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THE PROPERTY OF A LADY

CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS IN THE TEMPLE

measurements note
113.8 by 174 cm.; 44 3/4 by 68 1/2 in.

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Anonymous sale, Dordrecht, Mak, 28 November 1957, lot 73, where acquired by the late husband of the present owner.

NOTE

This hitherto unpublished painting would appear to be a youthful work by Jusepe de Ribera, painted around the middle of the second decade of the 17th century, either just before his departure for Naples in the summer of 1616 or more likely shortly afterwards, in circa 1617-18. The painting has some points in common with The Raising of Lazarus, a canvas of even larger dimensions in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, which has been dated to the artist's Roman sojourn.¹ Both are multi-figural compositions in which the protagonists are shown in penumbra and three-quarter length, with numerous secondary figures commenting on the action that is taking place in the foreground. It is a technique inherited from Caravaggio and it reaches its culmination in Ribera's own ~uvre in The Denial of Saint Peter in the Galleria Corsini, Rome, for a long time ascribed to the "Master of the Judgement of Solomon".² The naturalistic still life of scrolls and books in the foreground, with their tattered pages and turned corners, is treated in a similar manner to that in the foreground of Ribera's Saints Peter and Paul in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, dated by Nicola Spinosa and Alfonso Pérez Sánchez to 1615-16 but considered by Gianni Papi to date from early on in Ribera's Neapolitan period, that is to 1616-17.³ The coarse canvas weave of the present work, more typical of Neapolitan canvases, would argue for the slightly later dating for Christ among the Doctors also.

Although born in Valencia, Ribera travelled to Italy as a young man and his presence is recorded there in 1611 (the year in which he is paid for an altarpiece in Parma) though it is likely that he had arrived at least one or two years previously. A document dated 27 October 1613 notes Ribera's admittance to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, suggesting that he had already completed a number of commissions by this date. In April 1615 and March 1616 he is recorded as living in a house with other painters in via Margutta and the recent discovery of a document dated 5 June 1612 indicates that Ribera was in Rome much earlier than had previously been thought.⁴ The document consists of the twenty-two-year-old artist asking his landlord for authorisation to make a window in the roof of his studio; an interesting fact about Ribera's working practice. Having a single overhead light source seems to have been a lesson that he and other artists had learnt from Caravaggio and although Ribera's single-figure paintings are successful in this regard his more complex multi-figural compositions show the artist struggling with how to light such scenes. Not only is this true of the present painting, but it can also be said for the Prado Raising of Lazarus and the Christ among the Doctors in the Cathedral of St. Mammès, Langres, which is datable to circa 1614-16 and has Giustiniani (and therefore Roman) provenance.⁵ Ribera was still in Rome in May 1616 but moved to Naples in the summer of that year, for in November 1616 he is already recorded there. It was in that city that his reputation grew, both within Italy and abroad, and although he lived and worked in Naples he received numerous commissions from Spain through the intercession of Spanish painters and dignitaries.⁶

We are grateful to Prof. Nicola Spinosa for proposing an attribution to Ribera and for suggesting a date of execution circa 1617-18, after seeing the painting in the original. Prof. Spinosa plans to publish the work in his forthcoming revised edition of the catalogue raisonné of Ribera's paintings, due to be published by Electa Napoli in the autumn of this year.

1. Sold, New York, Sotheby's, 25 January 2001, lot 143. See N. Spinosa, Ribera, Naples 2003, p. 263, cat. no. A43, reproduced and a colour detail on p. 53.
2. Spinosa, op. cit., p. 257, cat. no. A26, reproduced; and, more recently, G. Papi, in Caravaggio e l'Europa: da Caravaggio a Mattia Preti, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Palazzo Reale, 15 October 2005 -- 6 February 2006, pp. 280-81, cat. no. III.15, reproduced in colour. Papi has argued that the paintings formerly ascribed to the "Master of the Judgement of Solomon" actually form the corpus of paintings Ribera painted whilst a young man in Rome.
3. Papi, op. cit., pp. 282-83, cat. no. III.16, reproduced in colour.
4. See S. Danesi Squarzina, "New documents on Ribera, 'pictor in Urbe', 1612-16", in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXLVIII, no. 1237, pp. 244-51.
5. Oil on canvas, 188 by 267 cm.; Danesi Squarzina, op. cit., p. 245, reproduced fig. 1.
6. Jusepe Martínez visited Ribera in Naples in 1625 as did Diego Velásquez five years later. Don Pedro Téllez-Girón (1575-1624), 3rd Duque of Osuna and Viceroy of Naples from 1616 to 1620, commissioned a number of works from Ribera during his early years in Naples (these were donated to the collegiate church of Osuna by his widow in 1627).