Penitent Saint Peter

Ribera signed this one Jusepe de Ribera, Spaniard. He had left Spain as a young man and never went back. From 1616 he lived in Naples, a city ruled from Madrid through a viceroy, and painting for those viceroys made him the dominant artist there, while the word espanol stayed on his canvases in a place that called him lo Spagnoletto, the little Spaniard. The subject is Peter after he has denied three times that he knows Christ, coming out of the dark into a hard light falling from above, his face and his hands turned up into it. That light is the thing Ribera took from Caravaggio, whose pictures he studied in Rome around 1612, when Caravaggio had been dead barely two years.