Archimedes

Nobody is certain who this is. The museum has catalogued him as Aesop and as Aristotle at different times, and settled on Archimedes only because another version of the same figure carries that name written on it. What the picture gives you instead of a name is a job: a man in a torn coat and a soft cap, a quill in his right hand, a sheet of geometrical diagrams held up in the left, books piled on the table. The ragged clothes are the point. Around 1630 Ribera began painting the thinkers of antiquity as poor men, worn and badly dressed, absorbed in work that pays nothing, and that way of picturing a philosopher spread across 17th-century painting after him. The Prado dates this canvas to about 1630 and keeps it off the walls at present.