# Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband and Son [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [RIBERA, Jusepe de]() - Date: 1601-1650 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 196 x 127 cm ## Commentary Ribera painted this picture, his most unusual work in 1629 at the request of the duke of Alcalá, one of Ribera's major viceregal patrons. A lengthy Latin inscription, which describes the circumstances of the commission, implies that it was executed to record a wonder of the natural world. Magdalena Ventura was from the Abruzzi, a region in the kingdom of Naples, and began to grow a beard when she was thirty-seven. Fifteen years later, the woman and her husband, a timid sort wearing an understandably befuddled expression, produced the infant she holds in her arms. As the inscription further attests, the picture was completed on 16 February 1631 by "JOSEPHVS DE RIBERA HISPANUS CHRISTI CRVCE INSIGNITVS," a characteristic reference to Ribera's prized nationality and to the Order of Christ received from POpe Urban VIII on 29 January 1626. In this unforgettable image Ribera's uncompromising realism permits no escape from the unsettling force of this aberrative family portrait. ## Related artworks - [Adoration of the Shepherds]() - [An Old Money-Lender]() - [Apollo and Marsyas]() - [Apollo Flaying Marsyas]() - [Aristotle]() - [Clubfooted Boy]() - [Democritus \(Archimedes\)]() - [Denial of Saint Peter]() - [Diogenes]() - [Hercules at Rest]() - [Holy Trinity]() - [Ixion]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()