Saint Paul the Hermit

Everything that names this old man is lying on the ground in front of him. The half loaf is the point. Paul of Thebes, who went into the Egyptian desert to escape a persecution of Christians in the 3rd century and stayed there, was said to have been fed by a raven that brought him half a bread every day. Take the loaf away and he becomes any starved hermit with a skull and a book. The story survives because Jerome wrote it down around 375, and Spanish painters knew it well enough that half a loaf was all the label a picture needed. Ribera painted him in Naples, where he had settled and where cardinals and Spanish officials bought this kind of thing for their private chapels. The canvas was in Spain by the 18th century, recorded in 1772 in the workshop of Andrés de la Calleja, the court painter who looked after the king's pictures in the new Royal Palace in Madrid.