Saint Onuphrius

The museum calls this picture almost an essay in geriatric analysis, and it is hard to find a better phrase. Onuphrius was one of the desert fathers of Egypt. In the account attributed to the monk Paphnutius, he had given up a royal birth and lived alone in the wilderness for more than 60 years, until Paphnutius found him, naked except for his own hair, shortly before he died. In the 17th century this kind of penitent holiness was shown through the body itself, in sagging skin, wasted limbs and the marks of age and fasting. Battistello sends a raw light, remembered from Caravaggio, into a dark cave and lets it rest on the old man's flesh without softening any of it. The canvas is almost two metres high. Its author was not always known. An 18th-century inventory of the Capece Minutolo family in Naples listed it under Giovanni Do, a Spanish painter working in the city, and only in the 20th century was it given to Battistello. The Italian state bought it in 1912.