Liberation of Saint Peter

An angel has just stepped into the cell, and Peter is still half asleep, one hand raised against the sudden light. Ribera painted this in 1639 in Naples, then ruled from Madrid, and by then he had spent years turning Caravaggio's hard shadow into something of his own. The darkness is almost total, broken only by the glow the angel carries, which catches the old man's forehead, his shoulder, the loosened chain. What is new in these late years is the warmth: Ribera had softened the cold naturalism of his youth, and Peter's skin and the angel's robe take on a reddish, candlelit tone. He made it as a companion to his Jacob's Dream, another sleeping man visited from above, and both later passed into the Spanish royal collection, where the lower corner of this one still shows the small fleur-de-lys mark of Isabella Farnese, an 18th-century queen of Spain who once owned it.