Word: caravaggio
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Still, the work displays its own sources. Ribera saw, and was completely bowled over by, the work of Caravaggio, which he must have heard about in Spain though not seen until he got to Rome. This happened around 1610, the year Caravaggio died. It is hardly fanciful to suppose that Ribera, barely 20 years old and full of an expatriate's ambition, was anxious to move into the space only just vacated by this great and still controversial painter...
Other contemporaries, such as Guido Reni and Annibale Carracci, affected him deeply as well; he had worked on their turf, in Parma, before coming to Rome. It was, however, Caravaggio, the tragic realist, with his dramatically articulate figures sculpted by darkness, his appetite for common life and his candor about the apprehensible world, who had blown away the mincing academism of late mannerist art and shown the way forward to a whole generation of younger European painters, of whom Ribera was the most gifted...
...essential difference between him and Caravaggio, though, was that Ribera believed strongly in drawing for its own sake -- no drawings by Caravaggio survive -- and was a passionate student of the 16th century grand manner, whose defining masters were Michelangelo and Raphael. Their works, he said, "demand to be studied and meditated over many times. For though we now paint following a different course and method, if it is not established upon this kind of study, ((our)) painting may easily end in ruin." This is why Michelangelesque poses often recur in Ribera's early work, such as the half- ruined, still...
...with the study and acquisition of Renaissance art that they had little time for the seicento; for them, Italian genius lay in "primitive" gold-ground altarpieces and 15th and 16th century frescoes. Consequently, Guercino, like a number of his contemporaries -- Guido Reni and the Carraccis, for instance, or even Caravaggio -- was slighted. The first Guercino exhibition was not held until three centuries after his death, in his ! birthplace in central Italy, the small Emilian city of Cento, in 1967. His rediscovery was due almost entirely to the love and labors of one English art historian, the late Denis Mahon...
None of this was completely new in painting -- you have only to think of Titian, Rembrandt's father figure and model, and of Caravaggio, whose dirty- feet realism had such an impact on the Dutch master when young. But Rembrandt put the elements of dramatic narrative, character description and history painting together in a way that had not been attempted before, and has scarcely been rivaled since...