Saint Philip

After the Council of Trent, sets of apostles sold steadily across Catholic Europe. The formula was fixed and easy to read from a distance, a figure cut at the waist against a plain dark ground, each one holding the object that identifies him. El Greco had settled the Spanish version of it and Rubens had worked in the same format, and this canvas belongs to the series Ribera supplied in those terms. The Prado dates it between 1630 and 1635 and keeps 13 pictures from the set. The museum is blunt about the quality being uneven across them, with workshop hands in some and close, precise study in others. The whole series first turns up in the Spanish royal collection at the end of the 18th century, with no record of who ordered it.