A Beggar

Around 1633 a clerk listing the pictures of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V and the man who built this collection, wrote down a painting of a beggar in a walnut frame and gave the painter as Spagnoletto, the little Spaniard, the name Italians used for Jusepe de Ribera. By the next inventory, in 1693, the same canvas had become a Caravaggio. Scholars proposed the Italian Bartolomeo Manfredi in 1893, the Dutchman Dirck van Baburen in 1928, and later another Dutch painter, Wouter Crabeth. Only in 2002 was it given back to Ribera, so the oldest record had been right all along. He painted it around 1612, soon after reaching Rome. The man faces us at half length in a torn shirt, holding his hat upside down in both hands, the way you would hold it out for coins.