Attributed to Jusepe de Ribera

Attributed to is the most cautious thing a museum can say while still using an artist's name. The picture is close enough to Ribera in handling, date and origin to hang under him, and the evidence stops short of proof. Where a copy reproduces one known painting, an attribution is a judgement about whose hand held the brush.

Ribera's apostles show why the hedge is needed. Working in Naples under the Spanish viceroys around 1630, he made series of half-length apostles on dark grounds, each saint with his attribute, for patrons including the Duke of Alcalá, viceroy there from 1629 to 1631. Sets like these were repeated, and the quality inside a single series varies, because parts of them were painted by his workshop. The Prado's set of 11 is first recorded in the royal collection late in the 18th century.

Among the Prado paintings under this name are a Saint Andrew, a Saint Paul and a Saint Francis of Assisi. The Saint Andrew, from about 1630, is half naked, with the fish that marks him as a fisherman and the cross he was killed on. The Saint Paul was hanging in the sacristy of the royal chapel in Madrid's Palacio Real when it was inventoried there in 1772.