Der heilige Hieronymus und der Engel

Naples in 1626 was a Spanish city run by a viceroy sent from Madrid, and its most sought-after painter was a Spaniard from near Valencia who had settled there and never went home. Ribera signed this canvas as a Valencian and a Roman academician, a title from the painters' academy of Saint Luke in Rome that he was proud enough to write into the picture itself. The old man is Jerome, the scholar who put the Bible into Latin, in the desert with his books and a skull. An angel has come out of the dark above him and sounded the trumpet of the Last Judgement, and Ribera painted the instant of hearing, with the head thrown back and the eyes going up. He returned to Jerome again and again in these years. This version reached the Hermitage in 1831.