Saint Mary of Egypt

Ribera painted this in Naples in 1641, and he painted it as one of four. The set shows two male and two female saints, all of them penitents, and the shared recipe is easy to check against the others. A single figure built large against a dark ground. One patch of open sky let in at the side. A tree trunk cutting its diagonal through the scene. Who ordered the four is not known. Mary of Egypt had, by her legend, sold herself in Alexandria for years before crossing into the desert and staying there for decades, and Ribera paints her accordingly, the arms and shoulders of someone who has lived on almost nothing, hands joined, eyes up. A skull and a second bone rest on the stone ledge at the right. By 1658 the four canvases were listed among the goods of a Spanish secretary of state for Flanders, and in 1772 they were hanging in the royal palace in Madrid.