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 Copyright Hannah Joy Friedman, 2016 (c) 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