José Ribera (January 12, 1591 - 1652) was a Spanish Tenebrist painter, also known as Jusepe (de) Ribera or, in Italian, as Giuseppe Ribera. He was also called Lo Spagnoletto, or "the Little Spaniard". Ribera was a leading painter of the Spanish school, who was born near Valencia, Spain at Xátiva, now named San Felipe de Jativa.

His parents intended him for a literary or learned career; but he neglected these studies and apprenticed with the Spanish painter Francisco Ribalta. Longing to study art in Italy, he made his way to Rome. Early in the 17th century a cardinal noticed him drawing from the frescoes on Roman palace facade, and housed the ragged stripling. Artists had then already bestowed upon the alien student, who was perpetually copying all sorts of objects in art and nature, the nickname "Lo Spagnoletto."

In the cardinal's household Ribera was comfortable but dissatisfied, and one day he decamped. He became a follower of Michelangelo da Caravaggio's style, or one of the so-called Tenebrosi, or shadow-painters owing to the sharp contrasts of light and shade marking their style. He traveled to Parma, where he completed a painting on Jacob's Ladder, now in the Prado Museum, Madrid. From Parma, Ribera traveled to Rome, and then to Naples.

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Volume 21, number 2: Copley's Cargo
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In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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