Philosopher with a Flask at His Belt

In Naples around 1630 the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera began painting the great thinkers of antiquity as beggars. Democritus, Diogenes and the rest appeared as weathered old men in rags, with dirty hands and books. The idea came from the Stoics and the Cynics, for whom wisdom had nothing to do with money, and it pleased the learned collectors of Spanish Naples, who hung such pictures in their libraries and studies.

A generation later the young Luca Giordano took up the formula, and this is one of his. The man turns the pages of a big book with an arm like a labourer's, a table of scrolls and loose sheets beside him. At his belt hangs a gourd flask, the kind travellers and pilgrims carried. The Louvre dates the canvas only to the third quarter of the 17th century, and his name, like those of his companions, is unknown.