Saint Augustine Leafing through a Book

This was painted in Rome around 1614 by a Spaniard in his early twenties who had not yet made a name. Ribera was living among the painters who had taken up Caravaggio's hard light after Caravaggio himself died in 1610, and he joined the Roman academy of Saint Luke in 1613. Within two years he left for Naples, then governed by Spain, and stayed there for the rest of his life. His Roman years were close to a blank for centuries, and scholars have spent recent decades reassembling them from canvases like this one. Augustine is shown half length and close to, in the black habit of his order, a quill lying beside the open book. The light reaches almost nothing but the face and the hands.