Ribera and the Operations of Painting

Abstract

Ribera and the Operations of Painting examines the convergence of painterly and medical practices in early modern Southern Europe through the work of Jusepe (José) de Ribera (Játiva, 1591–Naples, 1652). This dissertation argues that Ribera’s paintings must be understood not only within the artistic traditions of Spain and Italy but within the intellectual and institutional contexts that informed their making and reception. Central to this study is the Ospedale degli Incurabili, where Ribera likely worked upon his arrival in Naples, and its affiliated institutions: a literary academy (the Accademia degli Oziosi), a theatre (the Teatro di San Bartolomeo), and a confraternity (La Compagnia dei Bianchi della Giustizia). Contextualizing Ribera’s oeuvre in light of these intertwined settings allows this project to offer the first account of the painter’s work in relation to the history of medicine. This includes Ribera’s appropriation of surgical images and his reception within the “diagnostic” engravings of the Incurabili’s surgeon, Marco Aurelio Severino. The dissertation therefore advances two claims: first, that Ribera’s practice reflects a genuine point of contact between a painter and a distinct medical culture emerging in Spanish Naples; and second, that his naturalism constitutes a mode of inquiry in itself. Ribera’s art participated in a broader epistemic shift through which painting, to borrow from the physician and connoisseur Giulio Mancini, became an operazione: an “operation” whose material procedures would generate their own forms of knowledge. Ribera’s oeuvre offers a privileged space to consider the epistemology of the body within the body of art and, by extension, to reassess the operations of painting in the seventeenth century and beyond.