Der heilige Andreas

In 1616 the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera left Rome and settled for good in Naples, then ruled by Spain. He arrived carrying the lesson of Caravaggio, dead only six years: paint holy figures as real, worn, ordinary people, lit hard out of deep shadow. This Saint Andrew belonged to a set showing Christ and the twelve apostles. Ribera gives the old fisherman a sunburnt, deeply lined face and heavy working hands, with the diagonal cross of his martyrdom rising behind him in the dark. Most of that original series is now lost. Only this figure and two others, a Saint Peter and a Saint James, still hang together in the Girolamini church they were painted for.