Calle del Pintor Ribera

The street recalls José de Ribera, known as el Españoleto, one of the giants of the Spanish Baroque despite having painted far from Spain nearly all his life. He was born in Játiva in 1591, the son of a shoemaker, and crossed to Italy while still young. He passed through Rome, where he soaked up Caravaggio’s violent light, before settling for good in Naples, then under the Spanish crown. There the viceroys protected him, and there he died in 1652, having never returned to the peninsula. The Italians called him lo Spagnoletto, the little Spaniard, for his short stature and for how much he stressed his origin. He signed his paintings recalling that he was Valencian, though his world was the Naples waterfront and his models the beggars and philosophers of those streets. He left images that still unsettle, like The Bearded Woman, a portrait of Magdalena Ventura nursing with a full beard, much of it now in the Prado. The street belongs to a corner of Hispanoamérica where several roads bear painters' names, linking Calle de Uruguay with Avenida de Alfonso XIII.