Ribera, though born near Valencia, where he received his early
education in the painter’s art in the studio of Ribalta, was still
young in years when he left his native land for Italy, never to
return. Studying and working at Rome, Parma, and Naples, he was so
strongly influenced by Caravaggio, and to a minor extent by Correggio,
that, taking also into account his long domicile, there is some
justification for those who treat him as belonging to the Italian
school of Naturalists. The most prominent feature of his art is the
violent and abrupt contrasting of brilliant lights with very deep and
heavy shadows, which enforces the almost cruel dramatic intensity of
his scenes of torture, convulsions, and suffering. In this use of
chiaroscuro he was a true follower of Caravaggio, but Ribera, even
where he is most Italian, never denies his Spanish nationality and the
teaching of his first master.
Nowhere are his racial characteristics more pronounced than in
the admirable character-study, in the La Caze Room, of a grinning
beggar-boy who suffers from an infirmity from which the picture derives
its popular name, _The Club-foot_ (No. 1725). The boy is standing
in bold silhouette against a clouded sky. He shoulders his crutch
like a gun, and carries in his left hand a sheet of paper with the
inscription—DA MIHI ELEMOSINAM PROPTER AMOREM DEI.
If _The Club-foot_ is scarcely typical of the qualities that are
generally associated with Ribera’s art, the Louvre owns two thoroughly
characteristic examples of his more violent manner, of his dramatic
use of sharply contrasted light and shade, in _The Entombment_ (No.
1722) and _St. Paul the Hermit_ (No. 1723), which bears on a stone the
signature