Drunken Silenus

1626 was the year Jusepe de Ribera began signing his paintings in earnest, and he did it here with real defiance. Along the bottom edge, on a little painted scrap of paper, he wrote a long Latin inscription naming himself Spanish, from Valencia, a member of the Roman academy, at work in Naples. Ribera was a Spaniard who had settled in a Naples then ruled by Spain, and that label stakes out exactly who he wanted the world to think he was. The picture itself is anything but dignified: the fat, drunken Silenus of Greek myth sprawls on his back, flushed and bloated, while his companions refill his cup. Two years later Ribera reworked the whole composition as an etching, the finest print he ever made.