Jakobs Traum

By 1639 Ribera had spent most of his working life in Naples, then ruled by Spain, and he had a reputation for saints shown in harsh light, their skin and suffering painted with almost brutal honesty. This picture is a quieter thing. It takes the moment from Genesis when Jacob, fleeing his brother, lies down in open country with a stone for a pillow and dreams of a ladder reaching to heaven with angels going up and down it. Ribera gives you the sleeping shepherd close up, an ordinary tired man against a tree, and pushes the vision itself into the upper corner, not a wooden ladder but a soft blaze of golden light with the faint angels barely formed inside it. Most of the canvas is just the dreamer and the warm dark around him. You have to take the miracle almost on his word.