Edited by Steve Bamlett, Thursday, 27 Sep 2018, 10:07
Ribera’s Nudes –Men Penetrated
by Pain: Ribera: Art of Violence Dulwich Picture Gallery (opening 26th
September 2018.
How does the thesis that in the renaissance the nude male
was associated with heroic violent interaction between men fare if we look at a
key Baroque figure like de Ribera? It certainly links to that, but Ribera’s
focus is not on men in relatively equal combat but in the passive suffering of
a heroic body-figure under the hands of malign and/or justified torture.
Usually this torture involves penetration of the skin and/or flesh – his
favourite themes that run through his career being bodily punishment of an
extreme kind in which the body surface is ruptured, cut and often manually or
mechanically torn. Interest in the cruel mix of torture in which the victim’s
bodily responses force him to collaborate in worsening his condition for
instance, such as the strappado, but
also penetration by weapons (St. Sebastian) or flaying. Ribera imagined
different stages of gross torture (especially in the case of St Bartholomew),
imagining him in twisting three-dimensional mobility of experience and
expression of pain. He loves the moment of the scream through an open mouth –
another orifice in the flesh where inside and outside meet in visions of wet
(often blood-reddened and wet) rupture. His use of the idea of flaying in
butchery emerges in the 1644 Bartholomew and the flaying of Marsyas. The flayer
is shown at the minute when, having cut and exposed the flesh from skin (or
hide in Marsyas’ case), he uses a hand (yes, even Apollo does this) to push
down the patch of skin to expose a fresh wound.
For this reason, de Ribera was considered by Byron and
Gautier as a lover of violence for its own sake. Others, including the curators
of this exhibition feel that it is a means of communication about the role of
senses in the understanding of art, particularly in that art stimulated by the paragone, the demonstration of the
competing claims of sculpture and painting in terms of both knowledge gained
bottom-up from a range of the 5 senses or in the exploitation of mimetic
effects in multi-dimensional space. Ribera’s men in pain are often partially
exposed near the picture-plane, whilst the body-in-pain twists in two actual
and one virtual dimension (of depth). Pain naturally invites this motion which
is caught usually as a stasis torn out of arcs of embodied movement. In the
paintings in this exhibition, we see how this affects the picture frame in
2-dimensions as a stretching of the body to fill all available spaces – with
bodily extremities reaching out to the ultimate edges of the painting’s frame.
For these curators this exhibition is of art and hence
haunted by the head of Apollo (in flesh in the flaying of Marsyas) and as the a
captured stone bust of Apollo Belvedere (the bust probably used is also in the
exhibition) in a few surprising paintings but especially in his Bartholomew
paintings, where the eyes of Bartholomew are contrasted with the dead impassive
blindness as the former looks at God in the very physical c1628 version or,
more worrying and intensely, the viewer in the 1644 version (for detail see this link). For our curators
this proves the intention of meta-discourse in the pictures on the nature of
art itself - whether in paragone or colore-disegno debates
Let’s say though that another theme is possible, which is
the ways in which the Baroque nude male here transforms the conception of
masculinity. No longer are we as interested in the heroic moment of male
interaction but in the passive response (in fact a mix of active and passive
responses) to violence (rather than of mutual violence). De Ribera appears to
value in men the moment of their ability to suffer and endure whilst in bodily
torment (where their bodies are penetrated by male social violence and its
surface torn from an assumed depth that lies under opened orifices. Moths that
scream in silence are such orifices. You can’t perceive them without haptic apprehension,
some imagined but embodied performance in the viewer. That is why the surface
that is torn is not only of the skin, but in the greatest painting (Marsyas) of
the tree bark and the surface paint of the painting itself. The curators are
good in their analysis of this in the catalogue.
What in seventeenth-century Milan makes de Ribera the poet
of male passive suffering in the body? Of course, the Counter Reformation stress
on the pierced body is part of it – in Bernini for instance, but something else
is happening. A response o the male body that only in part looks like a return
to Northern Gothic dwelling on the torn body of Christ, but in the sense of an
artist, whose exposed inside is the sign of art (now based on Milanese
art-under-sale and the rise of exhibition selling (as Haskell famously tells
us) made men-in-solitary-pain.
For me a strange star in the show is a wizened older man in
red and with a clear halo, brandishing a knife in one end and the removed skin
with remaining facial features of St. Bartholomew. Make sure you puzzle here.
Ribera’s Nudes –Men Penetrated by Pain:
Ribera’s Nudes –Men Penetrated by Pain: Ribera: Art of Violence Dulwich Picture Gallery (opening 26th September 2018.
How does the thesis that in the renaissance the nude male was associated with heroic violent interaction between men fare if we look at a key Baroque figure like de Ribera? It certainly links to that, but Ribera’s focus is not on men in relatively equal combat but in the passive suffering of a heroic body-figure under the hands of malign and/or justified torture. Usually this torture involves penetration of the skin and/or flesh – his favourite themes that run through his career being bodily punishment of an extreme kind in which the body surface is ruptured, cut and often manually or mechanically torn. Interest in the cruel mix of torture in which the victim’s bodily responses force him to collaborate in worsening his condition for instance, such as the strappado, but also penetration by weapons (St. Sebastian) or flaying. Ribera imagined different stages of gross torture (especially in the case of St Bartholomew), imagining him in twisting three-dimensional mobility of experience and expression of pain. He loves the moment of the scream through an open mouth – another orifice in the flesh where inside and outside meet in visions of wet (often blood-reddened and wet) rupture. His use of the idea of flaying in butchery emerges in the 1644 Bartholomew and the flaying of Marsyas. The flayer is shown at the minute when, having cut and exposed the flesh from skin (or hide in Marsyas’ case), he uses a hand (yes, even Apollo does this) to push down the patch of skin to expose a fresh wound.
For this reason, de Ribera was considered by Byron and Gautier as a lover of violence for its own sake. Others, including the curators of this exhibition feel that it is a means of communication about the role of senses in the understanding of art, particularly in that art stimulated by the paragone, the demonstration of the competing claims of sculpture and painting in terms of both knowledge gained bottom-up from a range of the 5 senses or in the exploitation of mimetic effects in multi-dimensional space. Ribera’s men in pain are often partially exposed near the picture-plane, whilst the body-in-pain twists in two actual and one virtual dimension (of depth). Pain naturally invites this motion which is caught usually as a stasis torn out of arcs of embodied movement. In the paintings in this exhibition, we see how this affects the picture frame in 2-dimensions as a stretching of the body to fill all available spaces – with bodily extremities reaching out to the ultimate edges of the painting’s frame.
For these curators this exhibition is of art and hence haunted by the head of Apollo (in flesh in the flaying of Marsyas) and as the a captured stone bust of Apollo Belvedere (the bust probably used is also in the exhibition) in a few surprising paintings but especially in his Bartholomew paintings, where the eyes of Bartholomew are contrasted with the dead impassive blindness as the former looks at God in the very physical c1628 version or, more worrying and intensely, the viewer in the 1644 version (for detail see this link). For our curators this proves the intention of meta-discourse in the pictures on the nature of art itself - whether in paragone or colore-disegno debates
Let’s say though that another theme is possible, which is the ways in which the Baroque nude male here transforms the conception of masculinity. No longer are we as interested in the heroic moment of male interaction but in the passive response (in fact a mix of active and passive responses) to violence (rather than of mutual violence). De Ribera appears to value in men the moment of their ability to suffer and endure whilst in bodily torment (where their bodies are penetrated by male social violence and its surface torn from an assumed depth that lies under opened orifices. Moths that scream in silence are such orifices. You can’t perceive them without haptic apprehension, some imagined but embodied performance in the viewer. That is why the surface that is torn is not only of the skin, but in the greatest painting (Marsyas) of the tree bark and the surface paint of the painting itself. The curators are good in their analysis of this in the catalogue.
What in seventeenth-century Milan makes de Ribera the poet of male passive suffering in the body? Of course, the Counter Reformation stress on the pierced body is part of it – in Bernini for instance, but something else is happening. A response o the male body that only in part looks like a return to Northern Gothic dwelling on the torn body of Christ, but in the sense of an artist, whose exposed inside is the sign of art (now based on Milanese art-under-sale and the rise of exhibition selling (as Haskell famously tells us) made men-in-solitary-pain.
For me a strange star in the show is a wizened older man in red and with a clear halo, brandishing a knife in one end and the removed skin with remaining facial features of St. Bartholomew. Make sure you puzzle here.
All the best
Steve