The Clubfooted boy
Jusepe de Ribera
Jusepe de Ribera was a Spanish Tenebrist painter and printmaker, also known as José de Ribera and Josep de Ribera. He also was called Lo Spagnoletto by his contemporaries and early writers.
Max Resolution:1576×2815 PX
Title:The Clubfooted boy
Artists:Jusepe de Ribera
Date:1642; Naples, Italy
Style:Baroque
Genre:portrait
Medium:oil,canvas
Location:Louvre, Paris, France
Dimensions:93.5×164 cm
Copyright:Public domain
The Clubfoot (also known as The Club-Footed Boy) is a 1642 oil on canvas painting by Jusepe de Ribera. It is housed in the Musée du Louvre in Paris (part of the La Caze bequest of 1869), and was painted in Naples. Art historian Ellis Waterhouse wrote of it as "a touchstone by which we can interpret the whole of Ribera's art".
Commissioned by a Flemish dealer, the painting features a Neapolitan beggar boy with a deformed foot. Behind him is a vast and luminous landscape, against which the boy stands with a gap-toothed grin, wearing earth-toned clothes and holding his crutch slung over his left shoulder. Written in Latin on the paper in the boy's hand is the sentence "DA MIHI ELEMOSINAM PROPTER AMOREM DEI" ("Give me alms, for the love of God").
This is one of the painter's last works, and one of the most bitter. The contrast of light and shade gave him pleasure. He studied the composition of the Renaissance painters in Italy, and perhaps also the work of Flemish artists, but in spite of all that, he clung to the profoundly Spanish tradition of realism, even after having spent nearly all his life in Italy.
Moved by a Christian awareness of human weakness, Spanish artists often painted pictures of beggars, cripples and idiots. Here the young Neapolitan vagabond seems to be making game of his own infirmity; he is also careful to inform us, by means of the scrap of writing he holds, that he is dumb as well as crippled, because he appeals to the charity of the passer-by with that card written in Latin.
The motif is surely a derivation of taste for scenes of low life in art, as instituted by Caravaggio and followed by Ribera, who was in Naples his most fervent admirer in the realist vein.
Commissioned by a Flemish dealer, the painting features a Neapolitan beggar boy with a deformed foot. Behind him is a vast and luminous landscape, against which the boy stands with a gap-toothed grin, wearing earth-toned clothes and holding his crutch slung over his left shoulder. Written in Latin on the paper in the boy's hand is the sentence "DA MIHI ELEMOSINAM PROPTER AMOREM DEI" ("Give me alms, for the love of God").
This is one of the painter's last works, and one of the most bitter. The contrast of light and shade gave him pleasure. He studied the composition of the Renaissance painters in Italy, and perhaps also the work of Flemish artists, but in spite of all that, he clung to the profoundly Spanish tradition of realism, even after having spent nearly all his life in Italy.
Moved by a Christian awareness of human weakness, Spanish artists often painted pictures of beggars, cripples and idiots. Here the young Neapolitan vagabond seems to be making game of his own infirmity; he is also careful to inform us, by means of the scrap of writing he holds, that he is dumb as well as crippled, because he appeals to the charity of the passer-by with that card written in Latin.
The motif is surely a derivation of taste for scenes of low life in art, as instituted by Caravaggio and followed by Ribera, who was in Naples his most fervent admirer in the realist vein.