Magdalena Ventura with husband and son

"Magdalena Ventura with husband and son"one of the most famous and paradoxical paintings by Jose Ribera, capable of even the modern viewer who voted in the Eurovision song contest 2014 Conchita Wurst to enter into a cognitive stupor. We can clearly see before him a middle-aged bearded man. In addition to the beard on his masculine gender indicates high receding hairline on his forehead, knotted hands, severely overhanging eyebrows. Thus from unbuttoned gate men visible female Breasts, and to her more convincing is attached approximately one-year-old baby. Behind why it is clinging another man – more elderly and confused.

What is striking in this painting, Ribera, perhaps, that it is not the fruit of sophisticated or even perverted imagination, but a realistic and truthful sketch from nature.

Vice-kings of Naples, at the court where Jose Ribera worked for many years, had a taste for everything exotic and unusual, not to say ugly. In their collection of paintings and sculptures was a place of dwarfs and giants, of animals about a few heads or feet and other natural anomalies. All reflect the intense interest of the era Baroque to all, very different from the norm. And Magdalena Ventura, nothing, apart from the unfortunate beard, not remarkable woman of the Italian town of Abruzzi, gained fame on the wave of this interest.

The patron Saint of Ribera, the Neapolitan Viceroy, the Duke of Alcala, according to legend, brought the family to the artist's Studio so that he could capture the nature of the error.

According to the signature, engraved on stone tablets in the right part of the canvas, 37 Ventura was an ordinary woman who had her husband Felice de Ameche (it was he, oppressed family misfortune, depicted in the background of the picture) and three sons. After the incredible happened: Magdalena started to grow a beard and change appearance. It is not known than is explained in the XVII century, long before the discovery of sex hormones – possibly from the devil. In the twentieth century, of course, Ventura was diagnosed with a hormonal disorder of a gross, in which she likened to the man. It is surprising that, judging by the presence in the painting of the child and the lactating breast, it is not deprived of her reproductive function. But is it possible?

Modern Spanish critics, after numerous consultations with luminaries of medicine, came to the conclusion that, taking into account factors of age (in the picture Magdalena was about 52 years) and virilization ("Augustine" as a result of exposure to androgens) to give birth to this baby a woman could not. According to their assumption, Ribera decided to write and baby, finding other, more persuasive means to show that is front of us still a woman, not a man.

Author: Anna Yesterday