Petit Palais: Ribera, Caravaggio’s enfant terrible in his black light

All mythology is great. As beautiful as she is fierce, as whimsical as she is deeply human. This is what Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), a painter more dark and even more terrible than his model, understood. At , its . This is thanks to the interpersonal skills and competence of the director, Annick Lemoine, already author here of the colorful exhibition on The Lowlands of the Baroque, the Rome of vice and povertyin 2015, then, in 2017 at the Louvre, of the retrospective honoring Valentin de Boulogne, another brilliant Caravaggio.

Here there are fewer card games or banquets (a single tavern scene, a Denial of Saint Peter came from Rome, Corsini Gallery). But more apostles, saints and other mythological martyrs in a hypnotizing theater of cruelty. Where, as he wrote…