Heraclitus

A man writes in a book and looks up at whoever has come in. The one detail that names him is the wet eyes. Antiquity handed down Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, as the man who wept at the state of the world, against Democritus who laughed at it, and painters used the pair as a matched set of temperaments. The Prado dates this canvas to about 1615, when Ribera was working in Rome, and points to the way the hands are modelled as typical of those years. The picture spent a long time without a settled author, passing under several names before the museum placed it with the young Ribera. It is recorded in the royal collection at the Buen Retiro palace in Madrid in 1794, and in the Royal Palace between 1814 and 1818.