Gender is a fluid concept in the 21st century. Male and female are ceasing to be conceived as binary opposites. Categories of sexual identity are complex. But when Magdalena Ventura posed to be portrayed by Jusepe de Ribera in 1631, the world was in theory a much simpler and more stable place. In that age men were men and women were women – or were they?
Ribera’s painting Magdalena Ventura, also known as La mujer barbuda – The Bearded Woman – shows its subject breastfeeding her baby. This is Ribera’s none too subtle way of showing us that Ventura is anatomically a woman, for there is no sign of that in her face. Her huge, black beard makes her look like an Old Testament patriarch. Her facial features too are heavy and powerful, in other words they conform to common assumptions of what looks “masculine.” Her body is big and muscular, her hands strong and hairy. Her clothes are finely coloured but gender-neutral – again, they evoke a Biblical prophet.
Ventura’s husband, standing behind her right shoulder, looks less of a man than she does. His beard is smaller, his physique slighter. Ribera captures the fact that he is overshadowed by his wife’s fame, for Magdalena’s defiance of 17th century images of womanhood made her a celebrity in Italy. She came from Abruzzi where, according to the inscription on a stone slab in Ribera’s painting, she gave birth to three sons before her beard suddenly grew when she was 37 years old. In the painting she is 52.
Ribera painted her in Naples, where he worked as a court artist. The city was under Spanish rule and Ribera, born in 1591 in Valencia, mixed a Spanish sense of gravity with the courageous realism Caravaggio had introduced to Naples a quarter of a century earlier. The Viceroy of Naples, fascinated by the fame of “The Bearded Woman of Abruzzi”, commissioned Ribera to paint this mysterious masterpiece.
The inscription calls Magdalena Ventura a “great wonder of nature”. That says a lot about how she was seen. Ventura crossed boundaries and broke down categories. Today, we might see this as a conscious and radical defiance of oppressive norms. In the 17th century it made her a curiosity, perhaps even a monster. There was no concept of social progress, let alone of gender revolution. The order of nature was God-given and unchanging. There was no idea of evolution either in the forms of animals or the customs of human beings. Yet there were manifest exceptions to the order of things: hybrid beasts, cross-bred plants, prodigious births, and bearded women.
Ribera portrays Ventura with a calm and sombre naturalism. He also gives her great dignity. She is a unique being in his eyes: someone who is neither one thing nor another, and yet whose humanity outshines what looked to contemporaries like freakishness. This painting embodies what makes Ribera such a moving and memorable artist: his tender, compassionate eye for the real world.
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He is one of the stars of the National Gallery’s exhibition Beyond Caravaggio, which is well worth seeing this Christmas or when it tours to Dublin and Edinburgh in 2017. Yet even by his standards or those of Caravaggio, this is a radical work of realism. It puts truth before all conventions of beauty. Art in Ribera’s day saw women as goddesses and saints, martyrs and nudes. Here a woman with a man’s beard and a man’s face stands breastfeeding her baby. Ribera sees beyond the conventions of art and the assumptions of his time – if someone does not fit our expectations, their uniqueness has to be recognised for what it is.
Ventura is a fact. She is real. Here she stands. In her absolute originality, Ribera sees not just some freak of nature but the wonder and enigma of individuality itself. Magdalena Ventura broke every law of her world – and Ribera immortalised her for doing so.
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I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war.
