Saint Onophrius

When the Florentine marquis Carlo Gerini died in 1673, the inventory of his house listed two hermits by Ribera side by side. One was this old man, the other a Saint Mary of Egypt, and the pair hung together in the Gerini palace for well over a century. In 1786 both were engraved for a printed volume of the family's pictures. They may have reached Florence even earlier, through Cardinal Carlo de' Medici, who bought two Ribera penitents in 1644. When the Gerini collection was broken up in the 19th century, the two parted. Mary of Egypt went to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, in the south of France. This canvas, signed and dated 1642, changed names on its travels and was lent to a Boston exhibition in 1912 as Saint Jerome. The museum calls him Onophrius, the Egyptian hermit said to have lived for decades in the desert with nothing but his hair and a girdle of leaves. The leaves are there, with a skull in front of him and dirt under his fingernails.