Jusepe de Ribera

Jusepe de Ribera was a Spanish painter and printmaker, baptised on 17 February 1591 and dying on 3 November 1652. Ribera, Francisco de Zurbaran, Bartolome Esteban Murillo and Diego Velazquez are regarded as the major artists of Spanish Baroque painting. He has also been referred to as Jose de Ribera, which is usual in Spanish and French, and was called Lo Spagnoletto, Italian for the Little Spaniard, by his contemporaries and early historians. Exhibitions of his work held in the late 20th century led Philippe de Montebello to write that Ribera emerged as not simply the greatest Neapolitan artist of his age but one of the outstanding European masters of the seventeenth century.