Spanish School (xix) - Prometheus (after Joseph De Ribera)

Oil on canvas. Original canvas. Information label on back.

The tenebrous darkness and anatomical rigor of José de Ribera's Furies exerted a real fascination on nineteenth-century Spanish painting, then in search of a new identity through realism and the tragic vein of the Baroque. Nineteenth-century artists, captivated by the pathos of Tityos or the torment of Sisyphus, rediscovered in the Spagnoletto master an expressive violence and mastery of chiaroscuro that offered an antidote to the coldness of academicism. This fascination with monumental pain and the sublimation of bodily suffering had a profound effect on the history paintings and dramatic canvases of artists such as Eduardo Rosales and Francisco Pradilla, who assimilated this dense brushwork and violent lighting to lend their compositions a profoundly Spanish psychological intensity and visceral truth.

- Image size unframed: 44 x 31 cm / 56 x 43.5 cm with exclusive custom-made frame.