Saint Sebastian

Ribera painted this Saint Sebastian in 1651, near the end of a long life spent almost entirely in Spanish-ruled Naples. It was one of three canvases the Carthusian monks wanted for the private rooms of their prior, high on the hill at the charterhouse of San Martino, where it still hangs. Sebastian, the Roman soldier shot with arrows for his faith, is bound to a tree and turns his face up toward a light falling from outside the picture. Ribera keeps almost everything else in shadow, the tenebrism he had built from studying Caravaggio decades earlier. He had painted the same saint before, and this is his quieter, older reworking of that earlier canvas now in Madrid.