Milan: Giovanni Silvestri, 1822), letter XCVII, pp. 289-91.

Quoted from Giovanna Perini, ed. Gli Scritti dei Carracci. Ludovico, Annibale, Agostino, Antonio, Giovanni Antonio (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1990), letter no. 33, p. 143.

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334 2. Letter from Cosimo del Sera in Naples to Andrea Cioli in Florence, 23 January, 1618.

Hebbi lo schizzo del Quadro, che S. A. desidera da Fabbrizio Santa Fede il quale fu hieri da me con il Naccherini et ha promesso di mettervi mano molto presto volendo prima dar una rivista alla storia, perche in queste sorte di Materie, qua non hanno molta pratica, e se bene costui tiene il Primato, et è belliss.mo Coloritore, io non credo, che gl’habbia tanta bizzarria che basti, tuttavia l’opera lo dimostrerà; ci è uno Spagniuolo, che al gusto mio, è molto meglio, avendo fatto tre quadri di santi al V[ice] R[e] che sono molto stim.ti et a questo non manca Bizzarria, e buone invenzioni, e per quanto mi dicano le persone intelligenti di questa Professione, a molte parte squisite; se S.A. vuol veder qual cosa V.S. mel’avvisi, che procurerò di servirla, e se fusse costà un certo Pittoretto Gobbo di questi paesi chiamato Giovambattistello [Caracciolo] non e a proposito informarsi da lui, perche sono poco amici, e questo spag.lo è invidiato da tutti, e dopo il Bronzino [Cristofano Allori], e stimato il meglio di quanti hoggi ne viva. Il Naccherini mi ha fatto vedere il bambino che lavora per V. S. che mi par bellissimo, e dice che per tutto il prossimo l’havrà finito, et io gliene manderò subito.

Cosimo del Sera

Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo 1396.

Quoted from Alessandro Parronchi, “Sculture e progetti di Michelangelo Naccherino,” in Prospettiva 20 (1980): 34-46, 40.

New York 1992, 235.

I received the sketch of the painting that His Highness desires from Fabrizio Santafede, who came to see me yesterday with [Michelangelo] Naccherini and promised to get to work on it quickly, wanting first to review the story, for in this sort of subject matter they have but little practice here, and if it be true that [Santafede] holds pride of place, and is a lovely colorist, I do not believe that he has as much strange inventiveness (bizzarria) as would suffice; only the work will tell; there is a Spaniard, who for my taste is much better [than Fabrizio Santafede], having made three pictures of saints for the Viceroy that are much esteemed; and this artist does not lack in strangeness (Bizarria) and good inventions, and according to what I’m told by those who have expertise (intelligenti) in this profession, he has many exquisite parts; if His Highness would like to see something, please let me know, and I shall endeavor to serve you, and if a certain bent little painter (Pittoretto Gobbo) from these parts named Giovambattistello [Caracciolo] should be there, it will be best not to get your information from him, for there is little friendship between them, and this Spaniard is envied by all, and after Bronzino [Cristofano Allori], he is held to be (stimato) the best there is living today.

335 ======

3. Letter from Cosimo del Sera in Naples to Andrea Cioli in Florence, 13 February, 1618

Il Naccherini scultore, son già due giorni che si ritrova in letto cun un gran catarro nella parte destra, che temono sia spezie di gocciola, avendoli torto alquanto la bocca. Per ancora li Medici non si sanno risolvere, se il male sia pericoloso e domatina io sarò da lui, e gli persenterò la lettera di V. S. Dispiacendomi che questo accidente allungherà la fine di quel bambino, e d’unaltro, che ne faceva a me, ma quel di V. S. è molto più avanti. - Ho visto quanto S.A. comanda circa le pitture, che devo far fare a suggetti avvisatimi sentendo sieno molto eminenti, et allo Spagniolo dirò che metta il quadro in ordine, per farlo a suo capriccio, sperando darà satisfazione, et il Santafede va disegniando la Galatea, e nel tardare differisce poco dal Bronzino, non so poi se le sue opere sien di tanta finezza havendo io un S. Gio. nel deserto e una Sta Maria Maddalena di mano del S. Cristofano, che sono stupor di Napoli, e non posso resistere alle molte copie, chiestemi giornalmente da questi principi. Il S. Gio. mi fu mandato dal S. Lorenzo Usimbardi, e la Santa Maria Maddalena la comperai dal S. Cristofano 10 sono (10?) se mi riuscirà riportarle non sarà poco. - Quella mostra di ricamo il maestro me l’ha promessa per il principio di Quaresima, et il vaso d’argento è ancor indietro, perche all’orefice detti sc 50 anticipati senza ordine alcuno, e non me parso dargliene di vantaggio senza sapere la mente di V. A. siccome ne scrivo al S. Enea, al quale fu mandato il modello di cera.

Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo 1396

Quoted from Alessandro Parronchi, “Sculture e progetti di Michelangelo Naccherino,” in Prospettiva 20 (1980): 34-46, 40.

New York 1992, 235.

The sculptor Naccherini has been bedridden for two days now with a great catarrh on his right side, which they fear may be a form of gout, having twisted somewhat his mouth. As of yet, the doctors remain undecided as to whether the illness is dangerous, and I will visit him [Naccherino] tomorrow, and will present to him your letter. It is a shame that this accident will delay the completion of that child and of another [sculpture commissions undertaken for Cioli and Del Sera by Naccherino], which he was making for me, but your is much further along. I have seen what His Highness orders as to the paintings, which I must have made on the subjects that have been conveyed to me, being most eminent, and I shall tell the Spaniard to put the picture in order, to make it according to his caprice, hoping that he will give satisfaction, and Santafede is drawing the Galatea, and in delaying he differs little from Bronzino [Allori], though I do not know whether his works are of the same quality, as I own a Saint John in the desert and a Saint Mary Magdalene by the hand of S[ignor] Cristofano, which are the wonder of Naples,

336 and I cannot resist the many copies that are daily requested of me from these originals. The Saint John was sent to me by S[ignor] Lorenzo Usimbardi, and the Saint Mary Magdalene I purchased from S[ignor] Cristofano 10 [years?] ago, and if I manage to bring them back with me it will be no small feat. - The master [Santafede] has promised to me this show of refinement by the beginning of Lent, and the silver vase is delayed even more, because [the demand for] the aforementioned 50 scudi for the goldsmith [was] anticipated with no order whatsoever, and I did not wish to give them anything without knowing your Highness’s mind, as indeed I will write about it to S[ignor] Enea, to whom the wax model was sent.

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4. Letter from Cosimo del Sera in Naples to Andrea Cioli in Florence, 20 February, 1618

Il Naccherini sta alquanto meglio, ma non è però fuori di pericolo, e hieri mi disse, che li dorrebbe grandemente il morire, solo per lasciare imperfetto l’opera, che ha fra mano. Detti a Giulio di Grazia il disegnio, che deve fare in cera, che ci metterà mano quanto prima. Non ho già possuto vedere Cornelio che deve fare il Paesaggio, essendo egli stato fuora alcuni giorni, e lo Spagniolo va pensando di fare qual’ cosa di garbo, si come anco il Santafede.

Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo 1396.

Quoted from Alessandro Parronchi, “Sculture e progetti di Michelangelo Naccherino,” in Prospettiva 20 (1980): 34-46, 40.

New York 1992, 235.

Naccherini is somewhat better, but he is not yet out of harm’s way, and yesterday he told me that he would have great displeasure in dying, only to leave in an imperfect state the work that he has in hand. I have entrusted the design to Giulio di Grazia, who is to render [it] in wax, [and] who will put his hand to it as soon as may be. I have not yet been able to see Cornelio who is to do the landscape, as he has been away for a few days, and the Spaniard is thinking of making some graceful thing, as is Santafede.

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5. Letter from Cosimo del Sera in Naples to Andrea Cioli in Florence, 6 March, 1618

All’argentiere sanese che fa il vaso d’argento somministrerò danari perche possa finirlo, si come V. S. con l’amorevol.ma sua de 25 passato mi ordina. Et il ricamo fra 15 giorni per quanto dice il maestro sarà fatto. Il Santa Fede pittore è lungo quanto quel amico non

337 so già se poi riuscirà come lui. Ieri fui a casa sua per vedere se haveva cominciato, e non ne cavai, se non che andava disegniando ma non veddi nulla. Lo Spagniuolo e dattorno a un Crocifisso della S. Ufregiaz [retranscribed by Finaldi in New York 1992 as S. a V Regina] et compiuto (?) dara di mano a servir S.A.S. sperando che questo sara molto puntuale, perche si diletta del suo mestiero et e un huomo di molte buone parte. - Con il Fiamingo che deve far il paese e si vorra pigliar il tenpo di trovarlo fuor dallegria alla quale egli e spesso sottoposto, e Giulio di Grazia che lavora di cerami dice aver cominciato. Il Naccherini sta meglio ma non credo di potar far molto capitale di lui, non sentendo niente del lato manco, e la bocca non da segno di voler ritornare. Quel Puttino che faceva per V. S. era a buon segno et ogni poco basteria a finirlo, io ne sarò suo Procuratore.

Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo 1396.

Quoted from Alessandro Parronchi, “Sculture e progetti di Michelangelo Naccherino,” in Prospettiva 20 (1980): 34-46, 40.

New York 1992, 235.

I will give the Sienese silversmith who is making the silver vase the money with which to finish it, as you direct in your most loving [missive] of the 25[th] past. And the fine work according to the master will be done in 15 days. The painter Santafede is as slow as that friend but I do not know if he will then succeed as he does. Yesterday I went to see if [Santafede] had started, and got nothing from him but that he was drawing away at it, but I didn’t see a thing. The Spaniard is working on a crucifix for her Highness the Virreina and when it is done, he has sworn to serve His Most Serene Highness, hoping that he will be most punctual, for he delights in his work, and is a man of many good traits (buone parte). - With the Fleming who is to do the landscape we will have to allow the time to find him out of sorts, to which he is often subject, and Giulio di Grazia who works in ceramics claims to have started. Naccherini is better but I do not believe we can get much from him, as he can’t feel anything on his left side, and his mouth gives no sign of wanting to return [to normal]. That Puttino that he was making for you was at a good stage and it would take very little to finish it, which I will arrange for you.

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6. Letter from Cosimo del Sera in Naples to Andrea Cioli in Florence, 12 April, 1618

Io torno adesso da visitare il Naccherini, che sta alquanto meglio, ma non muove punto il bracio manco, ne si regge sopra quella gamba, mi son provato a persuaderlo di lasciar finir quel bambino allo scultore Montani, e non ho fatto nulla perche si è più presto (?) questo fastidio, pensando in pochi giorni poter lavorar da se, se pur lo potrà fare in termine di mesi, sarà manco male. - Sarò dattorno a quelli che hanno e’ lavori fra mani

338 per servizio di S.A.S. e quanto a’ quadri, avanti la mia partenza, non sarà finito salvo che in parte i Fiammingo, ma lascierò per sollecitare Vinc[enzo] Vettori, e lo spagniolo per tutto maggio si caverà le mani, così Giulio di Grazia che fa di cera, e con esso meco porterò il ricamo et il vaso d’argento, sperando partire alli 8.

Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo 1396.

Quoted from Alessandro Parronchi, “Sculture e progetti di Michelangelo Naccherino,” in Prospettiva 20 (1980): 34-46, 41.

New York 1992 235.

I return now from visiting Naccherini, who is somewhat better, but he cannot move his left arm at all, nor stand on that leg; I have tried to persuade him to let that child be finished by the sculptor Montani, and I did nothing for it is quicker (?) [to undergo?] such discomfort, thinking that [he] would be able to work on his own in a few days, and if he can even do so in terms of months, it will be just as well. - I will be around those who have works in hand for the service of His Most Serene Highness, and as for paintings, before my departure, nothing will be finished except part of the Fleming’s [work], but I will let them be called for by Vinc[enzo] Vettori, and the Spaniard will work his hands to the bone for all of May, as will Giulio di Grazia who works in wax, and therewith I will bring with me the fine work and the silver vase, hoping to leave on the 8[th].

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7. Letter from Cosimo del Sera in Naples to Andrea Cioli in Florence, 1 May, 1618

Quanto alli quadri spero di havere avanti la mia partenza il paese del Fiammingho et il giudizio di Paris di Giulio di Grazia. Poco appresso finirà il suo lo Spagniuolo, ma pel Santa Fede che deve far Galatea, non so che mi dire, dubitando si sia sbigottito nel veder l’opere del Bronzino, sì come anco ha fatto lo Spagniuolo, ma perche questo è huomo modestissimo, e confessa d’esser inferiore, non e per mancare di quanto ha promesso. Il ricamatore ha quasi finito, e senza fallo la sua opera la porterò con meco. Non spero già poter far il medesimo col Vaso d’argento, parendomi, che il maestro vadia lentamente, ma mi resterà da far poco.

Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo 1400.

Quoted from Alessandro Parronchi, “Sculture e progetti di Michelangelo Naccherino,” in Prospettiva 20 (1980): 34-46, 41.

New York 1992, 235.

339

As for the paintings I hope to have, before I leave, the landscape from the Fleming and the Judgment of Paris from Giulio di Grazia. Soon thereabouts the Spaniard will finish his, but for Santafede who is supposed to do the Galatea, I don’t know what to think, as I doubt that he was at all impressed at seeing Bronzino’s works, as did also the Spaniard, but because the latter is a most modest man, and confesses to being inferior, he will not default on what he has promised. The fine workman is nearly finished, and without fault I will bring his work with me. I no longer [even] hope to do the same with the silver vase, as it seems to me, the master works slowly, but there will remain little for me to do.

8. Giulio Mancini, Introduction, Considerations on Painting.

L’intention mia non è di propor precetti appertinenti alla pittura o suo modo d’operare, sì per non esser mia professione, come ancor per esserne stato trattato dal Dureto e Gaurico ne’lor libri della proportion del corp’humano, e, doppo d’essi, dal Vinci, Vasari, Lomazzo et ultimamente dal Zuccharo, huomini eminentissimi in tal professione, ma si ben di proporre e considerar alcuni avvertimenti, per i quali un huomo di diletto di simili studij possa con facilità dar giuditio delle pitture propostegli, saperle comprar, acquistar et collocare ai lor luoghi, secondo i tempi ne’ quali sono state fatte, le materie che rappresentano et lumi che l’artefice gl’ha dato nel farle. Il tutto messo insieme per osservanza di varie pitture in diversi tempi et occasioni et per haver hauto amicitia d’alcuni pittori celebri di questo secolo.

Nè mi fa difficoltà quello che da alcuno mi potrebbe esser detto: che simil avvertimenti non possin esser dati da uno che non sia della professione, non si potendo riconoscer l’artifitio delle cose fatte da chi non le fa. Onde Plinio al lib. XXXV, al cap. 10 disse: “Simile al proverbio d’Apelle è quello di Stratonico Musico appresso Atheneo che contendendo con un fabro gli disse: Non ti avvedi che non parli di martello?” Onde Aristotile nelle Morali scrive che ciascun è buon giudice delle cose che ha in prattica, e Fabio Pittore appresso Quintiliano dice che l’arti sarebber felici se solo gl’artefici di quelle dessero giuditio. Che però vediamo ché, quando in esse occorrono difficoltà di lite, sogliono i prudenti di governo referirsi agl’artefici di quella tal cosa. Nondimeno Aristotile nel primo De Partibus Animalium, al cap. primo disse: “In omni contemplandi genere omnique tum nobiliori [6] tum ignobiliori docendi via ac ratione duos esse habitus constat, quorum alterum sicentiam rei appellasse, alterum peritiam quandam bene est; hominis enim probe periti officium est iudicare perspicienter posse quidam recte aut non recte ab eo qui docet exponitur, quippe cum et hominem omnino peritum esse statuimus; sed hunc omnibus in rebus fere valere iudicio arbitramur numero unum; illum vero certae naturae alicui deligamus; fieri enim potest ut rem unam quispiam ut alias omnes possit iudicare.” Si che si darà questo giuditio di tutte le cose da quest’huomo perito et per consequenza ancor delle pitture. Qual peritia nelle cose appertinenti alla pittura come s’acquisti l’esplicò l’istesso Aristotile nel VIII della Politica, al cap. 3, quando che propose le quattro discipline necessarie per il suo futuro buon cittadino quando disse: “Videtur quoque figurandi peritia utilis esse ad iudicandum / melius artificium opera.” Perchè un huomo civile, per

340 complimento di sua civiltà dovendo imparar a disegniare com’insegna Aristotile nel luogo citato et altri che scrivono dell’institution civile, con questa facoltà di saper disegnare acquista questo giuditio, come insegna più a basso dicendo: “Similiter quoque figurandi peritia non ut in vendendo emendoque vasa non decipiamur, sed quia contemplari facit pulchritudinem corporum; quaerere vero utilitatem ubique non congruit magnanimis.” Onde questo nostro perito, per mezzo di saper disegnare, con la peritia e cognition universale dell’altre cose, potrà dar giuditio delle pitture: tanto più ch’è vero che al dar giuditio sia util il saper operar quelle tal cose, ma però non è commune nè necessario nè in tutte l’artificose et in particulare nella pittura; perchè questa, non essendo altro ch’un’immitatione delle cose che si ritrovano in questo mondo che sono da più persone riconosciute e giudicate, come l’artificiose dall’artefice che le fa - come dichiarò il ditterio d’Appelle non ultra crepidam et di Stratonico Musico detto di sopra - le naturali da quelli che l’osservano e considerano, le civili da quelli che le fanno et hanno in prattica. Perchè della pittura avviene come l’altre cose che altro è il farle altro è l’usarle, come del freno rispetto al cavallo, questo lo giudica benissimo senza farlo. Onde il Caro insegnò la composition dell’historia, decoro e costume per le pitture di Caprarola a Taddeo Zuccharo, come si vede nella littera scrittagli in simil proposito, l’Aretino a Titiano per la pittura della Fama da farsi per la Maestà di Carlo V, et il Bembo [7] a Raffaello per il Vaticano. S’aggiunge che il colore, la prospettiva, l’espression dell’affetto, et altre cose simili rappresentate et espresse dal pittore, son oggetti communi che si riconoscono e giudicano senza l’abito della pittura et suo modo d’operare, e basta solo un buon giuditio ammaestrato con aver visto più pitture e da per sé e col giuditio di più intendenti, e con la similitudine poi, equalità o inequalità giudicar dell’altre. E sicome con l’erudition civile per le historie lette, per peritia commune di stato e politica sono giudicate l’attioni giuste od ingiuste senza haver studiato legge - come vediamo farsi dai nobili venetiani da’ quali con tal peritia vien giudicato benissimo qualsivoglia evento civile, quale giuditio vien detto caso seguito et ha poi luogo di legge, come la Decisione di Ruota in Roma - così diremo in proposito nostro che un huomo di buon giuditio naturale, con la peritia universale delle cose, con erudition del disegno possa giudicar della perfettione, del valore e del collocar a’ lor luoghi le pitture. Onde appar quanto che il Marino s’inganni nella Diceria della Pittura, ponendo tanti requisiti nel pittore, bastandoli solo il color, la proportione, prospettiva, affetto et simili, che per l’historia, poesia, decoro et altro, essendo d’altra professione superiore et non di pittore, il quale da questa superiore ne viene ammaestrato, e pertanto non si ricerchi in esso tanta filosofia, astrologia et altro come dice il Marino. Et per questo proposito mi pare che dicesse Platone nel Fedro circa il fine: “At ille: O artificiosissime Theuth, inquit, alius ad iudicandum prontior, alius ad eius opera facienda idoneus est.” E, risguardando questo medessimo, Aristotile nella Poetica dava per avvertimento al suo poeta che non ad un subito et ad un fiato facesse il suo poema, ma di quando in quando lo tralasciasse e tornasse a ripigliare, come fanno, soggiongeva, i pittori, che le loro opere le van tralasciando e ripigliando per poterle ben giudicare e correggere. E la causa è perchè, in quel furor dell’operare, la fantasia è talmente vistita e imbeverata di quella fantasma che dall’intelletto d’esso non ne può esser spogliata nè corretta, come avvien ancor d’altri impressioni, per le quali alle volte sopravvengono delle pazzie come di quella ch’appresso i medici vien detta eros et amor eroico, del quale intese l’Ariosto quando disse che “non è vero [8] amor se non insania al giuditio di savij universali.” Alla quale

341 impression risguardando, Appelle riprendeva Protogene, come referisce Plinio al lib. XXXV, che non levava mai nè occhio nè pennello dall’opera fin tanto che non l’havesse condotta al fine; et in questo modo Pavol Veronese superò li antichi qual, non levando mai pennello dall’opera, condusse a gran perfettione le cose sue come si vedono. Qual sentenza, che l’artefice non giudichi dell’artificio per le raggion dette, ancorchè sia vera dell’artefice che le fa, ha anco verità dell’artefici del medessimo artificio, come esplicò il Ficino al decimo delle Leggi, al cap. 3 (supponendo che il giuditio appartenga all’intelletto e non alla fantasia) quando che disse: “Istam confessionem exprimere volens supra dicebam quod pictura et omnis immitandi facultas procul veritate posita suum opus exercet; rursusque cum aliqua nostri parte prudentiae expertae congreditur et amicitiam contrahit at sincerum verumque nihil.” Che da questo detto si raccoglie che il pittore non possa ben giudicare delle pitture, e l’argomento è tale perchè la pittura, essendo immitatione, non puol internamente et intimamente intendere la verità delle cose naturali o artificiose, ma solo dall’esterno et superficie. Che per corroboration soggionge che il pittore è simile a quelli che veston i fatti tragici co’versi jambi, quali non intendono il concetto e forza della favola o dell’historia soggetto della tragedia; così i pittori, che vestan con la sopraveste del colore i fatti civili, naturali, artificiosi et altro, non intendono la natura di quel tal fatto immitato e vestito di colore. Il che poi esplicò più chiaramente Hippocrate dicendo che il pittore rozzamente considerava le membra del corpo humano, non le considerando internamente, ma solo in superficie. Onde il pittor, non havendo l’habito della prudenza, come disse il Ficino con il quale si deve giudicare, e non considerando internamente la natura delle cose immitate, non puol dar perfetto giuditio della pittura; e ciò perchè quest’habito pittorescho, come l’altri habiti artificiosi, è nella fantasia e in essa riserbato, e l’atto poi di [9] giudicarli, messo in atto esternamente, appartiene all’intelletto con la sua prudenza, sapienza et intelligenza, considerando se le cose sian ben immitate et espresse con le circostanze, quali puol molto ben giudicare senza havere habilità nelle mani di poterle rappresentar con il pennello e con il colore, e così, senza esser pittore, fittor o immitator. E ciò più chiaramente ce l’insegnò Galeno al II De Sanitate Tuenda, al cap. XI, con l’essempio del Pedotrika et del medico che ha cura di conservar la sanità che quello sa far, et insegnar l’esercitij di ballare, cavalcare od altro, ma non le loro utilità, nè a chi convengono e quando, il che vien insegnato e commandato dal medico, artefice a lui superiore. Onde, per conclusione,è impossibile o difficilissimo questo giuditio nel pittore, ricercando quella nudità dell'intelletto dal fantasma del quale deve giudicare, havendo noi da Aristotile al III del Anima: "Intus existens prohibet extraneum." Onde il pittor, per operar dovendo havere questa fantasma nella fantasia, non puol esser corretta dall'intelletto e, se pur avviene che si correga, ciò avviene o con difficoltà in pochi e dopo longo tempo, e ciò, come diceva Aristotile, cum ferit singula factus, cioè dopo haver acquistato l'habito della sapienza, intelligenza, e prudenza. E benchè, come s’è detto, sia vero del pittor che le fa, è ancor vero d’un altro pittore per la ragione del Ficino già addotta, perchè il lor esser artifizioso è nella fantasia, et il giuditio nell’intelletto con li habiti detti co’quali riconosca il buon e perfetto, con la prudenza delle circostanze intorno alle cose per loro bontà, utilità, valor e prezzo per il mutuo che si deve considerar nella comunità civile. Perchè, non essendo le pitture cose di necessità assoluta, ma di diletto, nè meno hanno misura necessaria di lor valore e, se vi casca [10] qualche misura per le circostanze di chi le vende e compra, del tempo e del luogo e della cosa immitata e dipenta sopra la quale si fa questo contratto, queste

342 circostanze non le puol riconoscer l’artefice particolare, ma il prudente, il quale considera il gusto, possibilità et necessità di chi compra, e non già il pittore, come vediam avvenire delle cose di diletto come suono, ballo, canto, per lasciar il contatto di una donna, che da un principe vien pagato a decina di scudi e da un privato, con maggior strapazzo, a decine di baiocchi, Onde Aristotile al V dell’Etica, dove parla del mutuo di simili cose, dice queste parole: “Habita ratione sui hominis et operis,” cioè del valor dell’artefice, del compratore e dell’opera fatta, che così poi nel prezzo vi sarà una certa latitudine da considerarsi da questo nostro perito, o per dir meglio prudente, come il dono dato da Iddio all’artefice per venir a tal perfettion d’arte, le fatighe fatte per li tempi a dietro per acquistar l’habito, il tempo consumato per condurre l’opera, et in ultimo li capitali di coloro od altro per condurla, che queste circostanze non possono così bene esser considerate dall’artefice, et in particolare il grado proprio e suo merito che ha nella communità civile, che questo grado è ben conosciuto dal prudente, come insegna Aristotile nel primo del Etica. Oltre che, quando la pittura è giudicata da un altro pittore, o figulus figulum odit, o vero, per mettere in prezzo la mercantia dell’arte propria, dà nelle stravaganze. Onde, come nell’altre arti vien messo il prezzo e giuditio dall’artefice superiore e perito erudito nel modo detto, quale giudicherà e potrà ben giudicare per le ragion dette, così anchor nella pittura doverà avvenire. Vi se aggiunge che non potrà esser abagliato dalla passione d’interesse o d’odio, poichè non è figolo nè mercante di tal merce, e così questo nostro perito sarà ottimo giudice, come ci eravam proposto di provare. Nè fa contro questa verità quello che si diceva da principio, che chi non fa non puol giudicare, che i prudenti di governo si rimettono [11] ai professori, il detto d’Appelle, di Stratonico Musico e d’Aristotile nelle Morali, che ciascuno è buon giudice delle cose ch’ha in prattica, et il detto di Fabio Pittore appresso Quintiliano. Perchè prima si dice che l’uomo non fa l’asino, il bove od un cavallo, un prato od un monte, con tutto ciò dà giuditio retto di tutte’ queste cose, perchè, se altrimenti avvenisse, bisognarebbe che fusse senza giuditio, cioè un asino, un bove et un cavallo, cose inettissime a dire, o vero che deventasse Domenedio che fa i prati e monti, cose impiissime a pensare. E se bene i periti di governo si rimettono all’artefici, se dice che, se riconoscessero un tal perito da noi circonscritto, lo preferirebbono per le ragioni dette; et a simil perito so esser stato rimesso più volte simil difficultà et accommodate con dimostrar all’artefice il grado, merito e fadighe, et all’incontro al compratore le medesime cose et altre somministrateli da questa peritia. E se Appelle o Stratonico havesse hauto a trattar con un simil perito gl’havrebbe resposto, che sapesse ultra crepidam et malleum, et haverebbe potuto dire, per haver la sapienza et intelligenza con la prudenza, per le quali riconosce e giudica tutte le cose; e così Aristotile ancora haverebbe approvato il giuditio di questo perito perchè, havendo in prattica tutte le cose, pertanto di tutte senza passion puol giudicare.

Supposto dunque per vero che si possi dar giuditio della pittura da un huomo perito che non sappia maneggiare il pennello, l’intention mia è di propor il modo con il quale da un huomo di mediocre ingegno et giuditio naturale si possa apprendere questo giuditio et simil eruditione; per la quale, oltre al desegno che deve haver appresso com’un huomo civile come caviam da Aristotile al VIII della Politica, al cap. 3, è bisogno che sappia le seguenti cose, cioè:

343 [12] che sia pittura e quante siano le sue specie e i requisiti per la bontà di qualsivoglia di loro; le nationi che hanno dipento; i tempi ne’ quali hanno fatto le lor pitture secondo la perfettione od imperfettione dell’arte, e così dell’età della pittura in qualsivoglia nattione che ha dipento fin a questi nostri tempi; il modo vario col quale è stato dipento; et, essendo la pittura un’immitatione come si dirà, quante cose dal pittore vengono ad esser immitate; et in ultimo le regole de riconoscer la loro bontà e prezzi e di collocarle ai loro luoghi.

Quoted from Giulio Mancini, ed. Adriana Marucchi, Considerazioni sulla Pittura, 2 vols. (Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 1956), I, 5-12.

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9. Giulio Mancini, Biography of Jusepe de Ribera, Considerations on Painting.

Di Giuseppe Ribera detto lo Spagnoletto. Non si può nè deve negare che Giuseppe Ribera, valentiano, communemente detto il Spagnoletto, non habbia havuto una disposition tale da natura che da molt’anni in qua, fra i suggetti comparsi, non si sia vista la maggiore; perchè, ancor giovanetto, essendosene andato per la Lombardia per veder le cose di quei valent’huomini, capitando in Parma, messe gelosia in quelli che servivan quell’Altezza che, venendo questo suggetto a notitia di quel Prencipe, lo pigliasse al suo servitio et così fusser levati da quella servitù, onde lo necessitorno a partirsene. Et, venutosene a Roma, si messe a lavorar a giornata con questi che fan bottega e mercantie di pitture con le fadighe di simil giovani. Con la quale occasione, portandosi bene, si fece conoscer per valent’huomo e venne in gran reputatione con grandissimo guadagno. Ma in progresso di tempo, rincrescendoli il lavorare e tenendo vita che spendeva molto più che non guadagnava, fu forzato e necessitato dal debito a partirsi di Roma et andarsene a Napoli dove, raccettato da Giovan ***, siciliano, pittore et huomo singolarissimo in far in picciolo di cera e di terra et adesso nella pittura non ordinario, pigliò una sua figlia per moglie et, operando varie opere con quella felicità che suole, hebbe introduttion appresso il Vicerè, onde adesso con guadagno e splendore vive in quella città dove, ancorchè spenda secondo il suo solito et quel più che comporta e necessita la moglie et il comparir alla corte honoratamente, nondimeno, havendo lasciato i sparapani, con la prestezza del lavorar accompagnato dal colorito e buon intendimento, guadagna tanto che supplisce all splendor delle sue spese. Questo dal signor Guido vien molto stimato facendo gran conto della sua risolution e colorito, qual per il più è la strada del Caravaggio, ma più tento e più fiero. Era qui in Roma di costumi un po’ licentiosetti e, benchè fusse accoltissimo, nondimeno alcune volte incappava come fu quando che un anno per Pasqua, non essendosi confessato più per trascuraggine [250] che per mala volontà o altro

344 impedimento, dubitando che non l’intervenisse qualche cosa, pregò un suo amico che gli facesse haver un non gravetur, non sapendo che simil cause non hanno il non gravetur nè le tratta il foro del Governatore. Nondimeno con questa sua semplicità haveva congionta, nei bisogni, una gran rethorica, come si vedde più volte in persona dell’illustrissimo governatore Giulio Bunterentij che ductus ad presentiam pro suspicione fugae pro dare, si sapeva tanto ben raccomandare che da esso in quelle necessità li venivan prestati denari con promessa di farle tante pitture. In ultimo si partì per Napoli, et invero si potrebbe ascrivir a un po’ di mala volontà poichè, ogni volta che voleva lavorare, si guadagnava cinque o sei scudi al giorno che, con la spesa ordinaria, presto e facilmente havrebbe pagato ognuno. Nè a tanti sparapani che teneva vi voleva men di questo guadagno, ancorchè s’aiutasse con poche massaritie di casa che eran queste:

matarazzi a nolo per sei persone ...... n. 1 coperte duplius usus per coperta e lenzuolo ...... n. 1 salviette e tovaglie tanti stracci a fogli dissegnati ...... n. 1 piatti grandi multi usus ...... n. c fiaschi per bichier e sottocopa ...... n. c sedie per sedere mattoni ...... n. X

Con tutto ciò, con questi suoi modi stravaganti, era riputato et assai et, quel che è maggior maraviglia, gl’huomini che havevan gusto della pittura et che eran creditori di prestanza di denari, con le parole dando speranza di farli quello che desideravano, si li levava da torno a bocca dolce. Ma li osti, fornari, pizzicaroli, fruttaroli et hebrei gli facevano un gran tirar di faraiolo con gran romoreggiar alla porta et mandargli [251] nell’un’hora di notte certe polizette di ricordo che si dicon citationi per le quali in ultimo, dubitando del capiatur, si partì. Fece molte cose qui in Roma et in particulare per ***, spagniolo, quale ha cinque mezze figure per i cinque sensi molto belle, un Christo Deposto et altro che invero son cose di esquisitissima bellezza.

Quoted from Giulio Mancini, ed. Adriana Marucchi, Considerazioni sulla Pittura, 2 vols. (Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 1956), I, 249-51.

Of Giuseppe Ribera called lo Spagnoletto. One cannot nor should one attempt to deny that Giuseppe Ribera, Valencian, commonly called il Spagnoletto, should not have had a disposition from nature, the like of which for many years has not been seen among the subjects who have [since] appeared [here in Rome]; for, when he was still a youth, having been about Lombardy to see the works of those experts (valent’huomini), arriving in Parma, he filled with jealousy those who served that Highness who, this subject coming to the attention of that Prince, might take him into his service and thus relieve them of theirs, whence they forced him to get out. And having arrived in Rome, he began to work by the day with those who keep shops and sell pictures from the labors of such youths. With which occasion, bearing himself well, he gained a reputation as an expert (valent’huomo) and came into great

345 renown with great wealth. But as time went by, as his workload increased and having a lifestyle in which he spent far more than he earned, he was forced and necessitated by debt to leave Rome and to go to Naples, where, being taken in by Giovan *** the Sicilian, a painter and a most singular man in making small things of wax and earth and now in painting more than ordinary, [Ribera] took one of his daughters as a wife, and, making various works with his usual felicity, he gained an introduction to the Viceroy, whence now with great income and splendor he lives in that city where, although he spends according to his habit and far more than would be appropriate or required by a wife and appearing honorably at court, nevertheless, [having left behind his days as a laborer] as his speed in working was accompanied by color and good understanding, he earns so much that he can support even the splendor of his expenses. He is held in great esteem by signor Guido [Reni], who makes great account of his resolution and coloring, which is for the most part in the way of Caravaggio, but more decisive and more daring. Here in Rome he was of rather licentious habit, and although he was extraordinarily savvy, nevertheless a few times he ran into trouble, as when one year at Easter, not having been to confession more out of neglect than out of ill will or other impediment, fearing lest he should get into trouble, he begged a friend of his to arrange for him to get a non gravetur, not knowing that the non gravetur is not for such causes, nor does the Governor deal with them. Notwithstanding this simplicity (semplicità) of his, he also possessed, at need, great rhetoric (gran rethorica), as the most illustrious governor Giulio Bunterentij had many occasions to observe, who [i.e., Ribera] ductus ad presentiam pro suspicione fugae pro dare [presence considered on suspicion of fleeing his creditors], advocated so well for himself that in such straits [the Governor] even came to lend him money against a promise that [Ribera] would make so many paintings for him. Finally he left for Naples, and in truth, one might ascribe [to him] some bad faith, for anytime he wanted to work, he earned five or six scudi a day, which, with ordinary expenses (la spesa ordinaria), quickly and easily would have enabled him to pay everyone back. Nor could his many creditors be satisified with less than such a wage, even supplemented as it was by his few household furnishings, which were these:

Mattresses, [rented] for six persons...... 1 lot Double blankets used for covers and bedlinens...... 1 lot Napkins and tablecloths of assorted design ...... -- Large plates of multiple use ...... 1 lot of 100 Drinking glasses and saucers...... 1 lot 100 Seats on bricks ...... 10 lots [CF*]

Despite all this, with these extravagant ways of his (modi stravaganti), he was quite renowned, and what is more astonishing, the men who had a taste for painting and who were creditors and moneylenders, he led by the nose with his smooth talk, giving them hope with his words that he would make for them what they desired. But the innkeepers, bakers, food sellers, fruit vendors and Jews, [seeing that] he was slow in the payment of his debts, beat on his door and sent bill collectors with documents called citations at all hours of the night, who finally doubting that they would ever get their money, departed. [CF*]

346 He made many things here in Rome, and in particular for ***, a Spaniard, who has five very beautiful half figures for the five senses, a Deposed Christ and other works that are truly things of most exquisite beauty.

*The sentences followed by the initials CF, as well as several individual passages whose interpretation was obscure to me, are taken from the translation by Craig Felton, with gratitude and apologies if I have merely overwritten with errors his hard work.

Craig Felton, “The Paintings of Ribera,” in Craig Felton and William B. Jordan (eds.), Jusepe de Ribera: Lo Spagnoletto, 1591-1652 (Exh. cat. Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1982), note 17, pp. 67-68.

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10. Letter from Giulio Mancini in Rome to Diefebo Mancini in Siena, 7 April, 1617

“... Il nome del autor del San Girolamo si chiama lo Spagnioletto quale adesso si ritrova in Napoli con gran fasto e reputazione e non ha tant’ eccesso nel arte quanta manigoldaria nel costume di puttane, di magniare, sbricconare e con esso poi [con] una semplicitA [vegliano]. Perché in casa sua continuamente puttane numero iij, senza camicia, sozze, laide e ..., letti numero i, distesso in terra; tutti dormivano chi mettendovi il capo in terra e chi un po’ di corpo’ piatti numero i e vi si faceva l’insalata, la broda e ogni cosa, al quale corrispondeva pignatte numero uno. Un fiascho senza bichiera e senza salviette e la tovaglia la domenica erono le carte del disegnio della settimana, il resto o in [terra] o come lo sparvere. Con tutto ciò non le bastavano 4 scudi il giorno: s’è fuggito per debito. Et con tanta sua manigoldaria non s’essendo l’anno passato confessato, dubbitando di non andar in prigione, dimandava ad un amico come potesse far per tal affetto a haver un non graveatur, come per debito le haveva fatto haver più volte e per altri ripetti che il governatore; se non havesse [...] l’havarebbe mandato in Galera. Et E gran dire cotesto San Girolamo lo fecce al più in due giorni, che se voi ponete ben mente vedrete che per tenta si serve del imprimatura e questo basta, che è comun opinione che del colorito sia stato piu padrone Michelangelo, poichè 10 mezze figure d’un giudizio di Nostro Signore maggior del [reale] le fece in 5 giorni per 20 scudi che adesso s’è venduto 200.”

Siena, Archivio della Società degli Esecutori Pie Disposizioni, Eredità Mancini, busta 4, cc. 479-80; transcribed in Michele Maccherini, Caravaggio e i Caravaggeschi nel carteggio familiare di Giulio Mancini (PhDiss. Rome: Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” 1995), 306.

Quoted from Justus Lange, “Opere veramente di rara naturalezza” Studien zum Frühwerk Jusepe de Riberas mit Katalog der Gemälde bis 1626 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003), doc. no. 24, pp. 268-69.

347 ... the author of the Saint Jerome is called lo Spagnioletto who now finds himself in Naples with great pomp and reputation and has not so much excess in art as miscreancy of habit in whoring, eating, running amok, and therewith [?] of [great] simplicity. For in his house there are continually whores in quantity iii, shirtless, filthy, ugly, and ..., beds in quantity i, spread out on the floor; everyone slept there, one person with their head on the floor, and another with here and there a scrap of body; plates quantity i, and one made therein the salad, the soup and everything else, to which corresponded pots, one in number. A flask without glasses and without napkins, and the tablecloth on Sundays was made up of the week’s drawings, the rest either on the floor or [like the hawk?]. With all this, he did not even get by on 4 scudi a day: he fled because of his debts. And with so much miscreancy, not having been to confession in the past year, and being worried that he might go to prison, he asked a friend how he might affect to obtain a non graveatur [sic.], as for his debts he had done many times and through other channels than the governor; if he hadn’t [...], they would have sent him to the galleys. And it’s said that he made that Saint Jerome in two days at the most, so that if you think about it well you will see that he uses the imprimatura to draw in and that’s it, [and] it’s common opinion that in coloring Michelangelo [da Caravaggio] was the greater, since 10 half-figures of a judgment of our Lord over life-sized, he [Ribera] produced in five days for 20 scudi, which has now been sold for 200.

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11. Giulio Mancini, "Della Pittura, e Scoltura." In Alcune considerazioni del honore fatte da Giulio Mancini per suo trattenimento. Occasione del scrivere e come introduttione a quel che si deve dire. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb.Lat. 4314, ff. 120v-123r.

Doppo le arti che fanno alla constitutione, conservatione è difesa della nostra città è suo cittadino gia considerato vi sono quelle che fanno al ornato diletto, et ammaestramento del nostro popolo e son diverse, è fra le prime vi è la Pittura è Scoltura che nel medesimo tempo orna e dà diletto, et ammaestramento. Queste come le altre hanno la formatione, l'operatione è la cosa fatta con tutte le circostanze di figura, colore et altro. Quanto alla formatione spesse volte gli e dato l'epitetto di Sapiente come si vede al 3. de Rè al 7 Misit quoque Rex Salamon et tulit Hiram de Tyro filim mulieris.

121 recto vedua de Tribu Nephtalim patre Tyro artificeñ eranium plenum sapientiae intelligentia et doctrina ad faciendum omne opus in aere, Et il Re di Tyro a Salamon al 2o del Paralip. al 2o dice misi ego Tibi virum Sapientem et prudentissimum Hiram gli aggiunge l'epitetto prem meum qui novit operari in auro et argento aere et ferro, marmore, et lignis in purpura quoque et hyacinto bisso, et cocciuno qui scit celare omnem sculpturam, et adinvenire prudenter quodcumque in poere necessarium si che rispetto a questa formatione è honorato di sapienza et intelligenza, e per magior risguardo dalli huomini dimandato Padre del Prencipe se poi si considera la Pittura quanto alla formatione la sua

348 formatione è la cognitione della cosa con la formatione sua nel intelletto da dover essere espressa in una superficie piana che con mezzo di varietà de colori dimostra la cosa stessa con le sue cose ammesse che quest astrattione, e formatione richerca grand'ingegno è cosi merita poi honore appresso a gli huomini se si considera poi quanto all'operatione

121 verso nella Pittura non ha dubbio che vi è del sordido per maneggiare colori, calce olij et altre cose che deturpano i panni e cosi esser necessitato in quest atto di vestir veste sozze e sporche che per tal rispetto noto Plinio come cosa rara che Attio Prisco nella casa di Nerone dove dipengeva super i ponti usasse la veste civile, è se bene il lavorar a olio nei nostri tempi non deturpa tanto ne corrono pericolo de i ponti non dimeno sempre quell'olio ha un certo fetore assai molesto è son tutti necesssitati a starsene a lavorare in una stanza che ha del sordido e del servile. E queste cose sono communi ancor alla scoltura con questa proprietà però che è qui faticosa è pericolosa ricercando scarpello, è mazzuolo in luogo piu racchiuso con pericolo che qualche suerza de di (sic) marmo non gli percuota gli occhi e nel lavorare di stucco starchi per i ponti è maneggiar calce con insalubrità di vapor cattivo è nel lavorar di bronzo maneggiar terra è gesso per formare et carbone per fondere con pericolo della vita

122 recto nella fusione che non basta à sfuggirlo ritirarsi dietro un muro. Ma se si opera senza queste sordidezze come avviene nel disegnar di penna et di lapis et con cera e terra all'hora questa operatione non havendo del sordido ne denerpando il corpo sara honorata et per compimento d'huomo ingenuo come insegnò Arist. al 8. della Polit: al c. 3 con quelle conditioni pero che non si rappresentino cose lascive come insegno il medesimo al 7. della Polit. al cap. ultimo. Se si considera la cosa fatta ha molto honore per l'utilita è giocondità che apporta essendo come disse Sesto Empirico una poesia muta che come quella è honorata cosi ancor queste Sarasmo honorate eccitando gli huomini al bene operare perche rappresenta il costume della Religione, et delle cose heroicamente fatte che per tal rispetto una pittura bella viene ancor conservata dall'inimico come apparve nell'assedio di Rodi che da Demetrio come dice Plinio al lib. 35 et Plut. in Demetrio perche dovendosi per

122 verso ragion di guerra battere in terra una muraglia, dove era una bellissima Pittura di Protogene prohibi questa demolitione come ancora ne nostri tempi le Pitture della Capella Paulina (sic) hanno salvato quella Cappella. Onde i Pittori e Scultori haveranno grado di honore nella Città onde Fabio per cognome Pittore, Patritio Romano descendente da Ercole Anonno Pio, Platone, Cicerone, Nerone, e molti altri nobilissimi huomini di tutti tempi hanno dipinto è sono stati scultori. E per tal professione sono stati honorati di grado di Cavalleregio è di cio perche questi sapientissimi Prencipi hanno considerato quello che dice Aristo. all. 8. delle moral. che l'honore si da à quelli che untilitano il publico che queste professioni utilitando é dilettando tanto con la cosa che esprimono con vaghezza

349 devono per tanto haver grado d`honore nella città ma quale rispetto alli altri artifici è chi deva procedere di loro si dira piu abasso al luogo suo quando che si proporranno le serie dell'honori è le precedenze delli

123 recto nostri Cittadini.

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12. Giulio Mancini, Che cosa sia disegno. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb. Lat. 4315, ff. 147r-155r.

147 recto

Parrà forse cosa degna d’ammiratione e reprensione, che non essendo io Pittore, od altro artefice, che per venire al fine da cui proposto uso, ed adoperi il disegno mi sia propost’il trattenerne, e tanto maggiormente s’augmenta que sea reprensione, quanto che me ne ho proposto di trattarne in Roma et che ne di questi sui secoli della Pittura, Scultura, Architettura; e Prospettiva, che adoperan, ò son mastre di questo grand’artificio detto Disegno. Et certo sarei degno di reprensione secò mi proponisse il trattarne per insegnamento, intentione dall’in tutto lontana dal mio pensier, e fine; qual è sol di dimostrar il diletto, che tengo di questa professione, e quello che io habbia potuto raccor, e raccolto dalla conversatione di simil virtuosi. E bene il trattarne in qualsivoglia modo sia cosa difficile, et improportionata al mio potere per le varie difficultà, che contiene in se. Nondimeno accio che le difficultà si sminuischino usaré nel trattarne quest’ordine, e modo. P.a per alcune cose sensate andarò cercando, che cosa sia. 2° di quante sorti sia, ò per dirla piu chiara

147 verso quante sieno le sue spetie. A chi s’appartenga et se convenga ad un huomo nobile non applicat’ al qualsivoglia manovalità l’apprenderne qual che cosa et in ultimo la sua utilità.

Cominciando dal p.o Potendosi considerar il disegno et com’attion fatta del huomo, e come cosa, che resta fatta doppo quest’operatione; ch’è quel segno, o figura in carta, o altrove, che noi vediamo. Per andar ordinatamente nel trovar, che cosa sia considero prima quest’attione, la qual che convengh’all’huomo, et all’huomo solo in rispetto degl’altri animali; Ne anch’à tutti gl’huomini, non e da dubitare, poiche tutto questo appar’al senso. Vedendo che sol fra li animali l’huomo fa quest’ attione, et che gl’huomini rustici, e Plebei, che non san tener la penna, od altro instrument’appropriato in mano non sann’ne anco disegnare. Onde essendo vera questa conclusione doviam andar piu oltre, cercando se quest’attion, che convien all’huomo le sia per natura, o per disciplina et apprendimento. Et per disciplina et apprehendimento sia come quella del parlare, overo come quella del leggere scrivere cavalcare, ballare, e simili. Non doviam

350 dire

148 recto dir che le convenga per natura per non convenire a tutti, come converrebbe se li fusse per natura. Onde non convien per natura non convenendo a tutti; ma a pochi; e questi con fatica, e disciplina. Or venendo per disciplina doviam considerar se sia con quella disciplina, che con veder, e servir s’apprende com’avvien del parlar, del quale ce ne impossessiam senza avvedersi della disciplina, et insegnamento. Overo con disciplina et ammaestramento E per un rispetto appare, che con il veder degl’altri ci venga questo. Onde vediamo, che fanciulletti con il vedere in queste Accademie cosi utili quanto, che honorate del disegno dal vivo van apprendendo il disegnare con il vedere far questa operatione dai piu Provetti nel modo à punto, che i fanciulli imparan à parlare con il veder, e sentir proferir questa, e quel altra voce con tal movimento di bocca, e di lingua con la demostratione della cosa significativa. Non dimeno perche in quest’Accademie vi è sempre qualche caritativo, e discret’artefice, che con la carità christiana, e zelo del mantenimento, e augumento dell’altre arte, ne van demostrando, et insegnando à men saputi, et eruditi, come avvien anco nel parlare

148 verso che per ben, e secondo le regole, e per facilità vi bisogna ancor demostratione, e guida. Per tanto doveremo dire, che quest’attion di disegnare sia per disciplina, et imparamento. Ma però tale, che adesso vi sia una dispositione naturale nell’huomo à guisa di quel carbone, che sta nascosto sotto la cenere che come vien ad esser ravvivato dandole materia va facendo gran progresso, e fiamma. E questa naturalezza se riconosce perche vediam i Pastorelli con i lor punzicarolli van facendo segni nella terra di queste ò quell’alltra figura, come racconta il Vasari di Meccarin da Siena. E ne putti piu civili, come si posson impadronire d’una penna van vacendo qualche scarabotto, che rappresenti al miglior modo questo, o quell’altro oggetto, il tutto nato da questa dispositione e principio naturale, che si ritrova nel huomo, che lo rende disposto à far quest’attione di disegnare si che stando, che sia per disciplina nata però, e fondata nella dispositione naturale doviam piu oltre andar cercando da qual parti del huomo sia fatta quest’attione. Perche havendo l’huomo l’anima, il corpo, et il composto, che dal composto del

149 recto dell’anima, e del corpo sia fatta, poiche disse Arist. al 2o dell’anima, che l’attioni erono del composto anzi soggiunse, che chi dicesse, che l’anima intendesse direbbe, che l’anima filasse, ò [tessisse] tanto men dunque si deve dir, che disegni, e che faccia quest’attione di disegnare; con dunque doverem dire, che questa dispositione sia del suggetto, e del composto. Ma perche si dice poi che l’anima sia principio di nutrire di sentire, e d’intendere, e di muovere, come disse pure il med[esimo] al med[esimo] luogo. Per tanto doviam cercar qual sia questo principio effettivo, questa facultà d’anima che causa questa dispositione, potentia, et atto, nel composto di disegnare se la nutriente,

351 sentiente, è quale ò l’intellettiva, e motiva della nutriente, et sentiente è manifesto non si ritrovando ne nelle piante ne nei bruti. Adunque sarà o dell’intellettiva, o appetitiva, o dell’uno, o del altra congionta insieme. Et invero essendo un’attion, che non resta nel huomo ma ha il fin esterno, et pera fatta per tanto direm che appartenga all’appetito, e facultà motiva Cercando però se penda talmente all’appetito,

149 verso che non vi habbia parte l’intelletto, overo, che vi habbia parte, et havendovene se vi concorra in tal modo, che non vi concorra ne la fantasia, ne la memoria. Io direi, che poiche l’appetito ò facultà motiva ogni volta, che opera vien indirizzata dalla facultà conoscente per tanto, che vi habbia di bisogno dell’aiuto dell’intelletto. Ma se questo intelletto per indrizzar questa facultà motiva à moversi, e disegnare, habbia bisogno della fantasia, o della memoria, non è ancor da dubitare. Perche ò noi formiam di nuomvo, over noi ritraremo dall’oggetto presente. Nel p[rimer]o modo non è dubbio, che bisogna, che noi ricorriamo alla fantasia, e memoria per poter con questa compor separar, et cosi formar di nuovo immagin di cose, et esprimerle con il disegno, et attion del disegnare. Se poi Dal presente noi andiam retrahendo vi è di bisogno di memoria con la qual riserviam il fantasma, ò immagin della visione fin all’ espressione. Onde si venga à disegnar quella cosa impressa nella memoria E cosi vedendo, che vien diretto quest’appetito, e facultà, motiva dell’intelletto, doverem dire di

150 recto di necessita, che la causa efficiente non sarà altra che l’appetito intellettivo, che noi diciam voluntà e questo basti dell’efficiente di quest’attione, che noi diciam disegnare. Dal che si comprende ancor che cosa sia disegnare, che è quest’attion fatta dalla voluntà diretta dall’intelletto, come viene ad esprimere l’immagine concepita per rappresentatione della fantasia, e della Memoria, considerato l’atto del disegnare. Seguit’hor il disegno come cosa, che resta fatta doppo quest’attion di disegnare. Che per trattar che cosa sia doviam prima considerare alcune cose sensate, e manifeste, e sono che noi chiamiamo disegno quello che ò in carta, o in altra materia senza colore; ma sol con superficie è espressa, ò con inchiostro lapis, ò altro vien ad esprimer la figura della cosa immaginata, senza quantità determinata, o non necessariamente corrispondente alla quantità vera, e naturale. Questo principio, ò assunto, che lo vogliam dire essendo sensato non ha dubbio. Perche quando vi è colore non altrimenti disegno; ma pittura vien dimandata. Com’ancor con sola superficie questa parti-

150 verso cella è chiara; perche quando vi è materialità non piu è disegno; ma rilievo, e modello. Et in ultimo è ver ancor quell’assunto, che sol ha la figura senza necessità di quantità determinata, e non corrispondent’al vero. Perche bene spesso fan’un disegno d’una battaglia in un mezzo foglio, che s’esprime sol la figura, l’attitudine; mà non gia la quantita propria, e naturale, che la quantità delle migliaia d’huomini, e cavalli non

352 capisce in un mezzo foglio. Onde s’esprime sol la figura, l’attitudine, e non la quantità propria, e naturale. Esplicato dunque, e conosciuto per verò questo supposto, doviam adesso da quel che si e detto dell’attion del disegnare, e da questo assunto sensato del disegno andar à cercare, che cosa li sia. Et havendo esplicato, che il disegnar erà un attion, che s’impara, e che si fa dalla voluntà diretta dall’intelletto, bisogna anco dir, che questo sia una cosa artificiosa, e che penda dall’arte. Tanto piu, che questo noi lo vediamo al operare, e far da artefici piu nobili Pittori, Architetti, Scultori, e Artefici mechanici, non quelli, che per viltà cosi

151 recto cosi son detti, mà quelli de quali parlò Arist[otile] nelle sue Mechaniche, che son quelli, che fan cose maravigliose di levar pesi, far fuochi artificiosi, moti d’acque, e tali, come in questi secoli haviam visto mover la guglia, e per tal attion Mechanica l’operatore è stato dichiarato nobile, e contrasegna solo d’habito di Cav[alie]re. Ond’essendo il Disegno cos’artificiosa, et artificiosa di simil arti; doviam per intelligenza esatta del disegno considerar prima alcune cose appartenenti all’arte, e di poi trovar di qual sorte d’arte sia la Pittura, Scultura, et Architettura, e per consequenza, com’habbia bisogno del disegno, e da questo cavarne poi che cosa ‘l sia. E quanto al p[rimer]o supposto, che l’intelletto habbia i suoi habiti, che sono Intelligenza, Sapienza, Scienza, Prudenza, et Arte. Et che questi sieno destinati fra di loro, perche altri appartengono all’intelletto contemplativo, come Intelligenza sapienza, e scienza, che non han’ cos’alcuna fuor di loro. Altri all’intelletto pratico, come Prudenza, et Arte

151 verso

Doviam anco supporre, e sapere, che la Prudenza è una retta regola di far l’attioni virtuose, e prudenti, secondo le circumstanze di tempo luogo quantità, e modo. l’Arte poi è una retta regola di far le cose artificiose; perche l’arte dell’edificare per esempio non è altro, che una regola di far bene l’edifitio, e quella del medicare d’indurre la sanità. Onde il disegno essendo una cosa artificiosa, non sarà altro, che d’una cosa, che pende da questa regola, ben formata, overo l’istessa regola, che forma et indirizza l’intelletto, e voluntà ad perar secondo, che conviene all’arte, e per arte e perche quest’ha un po di difficultà, ne si può ben intendere, se noi prima non sappiam per verissimo, come non ne accade dubitare, che queste arti, che si servon, e nelle quali si ritrova il disegno, come Pittura Scultura etc sono di quelle sorti d’arti, che havendo principio dalle Mathematiche s’applicano alle fisiche e naturali, et cosi si posson dir mathematiche medie, come l’Astrologia, la Musica, et altre Perche quest’usando il disegno, come quantità con application, o del color, o del materiale solido, si vanno accostando, e vestendo delle cose fisiche, e naturali Per

152 recto

Per tanto il disegno doverà esprimer questi due qualità, e dell’esser cos’artificiosa, et artificiosa di Mathematica media, che vien et usa il naturale. E perche di queste

353 Mathematiche medie altre sono subalternati alle Mathematiche assolute di quantità continua, altre di quantità discreta come l’Arithmetica et [Hisometria] se deve considerar qual di queste Mathematiche deva esprimere il disegno, se la quantità continua, o discreta. Et quant’à quel che appartien all’Arte, il disegno come cosa artificiosa d’arte, che sia mathematica media, che vada al naturale, non sarà altro, che una concettion espressa in carta, o altrove per punti dedott[?] in linee, che esprima la figura della cosa, che si deve fare, e dedurre al Naturale. Dico concett[ion]e espressa, Perche essendo l’Arte que concetto fatto di quella cosa, che deve haver l’esser reale fuor dell’intelletto, come l’ha spiritale, et come dicon certo in esser cognito nell’intelletto. Il disegno non sarà altro, che questa cosa concepita senza materia, o corpo naturale espresso con superficie, et linee dedotte dai punti per esprimer, et figurar quel concetto concepito nella mente in modo Mathematico, senz’applicarlo ancor all’

152 verso esser naturale, o alla materia, e corpo naturale di color, o di corpo. Et havendo noi detto esser quel concetto artificioso, non però siam dell’opinion di coloro, che il disegno è l’Idea artificiosa. Perche l’Idea artificiosa è tutta la cosa artificiosa concepita nella mente, per quell’essere che deve haver fuor della mente, che cosi comprende, e l’esser mathematico, e l’esser naturale. Ma il nostro disegno non diciam esser tutta questa Idea, mà l’esser concepito, et espresso consegni qual esser che la cos’ha in se d’esser quanta, et cosi d’esser mathematico senza application alc[un]a à colore, o cosa materiale. E questo quanto alla forma del disegno. Ma per maggior intelligenza havendo noi detto, che il disegno esprime questo esser mathematico, si può dubitare, e nasce occ[asio]ne di contemplare, se il disegno esprime sol la quantita continua, over ancor la discreta d[ett]o il num[er]o. Et appar di si vedendo noi, che si fanno le scale delle miglia [?con nei palmi] ne disegni delle Typografie Ma perche questi sono misure non per repetition dell’unità, come nella quantità discreta, mà per essenza propria della

153 recto della quantità continua per misurar la quantità estensa della cosa in esser naturale, che vien rappresentata con il disegno. Pertanto diremo che il Disegno non includa in se il numero, o, la quantità discreta; Ma sol la continua, che poi per mostrar la grandezza naturale, e reale, o futura di rappresentat[ion]e faccia la scala, la quale ancorche al primo aspetto paia quantità discreta nondimeno è continua nel modo detto. E questo modo di disegnar con numero s’osserva nell’Architettura, e nel Paesaggio di Cosmografia, e Typografia; et in qualche modo nella scultura per la quantità della materia nella quale opera, che ha longitudine, latitudine, e profondità.

Esplicate queste po di cose della Natura del Disegno potrem per utilità toccar alcune po di cose appartenenti all’Arti, che se ne servono, nelle quali non le medesimo modo vien in uso il disegno. Perche nell’Architettura, scultura, e Mechaniche, essendo nel todo, e nel vero non vi è di bisogno d’altro, che della quantità con la superficie ben intesa. Nella Pittura

354 153 verso poi essendo sol in cos’apparente d.o in superficie colorata, che per ragion di color diverso deve dar la grandezza lontananza, e presenza, vi bisogna un’altra sorte di disegno con ombre per mostrar queste qualità, e circumstanze. Ma perche con questi si và straccando, e divertendo l’intelletto avanti, che venga all’opera. Pertanto sarebbe molto à proposito à parer mio di far quello che si deve fare in grande, in piccolo con colore, accioche il concetto concepito piu immediatamente ci deduca all’esser naturale di colore, avanti, che si svanisca il pensiero concepito della quantità con il colore. Ma di questo si dirà piu à basso piu diffusamente. Ma quando, che s’impara all’hor bisogna far ogni diligenza di qualsivoglia minimo tratto, e linea. E questo basti per l’esplicatione della Natura del disegno. Seguit’hor che noi consideriam le sue spetie, le quali si deducono dalla memoria con la qual vengon ad esser espressi di penna, lapis, carbone. Da quel che rappresentono com’edificio, statua, Paese cosa colorita, e cosi di Pittura

154 recto

Pittura, scultura, o Architettura Onde ne nasce poi le differenze dal modo del fin del Disegno, che dev’haver per fine, et applicarsi ad una cosa solida, o ad una semplice superficie come di Pittore, e di Scultore etc. ò dal fin di ricordanza di cosa veduta, o trovata et che cosi che l’intelletto si serva nel dedur la voluntà à disegnare, o della memoria in disegnar le cose viste, o della fantasia nel disegnare le cose vedute. Lasciando la materia, dove si fanno questi segni, o disegni e questi distintioni, e differenze del disegno non han bisogno d’esplicatione; mà sol d’una ricognitione et applicatione Perche della materia diversa del qual è fatto è manifesto, come d’Inchiostro lapis, o d’altro. Cosi della sol superficie, o tratti lo vedi al ancor chiaro, che pittori eccellenti fanno ben la superficie, ma non gia tratteggion bene non havendo sciolta la mano alla penna, e lapis mà al pennello, come Titiano, et all’incontro han fatto altro come Baccio Benvenuto da Garofano, che han benissimo tratteggiato, e

154 verso sopra tutto Michelangelo et havendo esplicato la natura del disegno, e sue spetie Bisogna hor considerare se appartenga ad un huomo nobile, e deve apprendere questa facultà di disegnare E per una parte parrebbe di nò, non h[ave]ndo fine un tal huomo di Pittura, Scultura, o d altro, per non s’affaticar in vano. Non dimeno perche lo studio delle Mathematiche, e studio da nobile, poiche servon al Civil, e militare, professioni proprie del nobile, e questi s’apprendono, e si facilitano con il disegno. Pertanto non si deve dubitare punto, che il disegno, e disegnare appartenghi al huomo nobile. Tanto piu che del huomo nobile, è propria la Magnificenza, che risplende particularmente nel fare edifitij, le Pitture, le Sculture, le cose mechaniche d’ingegno, et ammiratione, che pendendo questi e riconoscendosi, e giudicandosi dal disegno, come haviam demostrato doverea credere, che come questi son da persone nobili, cosi ancor il lor Padre, Balio e Rettore, dico il disegno le deve appartenere come

355 155 recto com’ancor insegnò Franc[esc]o Patritij nella sua Republica, et Alessandro Piccolomini nell’Institution Civile, quali cavorono da Platone nella sua Repub[lica] et da Aristot[ile] nella Politica et appartenendo all’huomo nobile, che sorte di disegno deve esecutare penna, lapis, carbone. Dico di qualsivoglia materia per evento, e necessità del servirsene, et applicarlo, mà in particolare della penna cosa molto familiare usuale, et affettata, come il lapis, che ha dell’artefice pittoresco; Il tempo dell’apprenderlo, e fra i 12, in, 16 anni, e questo per diporto, et ad hore sottratte dalle cose, e studii piu gravi, che cosi poi l’applicarà alle Mathematiche, che doverà apprendere e por alli studij piu gravi, ne quali vi casca l’uso della Mathematica, e del disegno, e questo basti à proposito del disegno.

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13. Francesco De’Pietri, “Qual sia di maggior senso, ò potenza l’occhi, ò l’orecchio.”

Bisogna distinguere fra l’occhio, e l’orecchio nelle cose materiali, e fra l’occhio, e l’orecchio nella lettione degli Autori, e nell’udito, che s’hà da Maestri. Quanto al primo non è dubbio, che l’occhio prevaglia di gran lunga all’orecchio, onde se leggiamo, ò pure udiamo narrare che ne gli anni addietro in tempo della peste in Parigi andavan le Carra per la Città colme d’huomini morti, e moribondi piovendo sangue, e che i Beccamorti con gli uncini di ferro gli trahevano ancor tremanti, e languenti; ciò farà piccola impressione negli animi di chi ode, ò legge. Ma rappresentato all’occhio, apporterà sommo spavento, ET horrore, in guisa che molti da si fiero, ET orrendo spettacolo soprafatti, ne venivan meno, sicome leggiamo nella Storia Gallicana. Se leggiamo che Serse mosse mille mila guerrieri contra gli Ateniesi, in guisa, che tanta gente bevendo, disseccava i fiumi, onde passava; non prenderemo perciò gran maraviglia, ò spavento di smisurato esercito. Ma il Re, che ad occhi veggenti guardò scierata quella tanta calca, non potè contenersi di non lagrimare, come narra S. Girolamo, flevit Xerses ex alta specula, tantam militum aciem prospectans, quòd post paucos annos, nemo ex ijs superfuturus esset. Come havrebbe potuto la lettione, ò l’narramento di tal fatto cavar le lagrime da gli occhi di quel Principe udiamo Horatio nell’Arte Poet. Segnius irritant animos demissa per aures, Quàm qua sunt oculis subiecta fidelibus Laonde il prudente Filosofo vieta che nelle scene si rappresentino al vivo spettacoli fieri, ET horribili, come lo stesso nel luogo già detto. Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet. Siche in tal caso sia maggior l’occhio dell’orecchio. Quindi è che la vera scienza delle cose materiali, e visibili non si hà, salvo che dall’occhio, scit, qui avidit, la dove quella, che si hà dall’orecchio, ò pur dall’udito non sia punto efficace per disposition di legge, com’io dimostro nelle mie Lettioni Festive. E per non dipartirci da condimenti Accademici, ecco tutto ciò in Plauto nel suo Trucu. Pluris est oculatus testis unus, quàm auriti decem, Qui audiunt, audita dicunt, qui vident plane sciunt

356 Ma nel secondo caso, sarà maggior l’orecchio dell’occhio, percioche la voce de’ Maestri è viva, onde Seneca vuole, che non vi possa essere alcun dotto, che non habbia apparato da voce viva, ladove la semplice lettione sembra anzi voce morta. Il mio Maestro della ragion Civile Giulio Berlingiero nelle Feste dopò alcuni brievi discorsi, ne licentiava, dicendo: Andate ch’io vò favellare alquanto co’morti, per poter domattina communicare il tutto a voi con voce viva. Intendeva egli dello studio, e della lettion de’libri. Mi sovviene quel, ch’avviene in tempo d’Alessandro il Magno; Era in que’tempi un giovinetto di cinque lustri dotto in sommo grado in ciascuna scienza, del che maravigliato Alessandro, volle conoscerlo, e domandatogli, come in età così tenera, tante, e si gran cose apparato havesse, rispose il Giovane ch’haveva rubato il tempo; hor come, soggiunse Alessandro, si ruba il tempo? Sire, rispose il Giovane, lo nacqui agiato di beni di fortuna, onde mio padre mi tenne appresso d’huomini grandi; ET eminenti in ciascuna scienza, i quali mi communicarono in un soffio quel, ch’eglino in molt’anni, e con molto sudore dal rivolgimento de’ libri appreso havevano; tanto val la voce viva, Il perche gli scolari delle scienze prendon nome dall’orecchio, non già dell’occhio, chiamandosi Auditores. Onde è vero, che nel primiero caso delle materiali rappresentationi, prevalerà l’occhio all’udito, ma nel secondo della speculatione delle scienze, prevalerà l’udito da Maestri all’occhio, ò vero alla lettion de’ libri.

Francesco De’Pietri, I Problemi Accademici del Signor Francesco de’Pietri L’Impedito Accademico Otioso, ove Le più famose Quistioni proposte nell’Illustrissima Accademia de gli Otiosi di Napoli si spiegano (Naples: Francesco Savio, 1642), 138-40.

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14. Andrea Brayda? Discourse held in the Accademia degli Oziosi on the paragone between painting and sculpture. Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Borg. Lat. 144, ff. 409r-410v.

[One in a series of discourses, all apparently by Andrea Brayda, Otiose Academic, the first of which is noted to have been held in Naples on the 8th of August, 1630, in the presence of the Viceroy, the Duke of Alcalá (according to heading on fol. 375r.)]

409 recto

Tanta è la speranza ... [ellipsis in original] della felice riuscita che fara quest’ accademia, che ha messe quelle due si celebrat’arti cio è la pittura, e la scoltura, di voler terminare quella lor’ vecchia e di tant’anni ventilata lite di precedenza, et oggi a punto per [sic] quest’ unite qui sono comparse, e rimanendo di furore come è costume de litiganti co[l’] haver mandati per loro avocati il piu di questi S.ri, et a me particolare è venuta la pittura con pregarmi che per lei entri in Arringo, e che qual suo campione defenda i suoi meriti, et io confidato nelle sue bone ragioni bandanzoso comparo alla presenza vostra co[n la] speranza che le mie parure converando volubili e fucagi qual rapidi torrenti, e de cio’

357 francam.te avertato a si grave peso soppongo le spalle, e volgendo aver lo sguardo e della vaga foggia unico sole, e de si preggiati e pellegrin’ Ingegni aver mer.mo e cec’ dimando in qual guisa ardisce la scoltura competere co[n] la pittura che de gran lungi sempre l’ha lasciat’a dietro discorrere meco S.ri pervostra fede, e seguite co[n i] passi dell’orecchie le spedite carriere della precorretrice lingua et udite le maraviglie della pittura ch’ha ingandata [sic] la vista in modo che molte volte nella [sic - nulla] differenza si è fatta del certo al figurato, come si legge nella compiacenza di Zeusi co[n] Parrasio pittori eccelenti quale reputandosi uno piu dell’altro determinarno che ciascuno facesse la piu perfetta figura che potesse, e qual fusse migliore fusse piu ecc.te reputato del’altro Caccio fuori Zeusi una bella tavola nella quale vi era[no] dipinti due grappoli d’uve cosi al naturale che certi passaci [sic] ingan :

409 verso dati dalla pittura calorno per beccarli. al Incontro presentò Parrasio un altra tavola ove era depinto un lenzuolo co[n] tanta perfettione che fù giudicato da Zeusi vero, et il Sep.o detto Parrasio come narra Strabone nel 13 lib. depinse una Pernice in modo che ingando’ le vive. Valerio Martiale celebrò una cagna depinta come se fusse viva dicendo Ipsa’ denique pene cu/catella aut untramq. putabis ec.= uera’, aut utramq. putabis ex= pietã. E meno.= Bembo parlando d’un’ Imagine che pinse Gio: bellino la celebrò con questi versi O Imagine mia Celeste e pura che splende piu ch’il sol’ a gl’occhi mei e mi rassembri il volto di colei che scolpit’hò nel cor co’ maggior cura Credo che il mio Bellin co[n] la figura t’habbia dat’il costume anco di lei che m’arti e se ti miro, e per te sei freddo smalto mi giunse altra ventura

E Bernardo tasso sep.a un ritratto de Giulia Gonzaga disse Non Fidia Apelle, o’ chi pinse e scolpio meglio in duri metalli in marmi in carte di questa vera Imagine de Dio havran’ saputo far’ la minor parte E tant’altre meraviglie che questa celebr’arte fa giornalm.te; e dovendo io quella difendere, e le sue lodi celebrare, credo che no[n] sarà fuor di proposito narrar’ la sua origine secondo scrive

410 recto

Plinio nel lib 35 si vantavan’ l’egittij ch’havesse priorita appo di loro sei mila anni che la gretia n’havess’ havuto iuditio alcuno si bene il scptto [?] plinio vuole nel lib. 2.e che fuss’inventata da uno chiamato Ginge Lidio, sien’ essa grandiss.a erudit.e e strettissa commertio co[n] la Poesia conforme detto e’pico per sentenza di Simonide poeta che

358 disse la pittura [sic - poesia] e[sse]re una pittura che parla e per questo platone nel phedro disse Picture opera tanqua[m] viventia extant si quid vero rogaveris verecunda admodu[m] silent - Et app.o gl’antichi Greci secondo Baltassar Castiglione, fu tenuta in tanto preggio che volevano che i fanciulli nobili nella scuola della pittura dessero opera, e fu recevuta nel p.o grado dell’arti liberali, e vietato per public’editto che a servi n[on] s’insegnasse. Appo de Romani fu’ di tanto credito che come scrive plinio nel lib 39 [sic] che da essa trasse il cognome la nobiliss.a famiglia de fabij e che il p.o fabio fù cognominato pittore e tanto si preggiò di essa che havendo pinte le mura del tempio della salute vi scrisse il suo nome giudicando che li accrescesse gloria co[n] lasciar mem[oria] che fù pittore. Vi attese anco fra Romanio Turpilio Cavaliere qual depinse co[n] la sinistra mano miracolosam.te oltra che Missalissa, Marco Valerio Massimo Consule, Lucio Scipione, Lucio Hostilio, Mancino, Caio Cesare Dittatore, il gra[nde] augusto Tiberio Claudio Nerone, et infinit’altri huomini illustri antichi che di questo mistiero si dilettorno come anco fra moderni si dilettò di essa la buona mem[ori]a de Philippo 3o d’austria Re di Spagna il qual depingeva un pantalone venetiano miracolosam.te, e se considerate sig.ri i meriti della pittura direte che da ragg[ion]e deve esser’ celebrata, e che

410 verso gl’antichi f[aceva]no bene ad apprezzarla tanto perche ella diletta l’occhio co[n] la vaghezza, aguzza l’intell.o co[n] la sottigliezza delle cose depinte recrea la mem[ori]a dell’historie delle cose passate, pasce l’a[ttione?] co[n] la varietà artificiosa, eccita il desio all’Imitatione delle virtù aliene, serve per accender’ i giovani ai fatti magnanimi, e grata’ signori gioconda a studiosi, è accetta a litterati, è abbracciata da ogni sorte di persona virtuosa, per[ci]ò no[n] è maraviglia se i Dorici, i Corinti gli Ionici, et i Romani l’hebero in tanta consideratione. Cotessa è la sagace imitatrice della nat.a formatrice delle linee, maestra delle superficie, quella che destingue i lumi, e che finisce l’ombre, che forma l’ossa, et i nervi, ch’esprime la carne, che da’ colore, che dona spirito e vita quasi ad un’istesso tempo, et essa è quella ch’esprime la gratiosa vista dell’occhi neri e azuri, e co[n] il splendore di quei raggi amorosi mostra il color’ de capelli qual raggi solari, lo sblendor’ [sic] dell armi, una scura notte, un lucente giorno, una tempesta di mare, un lampeggiar’ del cielo, un fulminar’ del’[etua?], un Ingendio [sic] d’una Città una pugna d’un esercito, una caccia pastorale, un Impresa valorosa et in somma mostra il cielo il mare, selve, prati, giardini, fiumi città campagne, e cioche vuole, et al’incontro la scoltura è un’arte che piu presto scarpelloni si devriano chiamare i suoi professori che che [sic] altrimte arte piu presto ch’ogni cosa ch’Insegna, parche bisogna stentare col scarpello tt.o il g[ior]no intorno a i sassi col rivoltarli mille volte l’hora. tt.o il contrario della pittura, qual’è un art’Ingegnosa piu che faticosa, oltre che nelle sue opere ve s’intende, e vi si giudica piu di quello che si vede; Onde chiara cosa è che si può dire che la pittura no[n] solo avanza la scoltura si di nobiltà come di valore a tutte l’arti del mondo.

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359 15. Letter from Baltasar de Zúñiga y Velasco in Prague to Johannes Faber in Rome, 28 July, 1612. Biblioteca Corsiniana, Fondo Faber vol 415, fol. 46r.

Ex epistola Nuncij Pragensis 28 Julij 1612

[in a different hand:]

Alle volte i discorsi humani sono fallaci, se bene regolati da prudenza, et fundatisi la forza della ragione, ho partlato a lungo col Sig[nore] Ambas[ciatore] di Spagna, che e qui, sopra la persona di VS: et ho voluto destram[ente] intendere da lui il concetto che fa del Sig[nore] Scioppio; Mi hà risposto S[ua] S[ignoria] Ill[ustrissima], che li ha in concetto grandiss[imo] et che stima molto la sua virtu, Che non è molto tempo, che essendo di Spagna ricercato del suo parere circa alla persona di V[ostra] S[ignoria] ne diede un chiaro testimonio, dicendo che V[ostra] S[ignoria] di contiuno faticava p[er] la Religione con sua molta lauda, che era soggetto di molto valore et affettionat[issimo] alla Casa di Austria, et che questi rispetti appresso S[ua] S[ignoria] Ill[ustrissima] la rendevano degna che S[ua] M[aestà] Cat[tolica] la riconoscesse di una buona pensione. Cosi mi parlò, et io so dire a V[ostra] S[ignoria] che gli credo, p[er] che questo [havero?] oltre che fa professione di verità a me in part[icolare?] che ama grandem[ente], non significarebbe una cosa per un altra, si che non sarà se non bene che V[ostra] S[ignoria] disegnara di comporre per mostrare con quanta ragione ella riprende i Cat[tolici] di nome ma politici in effetto,

[in a different hand:]

Ill[ustre] señor,

He recivido la carta de V[uestra] S[eñoria] de 30 de Mayo con ciertas advertencias sobre particulares suyos, y he holgado de haverlas encendido. que no dejan de ser de harta consideraçion. De España tuve una carta en conformidad de lo que V[uestra] S[eñoria] apunta, en la suya, y he respondido haziendo muy buena relacion y intercession, en todo lo demas que tocare a V[uestra] S[eñoria] procurarè servirle con mucha voluntad. Dios guarde a V[uestra] S[eñoria] como yo deseo. De Praga 25de Julio 1612.

A Servicio de V[uestra] S[eñoria]

Don Balt.r de Zuniga

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16. Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Second Count of Villamediana, lyric sonnet “Against the Pretensions of the Court.”

Contra las pretensiones de la Corte

360 Ya no me engañarán las esperanzas, ni me disgustarán los desengaños, que el aviso costoso de mis años advertimientos saca de tardanzas.

Y con igual semblante a las mudanzas, el escarmiento deberé a mis daños, de lástima sujeto y no de engaños, justificando ofensas y venganzas.

Y retirado del común abuso de anhelar vanamente pretendiendo con mil indignidades mi desprecio,

nueva naturaleza haré del uso, ufano ya de no quedar perdiendo lo que menos se estima y es sin precio.

Quoted from Juan de Tassis, Conde de Villamediana, ed. José Francisco Ruiz de Casanova, Poesía impresa completa (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), no. 252 p. 332.

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17. Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Second Count of Villamediana, Romance, “To a Drunkard.”

A UN BORRACHO. ROMANCE DEL CONDE DE VILLAMEDIANA.

Entró a hacer la razón Gil Toribio en la taberna, y en vez de hacer la razón Toribio quedó sin ella. Era el divino Toribio un ángel en la pureza,y en ser de espíritu puro es divino por esencia. Cual ángel cayó Toribio, que, aunque de vino, humos eran, y así luego lo de[rr]iban humos conta la cabeza. Así que cayó Toribio, ya por demonio se cuenta; y es el Toribio tan diablo que hasta las paredes tienta. Los ojos tiene enramados Toribio, y es cosa cierta

361 que el ramo de los ojos dice que hay allá dentro taberna. De seda estaba vestido - que hay monas que visten seda -, y aunque se quedó vestido, no hay duda que en cueros queda. Sus ojos vasos de vidrio por de fuera vino enseñan, y aunque estén encarnizados, más cuero que carne muestran. Un mal le dejó de gota jarro que sin gota queda, que otros renquean por gota y él por azumbres ren[q]uea. Y como en cueros nació y en cueros morir espera, para más conformidad en cueros vivir desea. Siempre tuvo alma devota, siempre a lo que Dios enseña humilde su pecho inclina, la medida lo gobierna. Aborreció el agua en vida, y en la muerte es cosa cierta que para morir en paz se reconcilió con ella.

Quoted from Juan de Tassis, Conde de Villamediana, ed. José Francisco Ruiz Casanova, Poesía Inédita Completa (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994), no. 89, pp. 231-32.

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18. Genesis 27: 1-35. Isaac blesses Jacob instead of Esau

Now Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, and he could not see: and he called Esau, his elder son, and said to him: My son? And he answered: Here I am. And his father said to him: Thou seest that I am old, and know not the day of my death. Take thy arms, thy quiver, and bow, and go abroad: and when thou hast taken some thing by hunting, Make me savoury meat thereof, as thou knowest I like, and bring it, that I may eat: and my soul may bless thee before I die. And when Rebecca had heard this, and he was gone into the field to fulfill his father’s commandment, She said to her son Jacob: I heard thy father talking with Esau thy brother, and saying to him: Bring me of thy hunting, and make me meats that I may eat, and bless thee in the sight of the Lord, before I die. Now, therefore, my son, follow my counsel: And go thy way to the flock, bring me two kids of the best, that I may make of them meat for thy father, such as he gladly eateth: Which when thou hast brought in, and he hath eaten, he may bless thee before he die. And he answered her:

362 Thou knowest that Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am smooth. If my father shall feel me, and perceive it, I fear lest he will think I would have mocked him, and I shall bring upon me a curse instead of a blessing. And his mother said to him: Upon me be this curse, my son: only hear thou my voice, and go, fetch me the things which I have said. He went, and brought, and gave them to his mother. She dressed meats, such as she knew his father liked. And she put on him very good garments of Esau, which she had at home with her: And the little skins of the kids she put about his hands, and covered the bare of his neck. And she gave him savoury meat, and delivered him bread that she had baked. Which when he had carried in, he said: My father? But he answered: I hear. Who art thou, my son? And Jacob said: I am Esau thy firstborn: I have done as thou didst command me: arise, sit, and eat of my venison, that thy soul may bless me. And Isaac said to his son: How couldst thou find it so quickly, my son? He answered: It was the will of God, that what I sought came quickly in my way. And Isaac said: Come hither, that I may feel thee, my son, and may prove whether thou be my son Esau, or not. He came near to his father, and when he had felt him, Isaac said: The voice is indeed the voice of Jacob; but the hands are the hands of Esau. And he knew him not, because his hairy hands made him like the elder. Then blessing him, He said: Art thou my son Esau? He answered: I am. Then he said: Bring me the meats of thy hunting, my son, that my soul may bless thee. And when they were brought, and he had eaten, he offered him wine also, which after he had drunk, He said to him: Come near me, and give me a kiss, my son. He came near, and kissed him. And immediately as he smelled the fragrant smell of his garments, blessing him, he said: Behold the smell of my son is as the smell of a plentiful field, which the Lord hath blessed. God give thee the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, abundance of corn and wine. And let peoples serve thee, and tribes worship thee: be thou lord of thy brethren, and let thy mother’s children bow down before thee. Cursed be he that curseth thee: and let him that blesseth thee be filled with blessings. Isaac had scarce ended his words, when Jacob being now gone out abroad, Esau came, And brought in to his father meats made of what he had taken in hunting, saying: Arise, my father, and eat of thy son’s venison; that thy soul may bless me. And Isaac said to him: Why! who art thou? He answered: I am thy firstborn son Esau. Isaac was struck with fear, and astonished exceedingly: and wondering beyond what can be believed, said Who is he then that even now brought me venison that he had taken, and I ate of all before thou camest? and I have blessed him, and he shall be blessed. Esau having heard his father’s words, roared out with a great cry: and being in a great consternation, said: Bless me also, my father. And he said: Thy brother came deceitfully and got thy blessing.

Douay-Rheims version.

Senuit autem Isaac, & caligaverunt oculi eius, & videre non poterat, vocavitq[ue] Esau filium suum maiorem, & dixit ei: FIli mi? Qui respondit: Adsum. Cui pater: Vides, inquit, quod senerim, & ignorem diem mortis meae. Sume arma tua, paretram, & arcum, & egredere foras: cumque venatu aliquid apprehenderis, fac mihi inde pulmentum sicut velle me nostri, & affet ut comedam, & benedicat tibi anima mea antequam moriar. Quod eum audisset Rebecca, & ille abijsset in agrum ut iussionem patris impleret, dixit filio suo Iacob: Audivi patrem tuum loquentem cum Esau fratre tuo, & dicentem ei Affer mihi de

363 venatione tua, & fac cibos, ut comedam, & benedicam, tibi coram Domino antequam moriar. Nunc ergo fili mi, acquiesce consilijs meis: & pergens ad gregem, affer mihi duos haedos optimos, ut faciam ex eis escas patri tuo, quibus libenter vescitur: quas cum intuleris, & comederit, benedicat tibi priusquam moriatur. Cui ille respondit: Nosti quOd Esau frater meus homo pilosus sit, & ego lenis: si atrectaverit me pater meus, & senserit, timeo ne putet me sibi voluisse illudere, & inducam super me maledictionem pro benedictione. Ad quem mater: In me sit ait, ista maledictio, fili mi tantum audi vocem meam, & pergens affer quae dixi. Abijt, & attulit, deditq. matri. Paravit illa cibos, sicut velle noverat patrem illius. Et vestibus Esau valde bonis, quas apud se habebat domi, induit eum: pelliculasq[ue] haedorum circumdedit manib[us] & colli nuda protexit. Deditque pulmentum, & panes, quos coxerat, tradidit. Quibus illatis, dixit: Pater mi? At ille respondit: Audio. Qui es tu fili mi? Dixitq[ue] Iacob: Ego sum primogenitus tuus Esau: feci sicut praecepisti mihi: surge, sede, & comede de venatione mea, ut benedicat mihi anima tua. Rursumque Isaac ad filium suum: Quo modo, inquit, tam cito invenire potuisti, fili mi? Qui respondit: Voluntas Dei fuit ut cito occurreret mihi quod voleba[m]: Dixit[que] Isaac: Accede huc, ut tangam te fili mi, & probem utrum tu sis filius meus Esau, an non. Accessit ille ad patre[m], & palpato eo, dixit Isaac: Vox quidem, vox Iacob est: sed manus, manus sunt Esau. Et non cognovit eum, quia pilosae manus similitudinem maioris expresserant. Benedicens ergo illi, ait: Tu es filius meus Esau? Respondit, Ego sum. At ille: Affer mihi, inquit, cibos [16] de venatione tua, fili mi, ut benedicat tibi anima mea. Quos cu[m] oblatos comedisset, obtulit ei etiam vinum: quo hausto, dixit ad eum: Accede ad me, & da mihi osculum, fili mi. Accessit, & osculatus est eum. Statimque ut sensit vestimentorum illius fragrantiam, benedicens illi, ait: Ecce odor filij mei sicut odor agri pleni, cui benedixit Dominus. Det tibi Deus de rore caeli, & de pinguedine terrae abundantiam frumenti & vini. Et serviant tibi populi, & adorent te tribus: esto dominus fratrum tuorum, & incuruentur ante te filij matris tuae. qui maledixerit tibi sit ille maledictus: & qui benedixerit tibi, benedictionibus repleatur. Vix Isaac sermonem impleverat: & egresso Iacob foras, venit Esau, coctosque de venatione cibos intulit patri, dicens: Surge pater mi, & comede de venatione filij tui: ut benedicat mihi anima tua. Dixitq[ue]. illi Isaac: Quis enim es tu? Qui respondit: Ego sum filius tuus primogenitus Esau. Expavit Isaac stupore vehementi: & ultra quam credi potest, admirans, ait: Quis igitur ille est qui dudum captam venationem attulit mihi, & comedi ex omnibus priusquam tu venires? benedixiq[ue] ei, & erit benedictus. Auditus Esau sermonibus patris, irrugit clamore magno: & consternauts, ait: Benedic etiam & mihi, pater mi. Qui ait: venit germanus tuus fraudolenter, & accepit benedictionem tua[m].

Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis Sixti Quinti Pont. Max. Iussu recognita, atque edita (Venice: Evangelista Deuchino & Giovanni Battista Pulciani, 1608), 15-16.

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19. Alonso de Villegas, Chapter II, “Vida de Isaac Patriarca.”

CAPITULO II. De como le nacieron a Isaac dos hijos Esau y Iacob, de su muger Rebeca: la bendicion que diò a Iacob: pensando ser Esau: y de su muerte.

364

Casi veynte años passaron sin que Rebeca se hiziesse preñada, con grande sentimiento suyo. Isaac hizo por ella oracion, y concibiò. Era le la preñez muy pesada, por razon que traya en sus entrañas dos hijos, y el uno con el otro peleavan. Consultò a Dios sobre este caso. Fue esto dize Sant Tehodoreto, segun algunos, comunicarlo con su sacerdote Melchisedech, que toda via ora vivo, o segun otro que edificò altar y lo tratò con Dios. Respondiosele que traya consigo dos pueblos contrarios el uno del otro. De los quales el mayor seria sujecto, y serviria al menor, siendo vencido por el. Llegò la hora del parto, y pariò dos hijos: el que naciò primero era bermejo y belloso, al qual llamaron Esau: naciò luego el segundo afido del piede de su hermano con la mano, y llamaronle Iacob. De sesenta años era Isaac quando le nacieron estos hijos. Crecieron y hizieronse hombres. Esau diò en ser caçador y en andarse por los campos, exercitandose en la labrança dellos, Iacob era hombre senzillo y recogido, y entreteniase en negocios de casa, por lo qual su madre le amava mucho: y lo mismo Isaac a Esau, porque le traya de sus caças, dandole gusto y sabiendole bien. Sucediò que aviendole guisado Iacob unas lentejas, llegò Esau cansado del campo y muy hambriento, pidiole dellas. Dixo Iacob que le diesse en precio y cambio la primogenitura. Esau replicò, estoy me muriendo de hambre, si muero que me aprovecha la primogenitura: que yo te la doy dame las lentejas. Ha de ser dize Iacob con Iuramento. Iurolo Esau de como le vendia la primogenitura por las lentejas. Dioselas Iacob y pan con que Esau comiò y beviò, boviendose luego al campo sin pena de lo que avia hecho. Por dos partes parece, que pecò Iacob en este contracto: La una en no dar de comer a su hermano en necessidad que perecia extrema, en comprar por precio tan baxo cosa de tanta estima como era la primogenitura. Con la qual segun el parecer de los Hebreos referido por san Hieronymo, en los descendientes de Sem que fue Melchisedech andava el sacerdocio, y assi conprar [sic] cosas espirituales pecado de symonia. Sancto Thomas responde que ni en lo uno ni en lo otro pecò Iacob, porque tuvo particular revelacion de Dios para este hecho, queriendo quitar la dignidad de primogenito a Esau por ser malo y vicioso, y passarla a Iacob que era bueno y virtuoso, junto con que la intencion de Iacob era senzilla sin mezcla de ambicion o symonia. Vino grande hambre en la tierra donde Isaac habitava hablole Dios, è hizole la misma promesa que havia hecho a Abraham que en su linage serian benditas todas las gentes que fue confirmar lo que avia dicho a Ahbraham de que se haria hombre el hijo de Dios en muger de su linage, mandole que no fuesse a Egypto, sino a Geraris ciudad donde residia Abimelech Rey de Palestina, el qual era possible ser otro del con quien su padre Abraham tuvo conversacion y trato, aunque tenia el mismo nombre. Fue alli preguntado acerca de Rebeca su muger, y dixo que era su hermana, porque temio no le matassen por quitarsela siendo muy hermosa. Vidolos el Rey un dia que estavan entreteniendose en burlas y juegos de casados, aunque honestos como ellos lo eran. Llamò Isaac y reprehendiole por aver encubierto que era [119v] su muger y dicho que era su hermana, poniendole en peligro de que le fuera hecho algun agravio. Isaac se disculpò dizendo, que lo hizo por temor no le matassen, queiendosela quitar. El Rey le assegurò y mandò que nadie le hiziesse agravio con pena de muerte. Hizo se muy rico Isaac en aquella tierra. Embidiavanle los naturales. y los pozos que abria para dar agua a sus ganados ellos se los cegavan. El mismo Rey le dixo que se fuesse de aquella tierra, porque ya era mas poderoso que el: hizolo assi Isaac, no faltandole donde quiera que yva diferencias, sobre los pozos que abia que se los tornavan a cegar los naturales de la tierra, o se los quitavan por fuerça,

365 diziendo que era suya la agua, hasta que reparò en tierra de Bersabe a donde abriò un pozo, sin que por el uviesse diferencia: antes vino Abimelech Rey de Palestina a visitarle con otros dos hombres de valor, Isaac les dixo: que aviendole echado de su tierra, a que venian a visitarle? Respondiò Abimalech [sic]: avemos visto que el Señor es contigo y te favorece, y assi queremos tu amistad. Concediosela Isaac con juramento de las dos partes, y aviendo comido se bolvieron a su ciudad. Siendo viejo Isaac perdiò la vista y quedò del todo ciego. Llamò a Esau su hijo y mandole que fuesse al campo, y que aviendo caçado alguna cosa, guisada se la truxesse y le bendeziria antes de su muerte. Fue Esau, y por haver oydo Rebeca esto, como amasse mas a Iacob, desseando para el semejante bendicion, dixole, que fuesse al ganado, y le truxesse dos cabritos guressos, que ella los guisaria como a Isaac fuessen muy sabrosos, y diziendo que era Esau, ganaria para si la bendicion. Recelavasse de hazer esto iacob, diziendo que su hermano era velloso, y que si su padre le llamava y tocava, visto el engaño, en lugar de bendezirle le madiziria. Sobre mi dixo Rebeca cayga tal maldicion hijo mio sino ve y haz lo que te digo. Fue Iacob y truxo los cabritos, adereçolos Rebeca, vistiole con vestidos de Esau ricos y preciosos, pusole en el cuello y sobre las manos las pieles de los cabritos, y con este disfraz representando a Esau entrò en el aposento de su padre, dixole que tomasse la caça que le avia mandado traer y le bendixesse: el viejo dixo como tan presto hijo mio hallaste caça? fue assi dixo Iacob la voluntad de Dios. Mandole que se acercasse a el y tocole para ver si era Esau. Tocado dixo: la voz, voz es de Iacob, aunque las manos, manos son de Esau, esto dixo, tocando las pieles de los cabritos, que Iacob traya rebueltas a sus manos. Comiò y beviò Isaac, y despues desto llamò a su hijo, y diole osculo de paz. Sintiò el buen olor que salia de los vestidos. Y dixo que era semejante al del campo lleno de flores bendito del Señor, començò a bendezirle, diziendo, Dios te dè abundancia de pan y vino, los pueblos te sirvan, y adoren te las tribus. Seras señor de tus hermanos: y los hijos de tu madre se arrodillen en tu presencia. El que te maldixere sera maldito: y el que te bendixere sea lleno de bendicion. Con esto se fue Iacob, y no era bien salido del aposento quando llego Esau: Hablò a Isaac pidiendole que comiese de su caça, y le bendixesse. El viejo le dixo. Quien eres tu? Yo soy dize tu Primogenito Esau. Quedò Isaac grandemente espantado, y mas que puede creer se admirado. Pues quien fue dize el que poco ha llegò aqui, y me diò de la caça que comiesse, comi y bendixele y sera bendito. Levantò Esau la voz, oyendo esto, y llorando amargamente dixo. Bendizeme a mi tambien: padre mio. Tu hermano dixo Isaac, vino engañosamente, y te ha llevado tu bendicion. Con razon, dixo Esau, le llamaron Iacob, que quiere dezir engañador: de antes y aora me engañò llevando me la primogenitura, y no contento con esto me a hurtado la bendicion. Tornò a lamentarse de nuevo pidiendo a su padre le bendixesse. Isaac le refiriò de la manera que le avia bendezido: y viendole que llorava, y se afligia por estremo, enternecido Isaac bendixole, diziendo: en la grossura de la tierra, y en el rocio del cielo, sea tu bendicion: viviras subjeto sirviendo a tu hermano, aunque vendra tiempo en que recuperes tu perdida libertad. Esta fue prophecia, cumpliose, como dize Santo Thomas, desde el reynado del Propheta David, basta el de Ioram hijo de Iosaphat, en cuyo tiempo, como parece en el quarto libro de los Reyes? Edon que era el pueblo descendiente de Esau, quitò la obediencia al Rey de Iuda, significado por Iacob, de quien descendia, y criò Rey de por si. S. Augustin escusa de culpa a Iacob en este hecho, por lo mismo que le escusò quando comprò la primogenitura, esto es por ser ordenado por Dios, y particular inspiracion suya: la qual dize el bienaventurado S. Hieronymo que tuvo Rebeca, por que si no la tuviera

366 peccara en ser medio de que se [120r] le hiziesse a Esau agravio de hurtarle la bendicion. Añade tambien el glorioso San Augustin que no mintiò Iacob en dezirle que era Esau, porque en la dignidad de mayorazgo era Esau. Al tal le, dize, que dixo IesuChristo nuestro Señor de S. Iuan Baptista que era Elias. En la persona no era Elias el Baptista, mas en espiritu eralo: assi Iacob en la persona era Esau en la dignidad del primogenito, aviendo adquirido para si licitamente, y con voluntad expressa de Dios nuestro Señor. Y prueva esto por que despues que Isaac entendiò el mysterio, no se ayrò con el ni le echò maldicion, sino se confirmò en lo dicho, diziendo, bendixele y sera bendito. Haze por esto que antes de su nascimiento el oraculo del cielo dixo, que el mayor serviria al menor. Y que Iacob es loado siempre de hombre muy senzillo y no doblado. Tambien que luego como passò esto le hablò Dios nuestro Señor y tuvo del muchas apariciones y mandatos. Finalmente que toda la escriptura sagrada està llena de loores de tres Patriarchas, Abraham, Isaac, Iacob. Y assi quando algun Propheta queria alcançar de Dios nuestro señor alguna cosa grande, era diziendo: Acuerdate Señor de Abraham, Isaac, y Iacob tus siervos, dixo esto Moyses quando pidiò a Dios perdonasse a su pueblo la adoracion del bezerro. Y el mismo Iesu christo dixo por S. matheo, de algunos que avian de yr al cielo, que se assentarian con Abraham, Isaac, y Iacob en las eternas moradas. Los hechos de los Patriarcas estan todos llenos de mysterios. Iacob hermano menor no pudo alcançar la bendicion de su padre, sino vestido de las ropas de su hermano mayor: los hombres con nuestras obras proprias sino van acompañadas de las de Christo nuestro hermano mayor, y bañadas en su sagnre, no merecemos alcançar la gracia y bendicion de Dios. Muchas cosas concurrieron, dize Santo Thomas, para que Isaac diesse la bendicion a Iacob su hijo, y se la quitasse a Esau, como fue la evidencia que tuvo por el tacto, de que era Esau el que tocava, velloso, y no Iacob: y aunque la voz le desengañasse y dixesse la verdad, pudo creer, que el venir Esau a que le bendixesse, le hazia se mostrasse humilde, y que baxasse y quebrantasse mas la voz, como era la de Iacob: siendo la suya robusta, y de hombre criado en el campo. Tambien oyr dezir que era Esau, porque no pudiera creer Isaac que Iacob se atreviera a engañarle, especialmente conociendole por hombre senzillo y sin engaño. Sin esto por aver Isaac dicho como en secreto a Esau, que fuesse a traerle de la caça, pareciole que nadie sino el podia saberlo. Y lo principal de todo, por ser esta la voluntad de Dios, que amava a Iacob, y le queria poner en el assiento y lugar de Esau, a quien aborrecia por sus pecados. Figurose en este hecho de Iacob el mysterio tan alto del Sanctissimo Sacramento del altar: en el qual los mas de lost sentidos se engañan. Los ojos veen accidentes de pan y vino, el tacto, el olfato, y gusto lo mismo. El oydo solo informado por la fee conoce que està transsubstanciado el pan en el cuerpo de Iesu Christo, y assi el tacto es de Esau, y la vox de Iacob. En las palabras que dixo Isaac, bendiziendo a sus hijos ay que notar, y es quando bendixo a Iacob, dixo: Dete Dios del rocio del cielo, y de la grossura de la tierra, porque los buenos de principal intento procuran los bienees del cielo, y menos principalmente, y como cosa accessiora los bienes de la tierra. Al contrario los malos, sus desseos todos y sus intentos y pretensiones son cosas de la tierra, y las cosas del cielo muy allà al cabo. Solo quando estan enfermos de muerte se acuerdan de Dios, y caen en la cuenta de que tienen almas, olvidados de lo uno y de lo otro toda la vida: y esto denote que en la bendicion de Esau primero dixo Isaac dete Dios de la grossura de la tierra, y luego añadiò, y dixo, y del rocio del cielo: Muy desabrido quedò Esau con su hermano por haverle hurtado la bendicion, dezia palabras por las quales mostrava que algun dia se

367 vengaria del, esto entendido de Rebeca su madre, tratò con Isaac que fuesse Iacob a casa de laban su hermano, a tierra de Mesopotamia de Syria: y assi se hizo, donde le sucediò lo que se dira en su vida. Bovliendo de aquella tierra despues de aver estado en ella veynte años, siendo Isaac de 180. muriò en tierra de Mambre en la ciudad de Arbe, que es Hebron, y fue sepultado por Iacob, y Esau sus hijos en la cueva donde Abraham y Sarra estavan sepultados, en la qual tambien fue sepultada Rebeca. Su merte fue cerca de los años de la creacion de 2228. Los lugares de la escriptura sagrada en que se haze mencion de Isaac, son casi los mismos en que se nombra Abraham su padre, y se delcaran en su vida. Lee de Isaac la Iglesia Catholica en las leciones de los Maytines del Domingo primero de Quaresma.

Alonso de Villegas, Flos Sanctorum. Segunda Parte, y Historia General, en que se Escrive la vida de la Virgen sacratissima madre de Dios, y Señora nuestra: y las de los Santos antiguos, que fueron antes de la venida de nuestro Salvador al Mundo: colegidas assi de la Divina Escritura, como de lo que escriven a cerca de esto los sagrados Doctores, y otros Autores graves, e fidedignos. Barcelona: Sebastian de Cormellas, 1612. “Vida de Isaac Patriarca,” chapter 2. 119r.-120r.

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20. Melchior Prieto, “Christ piously deceives the senses from the Eucharist.”

Engaña piamente Christo desde la Eucaristia a los sentidos.

O digamos ultimamente, Exultate Deo Iacob, hazed fiestas al Dios de Iacob: y añade san Geronimo, Suplantatori, que està entreteniendose con nosotros, que juega desde el secreto de la hostia con los hombres, engañando piamente desde ella los sentidos. Assi lo dize por expressas palabras el Angelico Doctor Santo Tomas, tratando deste misterio, in quo, scilicet Sacramento, nostri sensus pie sunt decepti prater auditum, ut sit Fides ex auditu tantùm, & non ex visu, vel alijs sensibus: auditus autem per verbum Christ, que en nuestros sentidos, salvo el oìdo, se engañan piamente, porque la Fè solo entra por el oìdo, y no por los demas sentidos: y el oìdo se causa por la palabra de Christo: esta dotrina dize el sagrado Maestro, que le figura maravillosamente en la bendicion de Iacob, Pulchre signatur in benedictione Iacob, ubi sensus Isaac sunt decepti putantis sentire Esau, dum sentit similitudinem eius, qui velatus erat Iacob, donde los sentidos de su padre Isaac se engañaron, pensando que Iacob vestido de los adornos de Esau, que era el hijo mayor, era Esau; pero no se engaño el oìdo, porque siempre dixo, Vox autem, vox Iacob est, que la voz era de Iacob: en la qual figura deste misterioso engaño, dize para explicarle mas, que concurrieron quatro personas, Isaac, Rebeca, Iacob, y Esau. Isaac, y Rebeca, marido, y muger, por el mismo caso son una misma cosa, Duo in carne una, significan las dos partes de nuestra composicion fisica, alma y cuerpo. Isaac que es el varon, que de ordinario anda fuera de casa tratando las cosas, y negocios de fuera della, significa el cuerpo con los sentidos exteriores; la muger - que està de ordinario dentro de casa, o por lo menos deve assistir en ella, dize el Santo, que significa al alma con sus potencias

368 interiores. Iacob el hermoso, a quien ama Rebeca, que es alma santa, es el verdadero cuerpo de Christo nuestro Señor. Esau a quien ama Isaac, que es el cuerpo, porque gusta de sus comidas, es la sustancia de pan con sus accidentes, olor, color, y sabor. Dum itaque Isaac, qui est homo exterior, id est, sacerdos, benedicere debet: Esau, id est, substantia panis, recedit, sed similitudo Esau (scilicet vertex cum odore, pelles pilosae, cibus cum sapore, &c.) manent circa Iacob, & sensus nostri falluntur, pues quando Isaac, que es el Sacerdote, como hombre exterior, con señales exteriores, como se requiere para el Sacramento, que es signo sensible (como difine el Teologo) echa la bendicion, benedixit, fregit: Esau, que es la sustancia de pan, se va, y quedan solos sus vestidos, y aparencias de accidentes en Iacob, que es el cuerpo de Christo, con que los sentidos se engañan; la vista flaca de Isaac, pues piensa que vee a Esau, que es el pan, y no ay sino apariencia del: engañase el gusto, que piensa come la [476] comida es de Esau, que es el pan, y solo gusta su semejança, engañase el olfato, que piensa huele el olor de Esau, y no es sino el de los vestidos de Esau, que es el pan de que està vestido Iacob, que es el cuerpo de Christo; solo el oìdo no se engaña, que dize, Vox quidem, vox est Iacob. quando Christo me dize, este es mi cuerpo, esso si que es verdad, la voz es de Iacob, en todo lo demas se engaña Isaac, que es el hombre exterior, con sus sentidos exteriores: pero Rebeca, que es el alma santa, no se engaña, que sabe que ahi està Iacob con vestidos de Esau, Credidit enim vere in benedictione sacra esse Iacob, id est corpus Christi velatum similitudine Esau, id est, specie panis, est es el cuerpo de Christo debaxo de las especies de pan: de manera que està Dios en este Sacramento, como Dios de Iacob engañando los sentidos; parecenos pan, y no es pan, piensa el gusto que gusta vino, y no es vino, sino se halla con carne y sangre en la boca. O digamos, si lo permite la alteza deste soberano misterio, que es como la tropelia que haze un jugador de manos, que tomando en ellas un bocado de pan con ligereza, passandole de una mano a otra, llegandole con ambas a la boca, parecenos le pone en la vuestra, y quando pensais tenerle, hallareis en ella una piedra, o otra cosa, que no pensais. Christo nuestro Redentor en este Sacramento juega, y se recrea con los hombres, Delicia mea esse cum filijs hominum, toma el pan en sus manos, Accepit panem in sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas, llegale a su divina boca, diziendo aquellas palabras, Hoc est corpus meum, este es mi cuerpo, y daseles a comer, Accipite, & comedite, y quando piensan que es pan, hallanse con carne en su boca, Panis quem ego dabo, caro mea est, y con una piedra que es Christo, Petra autem erat Christus. La razon deste engaño, que piadosamente padecen los sentidos en el Sacramento del altar, dà el mismo Santo Tomas, y dize: Quoniam sensus primi hominis in cibo perditionis vanè delectabantur, aquum est, ut sensus nostri corporis in cibo benedictionis decipiantur, que porque los sentidos en el primer hombre, que fue Adan, se deleytaron vanamente en la fruta vedada del paraiso, en pena desta vana delectacion, fue puesto en razon, que en el manjar bendito de la Eucaristia los sentidos corporales se engañassen, como se engañan. Funda el Angelico Doctor esta sentecia en las palabras del Genesis, que tratando del primer pecado, Vidit mulier quod pomum esset pulcrum, & ad vescendum suave, dize que vio la muger la mançana, y le parecio hermosa, y suave al gusto, y para comer. Donde nota que es diverso lo que vieron sus sentidos, y ojos, y lo que juzgò su coraçon. Lo que los ojos, y sentidos vieron fue verdad, porque la fruta era hermosa, y assi en esto no estuvo la culpa: pues donde estuvo? estuvo en lo que juzgò el coraçon, Et ad vescendum suave, que la mançana era buena para comer, porque era arbol,

369 y fruta vedada por ley de Dios, y assi era falso dezir, que era buena, engañòse el coraçon, y fue causa de esse juizio falso. Pero direis, si los ojos dixeran verdad, y el coraçon mintiera, tuvieran los ojos alguna culpa en esta verdad que dixeron? Respondo con santo Tomas, Quoniam sensus primi hominis in cibo perditionis vane delectabantur, que formalmente no, sino occasionaliter, deleytaronse vanamente, que es la quexa que podemos tener de los sentidos, que ocasionò la de Iob, Pepigi foedus cum oculis meis, ne cogitarem quidem de virgine, no piensan pero viendo, ocasionan a pensar. En contraposicion entran para este [477] divino manjar los ojos, y coraçon del fiel en el conocimiento deste misterio, al contrario el coraçon habla verdad, y los ojos, y sentidos mienten. Expliquemos bien esto, adorais de todo coraçon la hostia consagrada, los ojos dizen, que aquellos accidentes son pan, y engañanse grandemente, porque despues de la consagracion no ay pan: y el mismo engaño padecen los demas sentidos; y assi su juizio es falso y mentiroso: y veamos que dize el coraçon, Hoc est corpus meum, que aquel es el cuerpo de Christo, Caro mea vere est cibus, y que su carne es verdadera comida, goviernase por la Fè, ve detras de siete paredes, que como dize san Bernardo, la Fè Fides oculos lynceos habet, tiene ojos de lince, y debaxo de los accidentes de pan adora el cuerpo del Redentor, haze bien, y dize verdad el coraçon, y dizesela al oìdo la Fè, Quod non capis, quod non vides, animosa firmat Fides pareter rerum ordinem; que otro que ella no lo pudiera alcançar.

Melchior Prieto, Psalmodia Eucharistica compuesta por el M. Rde. P. M. Fr. Melchior Prieto Burgense, Vicario G.al del Orden de N.ra Senora de la Merced Redemp.on de Captivos en todas las Provincias del Peru. Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1622. pp. 475-477.

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21. Diego Niseno, Acto Sacramental: “The Most Blessed Deception.”

ACTO SACRAMENTAL,

El Engaño mas Dichoso.

Autor el ANGELICO Dotor, i anpliado por el Autor deste LIBRO.

Las personas que se introducen en èl son, ISAC, I REBECA, IACOB, i ESAU.

Fallezca este estudioso desvelo a fuer de buen Catolico, senezca el ultimo periodo de su mortal aliento à la lei de verdadero Cristiano, tenga por Viatico el eterno manjar, la sobresustancial Vianda, el Antidoto de las almas, el Perservativo de la salud, la Confeccion de la inmortalidad, la pitima de los coraçones, i la conpañia desta misera peregrinacion. I para dar principio à este que por escelencia se llama el misterio de la Fe, por ser la cifra i conpendio de todos los misterios, quiero començar por donde acaba lo

370 mas notable de las acciones de nuestro inclito Patriarca Isac. Cuenta pues el sagrado Istoriador, que llegò este eroico progenitor, i viva estanpa del esperado Mesias à tan profunda vegez, que [216r.] se alçaron los instrumentos de la vista, à no pagar los reditos i tributos a este Principe i Monarca de los esteriores sentidos. Teniendo à esta causa el fatal golpe de la inesorable parca, que con su corba guadaña amagaba yà à su debil i tremula cerbiz. Llama à su hijo mayor Esau, dicele que vaya a caça, i que de la presa de su flecha i archo le haga un guisado para que èl coma, pues sabe tanbien su gusto, i despues le bendiga, rogando al inmenso i poderoso Señor se sirva de cunplir propicio lo que èl afectuoso le suplique. Enterase Rebeca de la intencion de Isac, da cuenta del caso a Iacob, i como vè la oportuna saçon para efectuarse lo que el celestial Oraculo predijo, Que el mayor avia de servir al menor. Consulta con Iacob su intento i designio, i aunque resiste como prudente, ella como deseosa de sus acrecentamientos, le allana las dificultades, dispone el modo i dà la traça para que furta efeto se justa pretension. Era Esau mui belloso, que assi nacio del vientre de su madre; Iacob liso i llano en la tez de las manos i cuello, que eran las partes que podrian desengañar al padre con el tacto de lo que no podia alcançar la vista. Ocurre à esse inconveniente la sagaz madre, i dice, que poniendo en las manos i en el cuello unas pieles de cabrito, desmintiria las sospechas del anciano padre, i no levantando mucho la voz, seria facil persuadirle que èl era Esau. Satisfecho el hijo de la industriosa traça, con alentada osadia egecuta el consejo de la madre. Llega al ciego padre, i preguntandole si èl era su hijo primogenito Esau, i èl respondiendo que si, le replicò, que como en tan breve tienpo pudo hallar caça que traerle, guisarla tan presto i ofrecersela. Satisface Iacob à la pregunta diciendo, que fue voluntad del cielo, que tan en brebe se le ofreciesse que matar, para que pudiesse traerle que comer. No bien satisfecho Isac apela para el tacto, tocale el cuello i las manos, i sintiendo en èl i en estas la aspereça de las de Esau, dijo: Las manos, manos son de Esau, pero la voz, voz es de Iacob. Mandale traer los platos de la vianda, i despues de aver comido i bebido, pensando que era el Primogenito el que obsequioso le ministraba, dandole dulce beso de amorosa paz con afecto del alma, al sentir la fragrancia de los vestidos diputados [216v.] para este caso, dijo: El olor de mi hijo es como la del ameno prado poblado de açucenas i jazmines, de rosas i clavellinas, donde copiosa descendio la bendicion de la suprema mano. Dete, ò hijo mio, el altissimo Dueño i soberano Monarca, del rocio del cielo, i de la grosura de la tierra abundancia copiosa de trigo i vino, tributente feudo los pueblos, rindante vasallage las Tribus, seas dueño de tus hermanos, los hijos de tu madre postrados se te umillen; el que te maldigere sea maldito, i el que te bendigere llano le vez yo de bendiciones. Aqui acabò la suya el santo Patriarca, cuando saliendo Iacob verdadero mayorazgo de todas las paternales bendiciones, legitimo sucessor de sus grandeças, continuado aliento de sus inmunidades; entrò el mayor en el nombre con su vianda apercebida, solicitando la bendicion del padre: estrañando èl semejante peticion, le preguntò quien era, i respondiendo, que era su hijo primogenito Esau, quedò admirado i atonito, i con tan asonbroso pasmo tan eriçado el cabello, tan palpitando el coraçon, tan tenblando el pecho, i caducando toda la anciana maquina de la umana fabrica, que lo pudo el sentir, pero yo no lo sabrè esplicar. Pues quien ha sido aquel que en este instante me sirvio la comida antes que tu viniesses? Yà no ai remedio, sin duda que fue orden i disposicion del cielo, yo le bendige una vez, i para sienpre ha de quedar bendito. Oyendo Esau la resolucion del anciano padre, rugiò feroz a manera de hanbriento leon, cuando en la selva no encuentra en que ensangrentar las carniceras uñas:

371 instale à que tanbien le bendiga: respondele el padre: Vino tu hermano con artificioso engaño, desmintiendo su nonbre i afectando tu semejança, i assi te hurtò la bendicion i gracias. Ha! Que bien le llaman Iacob (replicò el furioso hermano) que es el que arma çancadillas i busca tretas, pues yà otra vez me ha robado el mayorazgo, i agora segunda vez se ha levantado con mi bendicion. Pero yà que esto sea assi, no ha quedado alguna bendicion i gracia reservada para mi? Respondio el enternecido padre: yo le constitui por señor tuyo, hicele dueño de todos tres hermanos, establecile, coroborele, vinculele la perpetua abundancia del pan i del vino, yà que puede quedar [217r] para ti? Con todo esto fueron tantas las lagrimas, los suspiros que arrojò el fiero Esau, que ablandò el pecho de su padre, i dandole su bendicion le dijo: sea tu bendicion en lo pingue de la tierra, in en lo llovido del cielo; viviràs de tu espada, serviràs a tu hermano, i vendrà el tienpo cuando sacudas de tu cerbiz este yugo. Con esto se despidio, pero tan lleno de rabia el pecho, tan enponçoñado el coraçon, tan rebosando ira por los cardenos labios, que jurò de vengarse deste agravio despues de la muerte de su padre, quitandole a Iacob à pesar de todo el mundo la vida. Supo Rebeca la sangrienta determinacion i fiero proposito del barbaro hermano, i da orden para que con la bendicion de su padre vaya à Mesopotamia, persuadiendo primero a Iacob lo bien que le esta hacer esta ausencia para escapar de la sañunda rabia del colerico hermano: consuelale con que seran pocos los dias de su ausencia, i que ya en casa de su tio Laban, donde serà mui bien recibido i regalado, i que en este medio tienpo desfogarà su enojo Esau, se mitigarà la colera, pues el tienpo lo remedia i cura todo, i con esso se pondran en buen estado las cosas, tendran felice fin, i llegaràn a logrado colmo las abundosas bendiciones de su padre. Parecele bien al hijo el consejo de la madre, la cual dice a Isac que està mui enfadada con las mugeres Eteas, i que mas quisiera padecer mil muertes que ver a su hijo Iacob dar la mano de esposo à ninguna dellas. Con esta industria la prudente matrona acudio à todo, escapò con la vida el hijo, obligò a su esposo à que le ausentasse como ella pretendia, dio buen color a la ausencia, obliga al padre a que haga con Iacob lo mismo que ella pretende, despacha al hijo a Mesopotamia, echandole su santa bendicion, i haciendole las ordinarias protestas, de que no se casasse con ninguna muger Cananea, por los grandes inconvenientes que se podian temer de semejantes juntas i parentescos. Partese Iacob con el viatico solo de la bendicion de su padre, llevando para el camino las perlas que su madre derrama a la despedida. Aqui senecen las acciones de nuestro santo Patriarca Isac, y con ser assi, que sobrevivio à las referidas acciones 43 años, no se cuenta accion singular de su santa vida, solo despues, dice Moisen, que murio el sagrado Anciano a los ciento i ochenta años de su vida, [217v.] i que le hicieron suntuosas esequias sus dos hijos Iacob, i Esau. Una de las mas memorables cosas, de los mas ocultos i escondidos Sacramentos es este misterioso hurto de la bendicion, tan celebrado de los sagrados Padres, i tan ponderado de los eruditos Espositores. Contener i encerrar la bendicion de Isac a Iacob una misteriosa estanpa, i vivo retrato del Augustissimo i Sacratissimo misterio del Altar, donde se ministra la soberana Vianda, i la sacrosanta Bebida disfraçada i encubierta debajo de las especies de pan i vino, es comun sentir i parecer de todos los Maestros i Dotores, Geronimo, Anbrosio, Agustino, Gregorio, Beda, Isidoro, Damasceno, Crisostomo, las dos Glossas, Iuan Clunaciense, i Teodoreto, el cual dice: Frumentum & vinum sunt enigmata divinorum misteriorum. El pan i el vino que fue la bendicion de Isac a Iacob, es la representacion i enigma de los divinos misterios del soberano sacrificio del Altar. Todo el cual misterio

372 enseña el Angelico Dotor, que està maravillosamente dibujado, retratado mui al vivo en el sucesso i progreso, latisces i circunstancias de la misteriosa bendicion, lo cual es (dice el Santo) como un Acto que se representa entre Isac i Rebeca, Iacob i Esau: Unde sciendum quod in ista figura dominici Corporis quatuor erant personae. La primera es Isac que hace al cuerpo, Rebeca al Alma, Iacob al cuerpo del Salvador, i Esau al pan. El titulo deste ACTO puede ser, EL ENGAÑO MAS DICHOSO, pues en este divino Sacramento se engañan (piadosamente) todos los sentidos, sino es el del oìdo: Nostri sensus pie sunt decepti praeter auditum sicut sit fides ex auditu tantum, & non ex visus, vel aliis sensibus, auditus autem per verbum Christi. Que ser Dios Autor de semejantes i tan piadosos engaños, todo es muestras claras, i manifiestos iudicios del inmenso amor que nos tiene. Assi lo dice por Oseas, cuando trata de sacar un alma del ruidoso bussicio, i estruendoso trafago de las solicitudes desta vida, i levarla à la soledad, donde en amena quietud, i en retirado sosiego, los dos se regalen i entretengan: Ecce ego lactabo tam & ducam eam in solitudinem & [218r] loquar ad cor ejus. Donde notan los Interpretes, que la palabra lactare, sinifica engañar, que es lo que acà decimos en nuestro Castellano, dar papilla: pues esso es lo que dice el Profeta que harà el Señor, que engañarà (como el alma suele al niño que cria) a las almas, para que vayan a la soledad. De que engaños i traças se suele valer una ama para que el niño que cria tome el medicamento ò vianda que reusa! Que sagaz que le engaña para que guarezca! Aquel engaño tan ageno està de condenarse, que antes debe aplaudirse, i assi dice la lei del derecho, que esta palabra Dolus, engaño, no sienpre se ha de tomar en mala parte, porque como ai engaños que se condenan, tanbien ai engaños que se alaban. Como se ve en los ardides i estratagemas de guerra. Que aunque son engaños, cuanto mas sutiles i utiles son mas plausibles i loables. Aqui pues en este altissimo Misterio padecen engaño, de cinco sentidos los cuatro. Piensan los ojos que ai pan i vino, i engañanse, si se pide el dicho al gusto, si se consulta con el tacto, si se pregunta al olfato, todos depondran contestes, que conforme a lo que pueden juzgar ai pan i vino; pero el oìdo que està mas bien informado, les dice que se engañan. Porque lo que alli se encierra no es sino carne i sangre del mismo Dios disfraçados con los accidentes del pan i del vino. Pues que mas feliz i dichoso engaño puede aver, que pensando la mano que toca pan, se halle alli disfraçado a su Dios, imaginando que toca vino, encuentre cubierta con sus especies, la sangre de su Criador, luego feliz es el engaño, como lo fuera i se diera un onbre por mui bien engañado, si pensando que recibia un cuarto de cobre, despues se hallasse con un doblon de oro en la mano. Aqui parece que vemos cunplido lo de Isaias: Seies quia ego Dominus salvans te & afferram aurum, & pro ferro afferam argentum. Sabras que yo soi tu Dios i Salvador y tu Redentor valiente i alentado; en lugar de cobre traere oro, i en vez de yerro darè plata. Pues que mas feliz i venturoso canbio para los sentidos, que no pueden quedarlo de tal engaño, que recibir el oro del cuerpo sacratissimo de [218v] CRISTO, cuando piensan que tienen delante el bellon i cobre del pan material, que andança mas alta les puede suceder, que mas crecida fortuna venir, que recibir en rubies de sangre lo que pensaban que era duro yerro de vino comun. Dense pues la horabuena los sentidos de tan afortunado engaño, i rindan parabienes al oìdo, que tan bien informado les avisa del sumo bien, que se disfraça i reboça debajo de sus groseras i materiales cortinas. Luego bien es, que demos a este Acto el titulo, DEL ENGAÑO MAS DICHOSO; que no es Dios como el mundo, que promete oro i aun no da cobre, promete plata, i solo cunple con yerro, brinda los gustos, i son amarguras, hace la salva con la dorada taça, i toda va llena de

373 mortal ponçoña, tosigo i veneno: aqui si que el engaño es desdichado donde busca vida i halla muerte, pide pan i le dan cuchillo, desea triaca i bebe aconito. O como les sucede à los miseros i tristes mortales sienpre con el demonio i mundo, lo mismo que a Iacob con Laban! Despues de aver servido siete años continuos con perpetuas fatigas i sudores, padeciendo las inclemencias i austeridades de los tienpos, cuando esperaba verse en los tan deseados braços de la hermosa i bella Raquel (porque aquel fue el pacto i aliança, que despues de siete años de servicio se la avian de entregar) cuando entendia goçar el dulce fruto de sus amargos afanes: Vespere filiam suam Liam introduxit ad eum. Valiendose el astuto Laban de las oscuras tinieblas de la noche, le introdujo la hija fea, la desgraciada i poco favorecida de los esteriores dones de la naturaleça. Hiçole a Iacob noche la hermosa, i engañole con la fea. Que quiere significar esto? Que enseñança moral se oculta debajo desta corteça? DICE un grave i piadoso Autor: In typum caco daemonis qui nobis aurum praeccipit, & lutum praebet: pargaritas asfert, & sordes ingerit. En figura de lo que le passa al onbre con su enemigo mortal el demonio, i de los lastimosos, i costosos engaños que cada dia le hace, pues le dà lodo i le quita el oro, hurtale las perlas, i le dà las piedras, saca el brocado i le da [219r] la gerga, despojale de la vida i le dà la muerte. EN CONSECUENCIA desto sobre el mismo paso dice Guillelmo Ebroicense: Revera quotidie videmus, quod ille qui servit mundo numquam pervenit ad bonum, quod ab cosperatur. Qui nimmo communiter fit, quod ubi mundus arridendo bona promittit, reddit mala. Ecce quomodo mundi dilectores turpiter decipiuntur; ideo merito possunt ascere illud Isaia, Expectavimus lucem & ecce tenebras. Cada dia vemos i esperimentamos i que todos aquellos que sirven al mundo, nunca llegan al bien que dèl esperan. Antes es lo comun, que donde este falso amigo promete cariñosamente descansos i prosperidades, lo que dà es fatigas i dolores. Mira como tan torpe i afrentosamente engaña i burla à sus amadores i seguaces; i cuan justamente podran decir lo de Isaias: Ai de nosotros, que esperabamos la hermosa luz de la felicidad, i nos han dado las escuras tinieblas del quebranto: nos prometieron ricos tesoros, i nos pagan en polvo i carbon! Este si que es engaño i burla mui pesada: Turpiter decipiuntur; pues prometiendoles la Raquel de la holgança i prosperidad, les dan la fea i deforme Lia de la pobreça i desventura. NO ASSI el divino Principe de las eternidades, que engaña piadosamente mui en utilidad i provecho nuestro, con inmensa ganancia, interes, i acrecentamiento, pues cuando la mano piensa que topa pan, se halla con carne de Dios, cuando imagina, que lo que tiene presente es vino, la fe le dice que es sangre de su Criador. Esperaba tinieblas i hallò luz, imaginaba carbones i encontrò diamantes, entendia polvo, i goçò oro. O feliz engaño! O gloria del onbre que sirve al infinito Dueño! REPRESENTA pues Isac el cuerpo, Rebeca el alma. I con raçon el onbre (dice el Angel Dotor) hace el papel del cuerpo: Quia magis solet esse manifestus, & exterioribus plus intendit. El onbre en la familia es el que fuera de casa acude a todos los negocios i cuidados que se ofrecen, assi el cuerpo vive en esto esterior de sus sentidos. Rebeca representa el alma que es la muger, i con mucha raçon dice santo Tomas, porque de la misma suerte [219v.] que la muger en la familia bien regida i concertada, en el buen economico gobierno sienpre ha de estar en casa, acudiendo de las puertas adentro della a lo necessario de su familia, como dice el Real Profeta: Uxor tua sicut vitis abundans in lataribus domus tuae. La muger ha de ser vid abundante, que nunca desampare el retiro

374 de la casa: assi el alma fiel i Cristiana ha de cuidar de regir i gobernar el onbre interior, traer bien concertada su republica, quietas las potencias i en paz los sentidos.Esau, à quien amaba Isac, esto es el cuerpo (porque comia de sus viandas i guisados) representa en este Acto la sustancia del pan con sus accidentes, color, sabor, i los demas: Esau significat substantiam Panis cum suis accientibus, scilicet calore sapore, & caeteris. I que bien repartidos los papeles, i los amores, i como es natural à cada uno buscar a su semejante! Isac que significa el cuerpo, amaba a Esau que representa el pan, Rebeca que hace el papel del Alma amaba tiernamente a Iacob que representa à Cristo; lo material se va tras lo material, lo espiritual busca lo espiritual: Isaac amabat Esau, & Rebeca diligebat Iacob; que como dice el Espiritu santo: Omne animal diligio sibi simile. Todo animal ama à su semejante i parecido, las palomas se aconpañan de palomas, las tortolas sienpre buscan, i siguen las tortolas, en las bestias es lo mismo, tanbien en los onbres, cada uno se acomoda mejor con el de su nacion, patria, idioma, i profesion, religion, i trato que con los demas. I ES de reparar, dice el Angelico Dotor, que cuando Isac, esto es el honbre esterior, el Sacerdote que ha de char la bendicion à Iacob, que significa el cuerpo de Cristo, que se consagra en este Sacramento, no està allì Esau; que representa la sustancia del pan, sino una semejança suya, conviene a saber, los vestidos con el olor, las pieles con el bello, i el manjar con el sabor de que se viste i vale Iacob. Aquì es donde se engañan no todos los sentidos de Isac, sino es el oìdo, pues pensando que tenia dolante a Esau, solo hallò sus vestidos, su olor, su sabor, i debajo de aquellos disfraces estaba Iacob escondido, tocaba [220r] esterioridades de Esau, i à la verdad no era sino Iacob: Ibi latet Iacob velatus, id est, Corpus Christi. Dice el Maestro del sacro Palacio de la Iglesia, lo mismo sucede en este Augustissimo Sacramento; piensan los ojos que ai pan, i engañanse, engañanse el gusto, porque piensa que come pan, engañase el olfato porque piensa que siente olor de pan; i no es assi solo el oìdo fue el que no se engañò, porque cuando dijo Isac: Vox quidem, vox Iacob. Acertò verdaderamente, porque el que alli estaba era verdaderamente Iacob: Nihil verius. Dice el Santo, no ai cosa mas verdadera; pero cuando Isac dijo: Manus manus sunt Esau. Las manos que yo toco son manos de Esau, no ai cosa mas falsa: Similiter Sacramentum quod tango substantia est panis. I si yo digesse como Isac, el Sacramento que toco es sustancia de pan: Nihil falsius; dice el divino Dotor, como articulo verdadero de fe, no ai cosa mas falsa i heretica: Vox Christi dicentis, hoc est Corpus meum. La voz de Christo que dice, este es mi Cuerpo verdadero, Nihil verius. No ai cosa mas cierta i verdadera; porque despues de las palabras de la Consagracion solo quedan alli los vestidos de Esau, que representa la sustancia del pan, quedan solos los accidentes del pan, que sirven como de cortina al supremo Rei que alli està encerrado, el olor, el color, el sabor, la cantidad, i los demas accidentes. I esto es lo que debemos confessar, esto lo que debemos tener, observando lo mismo en el misterio de la sangre, pues del vino tanbien despues de la consagracion, solamente quedan sus accidentes pereciendo la sustancia; i al que lo contrario digere, i contraviniere à lo representado en este Acto, anatematiça el sagrado Concilio Tridentino con severa autoridad, i la Inquisicion amenaça con otro Acto al proterbo i renitente, al contumaz rebelde a este sacrosanto Doma, entregandole al fogoso ardor de las gengativas llamas. Fundados pues en este articulo, prosigamos à los demas capitulos.

375 Diego Niseno, El Politico del Cielo. Primera Parte. Hallado en las misteriosas Acciones del Sagrado Patriarca Isac. Madrid: Pedro Coello, 1637. Book IX, chapter 1, pp. 215v.- 220r.

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22. Saint Augustine, “Of the things mystically prefigured in Esau and Jacob.”

Of the things mystically prefigured in Esau and Jacob.

Isaac's two sons, Esau and Jacob, grew up together. The primacy of the elder was transferred to the younger by a bargain and agreement between them, when the elder immoderately lusted after the lentiles the younger had prepared for food, and for that price sold his birthright to him, confirming it with an oath. We learn from this that a person is to be blamed, not for the kind of food he eats, but for immoderate greed. Isaac grew old, and old age deprived him of his eyesight. He wished to bless the elder son, and instead of the elder, who was hairy, unwittingly blessed the younger, who put himself under his father's hands, having covered himself with kid-skins, as if bearing the sins of others. Lest we should think this guile of Jacob's was fraudulent guile, isntead of seeking in it the mystery of a great thing, the Scripture has predicted in the words just before, "Esau [154] was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a simple man, dwelling at home." Some of our writers have interpreted this, "without guile." But whether the Greek [aplastos] means "without guile," or "simple," or rather "without feigning," in the receiving of that blessing what is the guile of the man without guile? What is the guile of the simple, what the fiction of the man who does not lie, but a profound mystery of the truth? But what is the blessing itself? "See," he says, "the smell of my son is as the smell of a full field which the Lord hath blessed: therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and of the fruitfulness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine: let nations serve thee, and princes adore thee: and be lord of thy brethren, and let thy father's sons adore thee: cursed be he that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee." The blessing of Jacob is therefore a proclamation of Christ to all nations. It is this which has come to pass, and is now being fulfilled. Isaac is the law and the prophecy: even by the mouth of the Jews Christ is blessed by prophecy as by one who knows not, because it is itself not understood. The world like a field is filled with the odour of Christ's name: His is the blessing of the dew of heaven, that is, of the showers of divine words; and of the fruitfulness of the earth, that is, of the gathering together of the peoples: His is the plenty of corn and wine, that is, the multitude that gathers bread and wine in the sacrament of His body and blood. Him the nations serve, Him princes adore. He is the Lord of His brethren, because His people rules over the Jews. Him His Father's sons adore, that is, the sons of Abraham according to faith; for He Himself is the son of Abraham according to the flesh. He is cursed that curseth Him, and he that blesseth Him is blessed. Christ, I say, who is ours is blessed, that is, truly spoken of out of the mouths of the Jews, when, although erring, they yet sing the law and the prophets, and think they are blessing another for whom they erringly hope. So, when the elder son claims the promised blessing, Isaac is greatly afraid, and wonders when he knows that he has

376 blessed one instead of the other, and demands who he is; yet he does not complain that [155] he has been deceived, yea, when the great mystery is revealed to him, in his secret heart he at once eschews anger, and confirms the blessing. "Who then," he says, "hath hunted me venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou camest, and have blessed him, and he shall be blessed?" Who would not rather have expected the curse of an angry man here, if these things had been done in an earthly manner, and not by inspiration from above? O things done, yet done prophetically; on the earth, yet celestially; by men, yet divinely! If everything that is fertile of so great mysteries should be examined carefully, many volumes would be filled; but the moderate compass fixed for this work compels us to hasten to other things.

Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, vol. 2. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871. Book XVI, chapter 37, pp. 153-5.

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23. Saint Augustine, “Lying.”

Let us turn, now, from this problem on which all agree to the question as to whether at any time it is useful to say something untrue with the intention of deceiving. Those who answer in the affirmative bring to the support of their argument the fact that Sara, although she had laughed, denied to the angels that she had done so; that Jacob, when questioned by his father, answered that he was Esau, his elder son; that the Egyptian midwives, lest the Hebrew children should be killed at birth, had lied with the approbation and reward of God. Choosing examples of this sort, they recount the lies of persons one would not dare to blame, and thus lead one to admit that, at times, a lie is not only undeserving of reproof but is even worthy of praise. They even add arguments by which they persuade not only men devoted to the sacred scriptures but all men, since they appeal to fundamental human feelings by such a question as: ‘If anyone should flee to you for protection and you were able to free him from death by a single lie, would you not tell the lie? If a sick person should ask you for information which it is not expedient for him to have, and if he will be more grievously afflicted if you do not reply, will you dare either to tell [61] the truth at the risk of his life or to be silent rather than by an honorable and merciful lie to minister to his health? By these and similar arguments, they think that they are urging us to lie sometimes, if the exigencies of the case demand it. (6) On the contrary, those who refuse to recognize any need for lying resist much more strongly, using first the divine authority, since in the Decalogue itself it is written: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness,’ in which classification every lie is embraced, for whoever pronounces any statement gives testimony to his own mind. If anyone should argue that not every lie should be called false witness, what will he answer to this statement which is also in the sacred Scriptures: ‘The mouth that belieth, killeth the soul’? If anyone should think that this passage can be interpreted to except certain lies, he may read in another passage: ‘Thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie.’ In this connection, our divine Lord said with His own lips: ‘Let your speech be “Yes, Yes;” “No, No;” and whatever is more comes from the evil one.’ Hence, the Apostle, too, when he directs that

377 the old man should be put off, under which term all sins are understood, goes on to explain his remark and specifically says: ‘Wherefore, put away lying and speak the truth.’ (7) They who take their stand against lying do not admit that they are disturbed by examples of lies cited from the Old Testament. They reply: ‘When something has been done, it can be understood figuratively, even though it has actually happened. Moreover, what is said or done figuratively is not a lie. Every pronouncement must be referred to that which it expresses. Everything said or done figuratively expresses what [62] it signified to those to whom it was related. Wherefore, it must be believed that those men mentioned as worthy of authority in the times of the Prophets did and said in prophetic spirit all that is related of them; in no less prophetic way did all that took place happen to them, so, that by the same prophetic spirit they judged what should be entrusted to tradition and to the Scriptures.’ In regard to the midwives, however, because the opponents of lying cannot say that these women announced one thing to the Pharao in place of another in prophetic spirit to signify a truth about to be revealed, even though, without their realization, their words signified something accomplished through them, they say that these women were approved and rewarded by God in relation to their own progress. For, he who is accustomed to lies in order to harm people has accomplished much if he now lies only to help others. It is one thing to have an action set forth as praiseworthy in itself, and another to have it extolled in comparison with something worse than itself. We rejoice in one way when a sick man is cured and in another when he improves a little. Even in the sacred Scriptures, Sodom is spoken of as justified in comparison with the crimes of the people of Israel. All the lies cited from the Old Testament, which are not and cannot be found reprehensible, are examined according to this criterion: Either they are approved in consideration of the nature and hope of those who tell them, or they are not lies at all because they bear some metaphorical significance.

Augustine of Hippo, “Lying,” trans. Harold B. Jaffee, in Roy J. Deferrari (ed.), Saint Augustine. Treatises on Various Subjects. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1952. Chapter 5 (5-7), pp 60-62.

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24. Pedro Sanchez, On false prudence and admirable prudence.

Las falsas prudencias nos enseñaron los antiguos, como Cayn que saco a su hermano al campo donde pudiesse a sus solas matalle. Rachel sentose en el aparejo del Camello, y fingio enfermedad, para engañar a su padre que no hallasse los idolos. Tamar disfraçase para engañar a Iudas. Amon para engañar a Tamar su hermana, y forçarla. Falsa prudencia era la de Absalon, sobornando al pueblo para se levantar contra su padre. Y la de los Filisteos, quando hizieron no huviesse herroes en Israel, para que no huviesse armas. Y la de Saul en dar su hija a David, con condicion que le diesse tantos prepucios de Filisteos. Y la de David, llamando a Urias de la guerra, para que viniesse a su casa, para dissimular el adulterio. Y la de Giezi, mintiendo a Naaman para le sacar dineros. Y

378 la de Ieroboan para fingir nuevos dioses en Israel, para los entretener que no se bolviessen al templo de Dios, y con esto perpetuar su reyno. Pero admirable prudencia fue la de los Santos, y excede a toda astucia de los malos, por ser regidos por el Espiritu santo. Assi dezia San Pablo. Como yo fuesse adulto, con engaños os cogi, porque ay buenos engaños quando nos llevan al cielo. Tal fue la prudencia de Iacob, quando se enriquecio con la invencion de las varas puestas junto a los canales. Tal la de Rebeca su madre, para que alcançasse la bendicion Iacob de su padre. Y Iacob aplacando con dones a su hermano. Y Ioseph guardando el trigo para sustento del mundo, y provando a sus hermanos con tan prudentes provaciones. Y David quando dissimulo ser loco, por escapar con la vida delante del Rey profano. Tal la de Salomon, quando dio sentencia entre las dos rameras. Y Abigail quando aplaco a David que no matasse a su marido. Y Natan, quando corrigio a David con tan prudente parabola. Y Daniel, quando convencio a los viejos tan prudentemente. Y San Pablo, quando en el concilio se libro, metiendo la question de la Resurreccion, mostrandose Fariseo y al fin como la serpiente de Moyses trago todas las demas que los Magos de Faraon hizieron, assi la prudencia de Dios excede a todas las astucias de los pecadores y malos.

Pedro Sanchez, Libro del Reyno de Dios, y del Camino por Do se alcança. Confirmado con exemplos y sentencias de Santos (Barcelona: Juan Simon, 1605), 264r.

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25. Genesis 30: 25-43. Jacob and the flocks of Laban

And when Joseph was born, Jacob said to his father in law: Send me away that I may return into my country, and to my land. Give me my wives, and my children, for whom I have served thee, that I may depart: thou knowest the service that I have rendered thee. Laban said to him: Let me find favour in thy sight: I have learned by experience, that God hath blessed me for thy sake. Appoint thy wages which I shall give thee. But he answered: Thou knowest how I have served thee, and how great thy possession hath been in my hands. Thou hadst but little before I came to thee, and now thou art become rich: and the Lord hath blessed thee at my coming. It is reasonable therefore that I should now provide also for my own house. And Laban said: What shall I give thee? But he said: I require nothing: but if thou wilt do what I demand, I will feed, and keep thy sheep again. Go round through all thy flocks, and separate all the sheep of diverse colours, and speckled: and all that is brown and spotted, and of divers colours, as well among the sheep, as among the goats, shall be my wages. And my justice shall answer for me tomorrow before thee when the time of the bargain shall come: and all that is not of divers colours, and spotted, and brown, as well among the sheep as among the goats, shall accuse me of theft. And Laban said: I like well what thou demandest. And he separated the same day the she goats, and the sheep, and the he goats, and the rams of divers colours, and spotted: and all the flock of one colour, that is, of white and black fleece, he delivered into the hands of his sons. And he set the space of three days’ journey betwixt himself and his son in law, who fed the rest of his flock. And Jacob took green

379 rods of poplar, and of almond, and of plane trees, and pilled them in part: so when the bark was taken off, in the parts that were pilled, there appeared whiteness: but the parts that were whole remained green: and by this means the colour was divers. And he put them in the troughs, where the water was poured out: that whn the flocks should come to drink, they might have the rods before their eyes, and in the sight of them might conceive. And it came to pass that in the very heat of coition, the sheep beheld the rods, and brought forth spotted, and of divers colours, and speckled. And Jacob separated the flock, and put the rods in the troughs before the eyes of the rams: and all the white and the black were Laban’s: and the rest were Jacob’s, when the flocks were separated one from the other. So when the ewes went first to ram, Jacob put the rods in the troughs of water before the eyes of the rams, and of the ewes, that they might conceive while they were looking upon them: But when the latter coming was, and the last conceiving, he did not put them. And those that were lateward, became Laban’s: and they of the first time, Jacob’s. And the man was enriched exceedingly, and he had many flocks, maid servants and men servants, camels and asses.

Douay-Rheims version.

Nato aut[em] Ioseph, dixit Iacob socero suo. Dimitte me ut revertar in patriam, & ad terram mea[m]. Da mihi uxores, & liberos meos, pro quib. servivi tibi, ut abeam: tu nosti servitutem qua servivi tibi. Ait illi Laban: Inveniam gratiam in co[n]specto tuo: esperimento didici, quia benedixerit mihi Deus propter te: constitue merdede[m] tuam quam de tibi. At ille respondit: Tu nosti quo modo servi erim tibi, & quanta in manib[us] meis fuerit possessio tua. Modicum habuisti antequam venirem, ad te, & nunc dives effectus es: bnedixitq[ue] tibi D[ominus] ad introitum meu[m]. Iustum est igitur ut aliqu[antem] privideam e[s]t domui meae. Dixit[que] Laban: Quid tibi dabo? At ille ait: Nihil volo: sed si feceris qu[ae] postulo, iterum pasca[m], & custodia[m] pecora tua. Gyra o[v]es greges tuos, & separa cunctas oves varias, & sparso vellere: & quodcumq[ue] furuum, & maculosum, varium[que] fuerit, tam in ovib[us] quam in capris, erit merces mea. Respondebitq[ue] mihi cras [18] iustitia mea, qn placiti te[m]pus advenerit cora[m] te: & o[mn]ia quae no[n] fuerint varia, & maculosa, & fuva, ta[m] in ovib[us] q[uam] in capris, furti me arguent. Dixitque Laba[n]: Gratu[m] habeo quod petis. Et separavit in die illa capras, & oves, & hircos, & arietes varios, atq[ue] maculosos: cunctu[m] aut[em] grege[m] unicolore[m] id est albi, & nigri velleris, tradidit in manu filiorum suorum. Et posuit spatiu[m] itineris triu[m] dieru[m] inter se & generu[m], qu[ae] pascebat reliquos greges eius. Tolle[n]s ergo Iacob virgas populeas virides, & amygdalinas, & ex platanis, ex parte decorticavit eas: detractisq[ue] corticibus, in his, quae spoliata fuerant, ca[n]dor apparuit: illa vero quae integra fuera[n]t, viridia perma[n]serunt: atq[ue] in hu[n]c modu[m] color effectus est varius. Posuitq[ue] eas in canalibus, ubi effundebatur aqua: ut cu[m] venissent greges ad bibe[n]du[m], ante oculos habere[n]t virgas, & in aspectu earu[m] concipere[n]t. Factumq[ue] est ut in ipso calore coitus, oves intuerent virgas, & parere[n]t maculosa, & varia, & diverso colore resperta. Divisitq[ue] grege[m] Iacob, & posuit virgas in canalibus ante oculos arietu[m]: era[n]t aute[m] alba & nigra qu[a]eque, Laban: cetera vero, Iacob, separatis inter se gregibus. Igit qn primo te[m]pore ascendeba[n]tur oves, ponebat Iacob virgas in canalibus aquaru[m] ante oculos arietu[m]

380 & ovi[b]u[s], ut in earu[m] conte[m]platione co[n]ciperent: qn vero serotinabat eas. Factaq[ue] sunt ea quae erant serotina, Laba[n]: & quae primi te[m]poris, Iacob. Ditatusq[ue] est homo ultra modum, & habuit greges multos, ancillas & servos, camelos & asinos.

Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis Sixti Quinti Pont. Max. Iussu recognita, atque edita (Venice: Evangelista Deuchino & Giovanni Battista Pulciani, 1608), 17-18.

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26. Melchior Prieto. “Explanation of the non-repugnance of the transsubstantiation of the bread into the flesh of Christ with natural examples.”

Explicase la no repugnancia de la transustanciacion del pan en carne de Christo con exemplos naturales.

O digamos para concluir nuestra explicacion, y contexto, que todos los versos deste Psalmo, desde qui emittit eloquium suum terra, hasta el que acabamos de explicar, los dixo el Pslamista, hablando con el fiel Christiano para persuadirle la verdad, y realidad de la Eucaristia: y fue como si dixe el Profeta Rey: Si te espanta dezir, que el pan es carne, y el vino es sangre de Christo, porque se transustancian en el para sustentar al hombre? Y si dixeres: Quomodò potest hic nobis carnem suam dare ad manducandum, que como es possible, que el Redentor nos dè su carne, para que la comamos? Para persuadirte a creerlo, oye con atencion la palabra de Dios, lo que puede, y haze en la tierra, y hallaràs, que es poderosa para hazer, que los vapores terrestres se conviertan, ya en agua, ya en nieve, ya en cristal, y essos mismos despues los deshaze, y convierte en agua. De manera que aqui estan condensados, aculla liquidos, y transparentes, unas vezes claros, y otras escuros. Pues si la palabra de Dios puede hazer tantas transformaciones destos vapores de la tierra, porque essa misma palabra, que contiene la virtud de Dios, no podrà transustanciar la sustancia del pany, y vino en la sustancia de la carne y sangre de Christo, para sustentar al hombre? Y si obra la palabra de Dios las grandezas dichas, y tu la ves al ojo, porque no te bastarà a persuadir el mistero, y transustanciacion del altar. De manera que aunque no le veas le creas, y te persuadas a darle verdadero assenso de Fè. Y deve darsele el fiel, pues Dios desde el principio del mundo se le ha revelado en infinidad de figuras, In figuris praesignatur, solo en orden a que le crea, y se persuada a el, Dixi vobis priusquam fiat, ut cum factum fuerit credatis; que assi lo dixo el Redentor en el sermon, que les hizo a sus Apostoles despues de la Cena, y de aver instituido el santissimo Sacramento, acordaos amigos mios, que os dixe en Cafarnaun, y os di noticia deste sacramento, que aora acabo de celebrar, para que teniendola os dispusiessedes a creerle. Pues esto mismo es lo que dizen las palabras de nuestro Psalmo, Qui annuntiat Verbum suum Iacob; que Dios revelò este misterio de la Eucaristia al Patriarca Iacob, quando entre sueños en Luza, a quien el puso nombre de Bethel, le revelo, y enseño aquella misteriosa escala, que como ya queda dicho, figurava, y significò este Sacramento del altar, a quien avia de baxar el Angel del gran Consejo del cielo, y por quien avian de subir los hombres a el: y que entonces le revelasse al santo Patriarca este

381 misterio del altar; parece, que lo muestra claramente el texto sagrado, que dize, que en acabando de despertar Iacob, dixo: Si dederit mihi panem ad vescendum, erit mihi Dominus in Deum, si el Señor fuere servido de darme el pan, que me ofrece, y me ha revelado, yo le conocerè, y adorarè por mi Dios; que Lira, y un moderno en este lugar de nuestro Psalmo, dizen, que Iacob tuvo grandes revelaciones del Messias, que se esperava, y de Christo Dios y hombre, que avia de nacer: y esso dizen que es lo que suenan estas palabras, Qui annuntiat verbum suum Iacob, que Dios le manifestò al santo Patriarca la encarnacion del Verbo, y los misterios que hecha avia de obrar. Donde se deve advertir, que yendo [200] con lo que avemos dicho, le revelò Dios este misterio del altar, quando dormia a ojos cerrados, en solo representacion, y de palabra, Qui annuntiat, dexòselo, como misterio de Fè, que no se ha de ver, sino creer: y revelandosele, como se le revelò: podemos dezir, que en el le revelo todos los misterios de Christo, porque en este santissimo Sacramento, Memoriam fecit mirabilium suorum, cifrò Dios todas sus maravillas. Y que se las revelasse a Iacob todas, dizen nos lo las palabras siguientes de nuestro Psalmo, en que afirma David, que le Revelò Dios al santo Patriarca, Iustitias, & iudica sua Israel, sus justicias, y sus juizios. Esto es sus grandezas, y los abismos de su sabiduria, que la justicia de Dios, Iustitia tua situt montes Dei, se compara a montes altissimos donde no se puede subir, y los juizios divinos se assimilan a un pielago inmenso, y a un mar Oceano infinito, que no se puede apear. Pues todas essas grandezas, y maravillas, dize nuestro Psalmo, que se las manifesto, y revelò Dios a Iacob, Iustitias, & iudicia sua Israel, que por otro nombre se llamò Israel, que quiere dezir, videns Deum, el que ve a Dios. Y en la ocasion que se las revelò todas, fue quando vio la escala (como queda dicho) y en ella a Dios, y al Verbo encarnado, Et Dominum innixum super scalam, a quien tan antes de tiempo vio con los ojos de la Fè.

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417 HANNAH J. FRIEDMAN

Department of the History of Art 3400 N. Charles Street 182 Gilman Hall Baltimore, Maryland, 21218 [email protected] (646) 565-0942

EDUCATION

2016 Ph.D. History of Art, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland “Taste and Prudence in the Art of Jusepe de Ribera” Advisors: Stephen J. Campbell and Felipe Pereda

2008 M.A. History of Art, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts “Artful Testimony? Evidence and Experience in Caravaggio's Incredulity of Saint Thomas” Advisor: Zirka Z. Filipczak

2003 B.A. Modern Languages and Literatures (German and Spanish), Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio “Problematische Konstruktionen von Gender in Rainer Werner Fassbinders Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1978) und Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972)” Advisor: Evelyn Moore

AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS

2015 Dean's Teaching Fellowship, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

2012-2015 Paul Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Gallery, Washington D. C.

2012-2014 Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellowship, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome (declined)

2011-2012 Carlson-Cowart Fellowship, Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland

2011, 2012 Summer Library Research Fellowship, the Charles S. Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, Baltimore, Maryland

418 2010 Travel Fellowship to Madrid, the Charles S. Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, Baltimore, Maryland

2011 Sadie and Louis Roth Fellowship, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland (travel to Madrid, Rome, and Naples)

2010 Hodson Fellowship in the Humanities, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland (travel to Florence and Rome)

2006-2008 Class of 1955 Memorial Fellowship, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (full tuition and stipend award)

INVITED SCHOLARLY PRESENTATIONS

2016 “Discernment and Prudence in Jusepe de Ribera's Isaac Blessing Jacob,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference, Boston

2014 “Fisonomía y filosofía natural en la obra gráfica de José de Ribera” Seminar, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid

2012 “Blind Practice and Shining Virtue: On the Theoretical Implications of Jusepe de Ribera's Drawings,” Courtauld Institute of Art, London

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Fall 2015 Primary instructor, “Theft, Theory, and Telescopes: Rome and Naples in the Age of Caravaggio,” The Johns Hopkins University

Spring 2012 Primary instructor, “Art, Knowledge, and Power in Global Perspective, 1500-1700,” The Johns Hopkins University

Fall 2011 Teaching assistant to Felipe Pereda, “Art and Faith in Golden Age Spain,” The Johns Hopkins University

Spring 2011 Teaching assistant to Stephen Campbell, "Early Renaissance Art from Giotto to Leonardo” The Johns Hopkins University

Spring 2010 Teaching assistant to Kathryn Tuma, “Survey of the History of Art from the Early Renaissance to the Present,”,The Johns Hopkins University

Spring 2008 Teaching assistant to Eva Grudin and Zirka Z. Filipczak, “Aspects of Western Art (painting and graphic arts),” Williams College

419

Fall 2007 Teaching assistant to Eugene J. Johnson and Peter Low, “Aspects of Western Art (sculpture and architecture)”

Summer 2004 Primary instructor and tutor, ELS Manhattan, New York, New York

2003-2005 Fulbright Austrian-American Educational Commission Teaching assistant, English as a foreign language, Handelsakademie Bundesgymnasium Frauengasse, Handelsakademie Mühlgasse, and Höhere Bundeslehranstalt für Wirtschaftliche Berufe Germergasse, Baden Bei Wien

Fall 2002 Teaching assistant, Introductory German, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio

Fall 2002 Tutor, Writing Lab

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

Fall 2009 Research assistant to Michael Fried, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland Bibliographic research on Valentin de Boulogne and Francesco Barbieri

Summer 2008 Research assistant to Jonathan Katz, the Clark Research and Academic Program, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts Bibliographic research on Agnes Martin

2005-2006 Staff research assistant, Plan of St. Gall Project, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Los Angeles, California

MUSEUM EXPERIENCE

2011-2012 Prints cataloguing on Gérard de Lairesse, Baltimore Museum of Art

Summer 2007 Gallery Interpreter, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute -2008

2006-2007 Intern, Department of Museum Education, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

July 2002 Intern to Julia Habrecht, Exhibitions Administrator, Toledo Museum of Art

420 LANGUAGES

French – Fluency in speaking, reading, and writing German – Fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Italian – Fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Spanish - Fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Latin - Reading proficiency

SERVICE

2009-2012 Departmental Representative, Graduate Representative Organization, the Johns Hopkins University

AFFILIATIONS

College Art Association Renaissance Society of America

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