Mater dolorosa, Copy after Ribera

This is a young painter's copy of a Spanish devotional image, the Mater dolorosa, the Virgin Mary grieving for her crucified son. The original was by Jusepe de Ribera, a Spaniard who spent his whole career in Naples and built his name on faces caught at the extreme of feeling, lit hard against near-black backgrounds. Ribera gives her nothing to distract the eye. Her head is bowed, her hands pressed together, a little light falling on the face and the folded fingers while everything around her stays in shadow. Copying around 1811 to 1815, Géricault pulled the figure in even closer, so she fills the small canvas and sits right in front of you, barely larger than a sheet of paper. What he was practising here, a bright face rising out of the dark, is the same device he would lean on later in his own paintings of the suffering and the dead. Ribera's original now hangs in the old-master gallery in Kassel, in Germany.