Jusepe de Ribera

Etching, with engraving and dry-point, 1628
Size of original & reproduction 272 x 350 mm, 10 11/16 x 13 3/4 inches

The Golden Age of Spanish painting produced only a very few prints of significance, and this is perhaps the finest, and the one that best conveys the secular aspect of the spirit of the period. Despite a run-down and realistic setting and the sordidness of his situation, the drunk demi-god Silenus retains considerable dignity, and even a faded touch of the glamour of Caravaggio's drinking boys.

In classical myth Silenus was the leader of the satyrs, and a poet as well as a drinker. He acted as foster-father to Dionysus/Bacchus. The satyrs had the bodies of goats below the waist, and often horns, but Silenus has a normal human body. He roams the countryside with a crew of satyrs and fauns, drinking, making mischief, and chasing nymphs.

His father was the god Pan, who here, identified by his pipes and crook on the ground beside him, is crowning Silenus with a wreath of vine leaves. The donkey was an essential part of the team, for Silenus to ride when too drunk to walk. Mature satyrs were considered prone to baldness, which the ancient Greeks (like the Jews of the Old Testament) found ridiculous.

This etching is a version, with several changes, of a painting Ribera had done two years before (now in Naples, Museo di Capodimonte). In the etching Ribera lightens and opens up the background and changes many of the minor elements of the composition. For example, the babies replace a young satyr. The central three figures remain very much the same, but in reverse (they are the mirror-image of the painting).

Ribera's Silenus is much younger than most depictions of the Baroque period, and looks more like the poet and wit he was believed to be in the classical period.

There are a number of major paintings of Silenus dating from 1615-1630, by Rubens (1618, now in Munich, and a studio work of c1620 in NG London), Van Dyck (before 1621, Dresden), and Poussin (1629-30, Munich). All these others made Silenus older, drunker and fatter, and based his face largely on classical sculptures of Socrates. This is because in Plato's Symposium Socrates is teased for physically resembling Silenus.

These pictures, especially the one in London, in turn clearly influenced early commercial images of Father Christmas, whose facial stereotype therefore turns out, rather surprisingly, to be based on the founder of Western philosophy.

Ribera's Silenus may well have been an influence on Velasquez's Triumph of Bacchus (1628-9, Prado Madrid). This famous picture shows the young god, sitting on a wine-barrel and wearing only loosely draped cloths, among a fully-clothed group of men in contemporary dress. Bacchus wears a vine wreath and is crowning one of the men.

The images share a striking mixture of realism and mythology, and both have their figures in a frieze-like line very close to the front of the picture-space. Since Velasquez could not have seen Ribera's painting until he visited Naples in 1630, the most likely source of any influence is the print.

Ribera only made eighteen etchings, mostly between 1620-8, when he had been working for a few years in Naples. Ribera's main patron, the Duke of Osuna, left Naples for Spain in 1620, and the following five years seem to have been difficult. No paintings signed and dated by him during these years survive, and he presumably produced the etchings to boost his career.

The inscription on the rock to the right carries the date of 1628 and Ribera's name and origin in a very formal style:" Joseph a Ribera Hisps. Valentis. Setaben. F(ecit). Partenope" - Jusepe de Ribera, Spaniard, of Jativa (Setaben) in Valencia, made this in Naples. The original Greek settlement at Naples was named after the nymph Parthenope, until the "new city" or Nea Polis grew up alongside it in the C5th BC.

Size of reproduction:
272 x 350 mm, 10 11/16 x 13 3/4 inches

Print price:
£65    €95    $105

£ and € print prices include UK VAT at 17.5%. No UK VAT on Books.

© The Trustees of the British Museum 2006 PD 1862-7-12-535 Bartsch 13, State II/II