Saint James the Greater

In most of Ribera's pictures of Saint James the Greater, the pilgrim's staff is what the whole figure leans on. Here it stands propped against a low stone wall on the left, and the apostle holds instead, in both hands, a heavy book bound in parchment, its pages worn. The museum reads it as a hint of study and interpretation of scripture that turns up nowhere else in his versions of the saint. The red cloak opens only at the right arm, showing a brown robe and a leather pilgrim's cape, and the scallop shell of Santiago is half hidden behind the clasp. James looks straight back at you, and the light from the left catches even the irises of his eyes. Ribera painted it between 1632 and 1635 as a slightly smaller replica, just as autograph, of a canvas in the fine arts museum of Seville. For a long time both were given to the Sicilian painter Pietro Novelli, until the art historian Roberto Longhi, around 1950, put them back under Ribera's name. Some have seen a hidden portrait in the calm face. A fondness for the patron saint of Spain fits a painter who spent his whole career in Naples and still signed himself español.