Paul the Hermit by Ribera (image above), which has elucidated not only the tender skin folds of the old man’s belly flesh, but the droplets of blood dripping down his arms? What better illustration than the Wallraf’s recently restored St. To get “under the skin” - or “unter die haut” in German - means to touch someone in a deep emotional way, and paintings by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán, explore this viscerally. Under the Skin, the Wallraf’s current exhibition of a dozen exquisite works from the masters of the Spanish baroque, lingers on the multiple meanings of its title. I love the titillating nature of this misconception - the art was so realistic that it conjured images of unnatural acts. In 17th-century Europe, rumors circulated that Spanish baroque artists “used actual flesh ground into the pigments” to depict human skin in their portraiture, so realistic were their renderings, according to Anja Ševčík, head of the baroque department of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne.
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