At the Petit Palais, Ribera sheds light on the shadows – Libération

In a formidable first retrospective in France dedicated to the wildest of Caravaggio's heirs, the Petit Palais exposes the naturalist bodies and “mouths” to the raw violence of the native of Spain.

We rarely see a woman with a beard. The one painted in 1631 by Jusepe de Ribera, with her husband and her baby suckling a swollen breast, has nothing of a circus creature, nor of a transformist artist: what we see through her , in it, it is our destiny and our solitude. The painting was painted in Naples, the city where the artist, born in Valencia in 1591, became rich and famous, the city where he died in 1652 without ever seeing his native country again. His harsh castles in Spain were found in Italy by this shoemaker's son. His bearded woman is a man, his bearded man is a woman: all one, all the other. No painting by the man nicknamed “l'Espagneetto”, the little Spaniard, shows with more force and tranquility the profound nature of his work: bringing as much reality as possible into a world whose representation is determined by intellectual and mythological grids. He is neither the first nor the only one: Caravaggio and his heirs have, each in their own way, dug this naturalist gap. Ribera does it with raw, barely stylized violence. It is Spanish misery and naturalness in the streets of Rome, then Naples. Here, through a Holy Family.

The bearded lady's name is Maddalena Ventura. An inscription engraved on the stone to her right specifies that she is 52 years old: she had a child in her fifties. She