Saint Jerome

Ribera painted this in Naples in 1646, and the city was close to breaking. The new Spanish viceroy, the Duke of Arcos, had arrived under orders to send a million ducats home to Madrid for Spain's wars, and he raised the money by taxing food, fruit included. In July of the following year a quarrel between fruit sellers and customs men at one of the city gates set off a revolt that handed Naples for a few weeks to a fisherman called Masaniello.

Ribera had been living there for 30 years by then, a Spaniard from near Valencia who had become the most sought-after painter in the city, though by the mid-1640s he was ill and working less. He had painted Saint Jerome over and over across his career. Here the old scholar who put the Bible into Latin sits in his cave with a skull and the lion whose paw he was said to have healed, looking up from the page with the light catching his face.