Sublime and Grotesque: Ribera and the Art of Drawing

Speaker: Edward Payne, Senior Curator of Spanish Art, Auckland Castle A prolific draftsman, outstanding painter, and influential printmaker, Jusepe de Ribera was one of the leading artists of the Spanish Golden Age. This lecture will provide an introduction to Ribera’s drawings by exploring some of the leitmotifs in his graphic oeuvre: grotesque heads, martyrdom scenes, tortured figures, and bound saints. It will demonstrate how these works reveal an underlying tension between the beauty and sophistication of the drawing medium and the ugliness and violence of the subject matter, arguing that this tension is a defining characteristic of Ribera’s artistic practice.