Philosopher Crates

Ribera spent his whole career in Naples, then a Spanish city, and in 1636 he was working through a set of ancient philosophers for a wealthy collector, probably the Prince of Liechtenstein. The man here is Crates of Thebes, a Greek thinker of around 320 BC who did something startling. Born rich, he gave away his fortune and chose to live as a beggar, teaching that you owned nothing you couldn't carry. Ribera takes him at his word. Instead of a noble sage he gives us an old man in torn clothes, lit hard against the dark, worked up from a real model off the Naples streets with every wrinkle and stain kept in. In his hand is a scrap of paper carrying a Greek inscription that names him, the one clue that this beggar is a philosopher at all.