Behold the Money

John Haber
in New York City

Caravaggio or Jusepe de Ribera?

Cristóbal de Villalpando

Not again! Does nothing matter more than the chance to cash in?

When money and careers are on the line, scholarship and common sense go out the window. Once again, that old thing in the living room makes the news as a masterpiece. A grimy painting that was also dirt cheap is now a newly discovered Caravaggio. At least his reputation is safe no matter what. As for what he meant to art and history, forget it. And a near contemporary, Jusepe (or José) de Ribera in Spain, makes out even worse.

Two dealers, Marco Voena and Fabrizio Moretti, spotted an early Baroque painting up for auction, listed as from the workshop of Ribera. It shows Jesus, drops of blood on his chest and a crown of thorns in his hair—the subject of Ecce Homo, or behold the man. But what if Caravaggio, at the very birth of the Baroque, painted it before his death in 1610? What if its heavy shadows and pitiless mockers belong to him? With Caravaggio, much as with Jesus, we are talking about the death and resurrection of a god.

Speaking of heights in religion, art, and commerce, who would have thought to rank Puebla alongside the great cathedral cities of Europe? The Mexican city was barely fifty years old when Cristóbal de Villalpando completed The Transfiguration in 1683. Yet Villalpando left his mark, says the Met, as "Mexican Painter of the Baroque." When it comes to cathedral cities, maybe rank the Met's Lehman wing up there, too. Now it, too, resembles a cathedral. You will never guess why.

If Villalpando was young, the bishopric had moved there just thirty years before as well. Even now, Puebla hardly comes to mind after Mexico City, not far to the northwest. (Wikipedia does credits it with exquisite tiling and mole poblano.) Look to a history of painting in the Americas, and you are likely to begin in Philadelphia or Boston on the eve of revolution. Demand to look back further, and you may learn about ancient civilizations. Now, though, like Spain contesting its painting, the Met asks for more.

The smell of blood

Everyone involved in the upgrade of Ribera could smell blood, not to mention a small fortune. For the dealers, history was about to repeat itself. They had pulled off quite an upgrade not five years before. A painting of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (the saint with a wheel) became a self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi, another early Baroque painter and the most important woman artist of all time. It looks a tad sweet for Artemisia, who drew plenty of blood herself. But no one is complaining, and it ended up in London's National Gallery for all to see.

That would have cemented any dealer's reputation, but once again behold the money. This time they found a work up for sale from what Voena calls (seriously) a "normal family" in Spain, with bidding set to start at just 1,500 euros (about $1,800). That would be a steal even for some contemporary art on the Lower East Side. Now it could be worth untold millions. They offered, The New York Times reports, "to negotiate a private sale to a Spanish museum," for what Voena also called a "small commission." But who is counting?

The Prado saw the chance to add to its collection, which includes just one painting by Michelangelo Merisi, or Caravaggio, of David with the head of Goliath. It must have seen another opportunity as well—to assert its authority in defining art history. That need not always mean a monster upgrade. The Met in New York asserted a curator's authority not long ago when it downgraded works and rethought the origins of the Northern Renaissance. What history books had attributed to Jan van Eyck and his mysterious older brother became van Eyck's collaborations with students, including Petrus Christus. The work that may have started it all, Robert Campin's Mérode Altarpiece, now fell to his students.

The Met has every right to use its best scholarly judgment, although it never hints at a lack of consensus, and the words "attributed to" are just not in its vocabulary. And Spain, too, had a great museum to consider, as well as a nation's reputation. It declared an export ban, and the auction house, Ansorena, agreed not to proceed. Maybe it can now expect a small commission. The Times took everything at its face, just as it faithfully reports the latest scientific study or the latest lie from Donald J. Trump. Allow me, though, as your favorite amateur art historian, to ask what else is at stake.

As recently as 2017, a middling painting of Jesus as Salvator Mundi, or savior of the world, made headlines as a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci. There, too, an unlikely attribution was tied up in money—oil money, from a crown prince in Saudi Arabia. Still, the paint incorporated ground glass, rarely used apart from Leonardo, an artist who did not share his materials with a workshop. The attribution also had the benefit of unknowns. Who knows what Leonardo might have painted had he not withdrawn to his notebooks, and who knows whether he, like Raphael before his early death, would have moved closer to Mannerism? Now, though, the certainties are crying to be heard.

Attributions matter—and not just to the art market. Art takes words, to supply a painting's context and to tell its story. Here competing stories tell of an unknown, derivative artist and a powerful, vulnerable artist more than a generation older. They also tell of two very different notions of darkness, in Madrid and Naples. They allow one to see afresh what each brought to their art. Not everything is measured in money.

Money makes a masterpiece

For the differences, one might look to that sole Caravaggio in Madrid—although it, too, has been disputed. There the darkness encompasses David and Goliath, and it is not just an absence of light. They have an ample, clearly defined space even in darkness, the space of a living theater. Like David's reaching over Goliath to grab his hair, shadow and light bring friend and foe together even in death. The one thing that one cannot see is David's face, as if he had turned away in shame, while Goliath's retains forever his agony and horror. The hero has become the cruelest of men, yet capable of doubts himself.

Caravaggio knew at first hand the brutality and the shame. After his childhood in Lombardy, he had his breakthroughs in Rome. Already he painted the monstrous face of Medusa, the bloody revenge of Judith over Holofernes, and Saint Peter's denial of Christ. And then he fled south and further south—accused of murder, with his victim's last gaping stare locked in his mind. I can see something of his weariness in Pontius Pilate, at the right in the newly discovered painting. Consider, though, just how much the discovery differs from Caravaggio's David in Madrid.

Jesus in Ecce Homo has no doubts, and one can have no doubt of his suffering or nobility. He has the saintly, sad expression of the holiest of men. That sentiment is characteristic of Spanish art, not Italian art. So is the painting's compressed space—the space not of a theater, but of a religious icon. Just try to figure out where any of three figures stands. Try to figure out, too, just what the man in the foreground is doing.

So, finally, is the paint handling. For Ribera, flesh retains its hard edges even in shadow. Wrinkles and musculature are clearly defined, even exaggerated. In contrast, Caravaggio's anatomy is subordinate to a unifying brushwork and psychological drama. Fruit in an early still life seems half spoiled but alive. So in his very last work does humanity.

I cannot offer a final word. I have not seen the painting in person or under a microscope, and it badly needs cleaning. It has serious defenders, like Maria Cristina Terzaghi, a professor in Rome. Pilate, she argues, has the same model as a man in Caravaggio's Madonna of the Rosary in Vienna. Still, she cannot explain how a major painting from Naples found its way to that "normal family" in Spain. As she told The Times, "There are holes in the story that we need to clarify."

What I can say is that I know a loss of integrity when I see it. Defenders have a lot of explaining to do. Had they settled for an upgrade to Jusepe de Ribera himself, I would have bought in. That would raise the painting to the top ranks of Spanish Baroque art—and value it at up to a million. Instead, too many people are making out like bandits and acting accordingly. So, too, is far too much of the art world today.

The Baroque in Mexico

At twenty-eight feet in height, Villalpando's painting spans two levels of the Lehman wing and presents a stunning view right from the entrance. (For the record, The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel is half again as tall, but Michelangelo did have at his disposal the Vatican.) One can almost look Jesus in his glory directly in the eye—or look down to see the scene's unexpected pairing with Moses in the wilderness. One can walk downstairs to look further at the Israelites, as the brazen serpent spares them harm from a swarm of real snakes. One can contrast the brightness of one scene with the murkier mix in the other, the shallow space of the heavens with the indeterminate and crowded space below, the golden wash with the more fluid handling of color—or the rapture with the terror. One can also step back upstairs for ten more paintings, all but one on loan from Mexico, for as much of a retrospective as Cristóbal de Villalpando is likely to get.

The drama may well be better in New York at that. The Mexican cathedral lacks an upper gallery, and the painter intended views of a god and human trauma from below. He also planned the painting around its site. There it stands not as an altarpiece, but on a side wall—where windows above the altar illuminate its heavens, while candles barely penetrate the darkness. If that makes Villalpando a master of architecture and space, like Gian Lorenzo Bernini in Italy, he was also a creature of doctrine and habit. He turns again and again to a shallow burst of yellow and a crowd.

As a Catholic and by disposition, he loved rapture. He also was a Mexican painter, although with little regard for native peoples or culture. He was born in Mexico City, of a Spanish family. One cannot say for sure when, but he was still in his early thirties when he undertook so large a painting. The Met can identify a likely teacher versed in the Baroque, but he knew Europeans like Peter Paul Rubens only from prints. Still, he internalized the art of Spain and its empire.

One can see Spanish and Flemish painting in his poorly defined spaces and often harsh colors. One can see, too, the persistence of Mannerism in his occasional choice of oil on copper. He must also have known The Transfiguration (also in the Vatican) by Raphael, the first to add a lower scene. The terror of snakes picks up Raphael's child possessed by a demon, but moves the scene to the Old Testament. The artist signed his works Villalpando inventor, but he surely bowed to Puebla's bishop—just as Michelangelo had a theological advisor for all his boasts. Maybe they liked that Moses appears in the vision above, too, holding a staff with a serpent that stands for medicine even today.

Villalpando often returns to the contrast between the old order and the new. He paints a cross growing out of the Tree of Life—and then he pairs it with the Annunciation. And he sure loves those crowds. The Annunciation comes with tiered stadium seating for its thousands of angels, while Adam and Eve have plenty of company in paradise, if only other versions of themselves. Villalpando combines multiple events in a single painting, with God's repeated attempts to nurture and to instruct the first couple. (Spoiler alert: it does not end well.)

Yet the positive emotions run wild. Israelites appear less in fear of the brazen serpent than in ecstatic worship. As curators, Ronda Kasl, NYU's Jonathan Brown, and Clara Bargellini of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico describe the Virgin Mary beneath her holy name as a painting of sound itself. When Villalpando depicts the Holy Family, he cannot settle for a manger with Joseph half asleep. He makes Jesus an older boy, Joseph a vigorous young man very much like a traditional Jesus. Amid the triumph of doctrine and deliverance, Villalpando's Baroque can still privilege humanity.

jhaber@haberarts.com

The Times reported on the attribution April 8, 2021. Cristóbal de Villalpando ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 15, 2017. A related review looks at the Baroque in Mexico.