Allegory of History

In 1603 a new edition of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, a handbook published in Rome that told artists how to paint abstract ideas, added the nine Muses. For Clio, the Muse of History, it prescribed a young woman with a laurel wreath, a trumpet in her right hand and a book bearing the name of Thucydides, the Athenian who wrote the history of the war between Athens and Sparta. Ribera, a young Spaniard working in Rome in the 1610s, followed that recipe closely, and you can read THUCYDIDES on the spine of the book under her left hand. The woman herself looks like someone from the street, with loose hair and a blouse slipping off her shoulder, lit from one side against a dark ground in the manner of Caravaggio. On the stone ledge at the bottom, Ribera signed with a small monogram.