Saint Bartholomew

Naples was run by a Spanish viceroy in 1641, at that point the duke of Medina de las Torres, and it was there that Ribera painted a set of four penitent saints, two men and two women. Who ordered them is not known. All four are in the Prado, and this Bartholomew is the largest kind of statement the group makes: a single figure seated on rock, built up from a low viewpoint so that he looms, a strip of open sky let in at one side, a tree trunk cutting a diagonal through the dark. The knife raised in his right hand is what names him, since he was said to have been flayed alive. The four canvases turn up in 1658 among the possessions of Jerónimo de la Torre, secretary of state for Flanders, and by 1772 they were hanging in the royal palace in Madrid.