Saint Sebastian

Ribera was a Spaniard who spent his working life in Naples, then ruled by the Spanish crown, and he built a reputation on exactly this kind of picture, a single body pulled out of deep shadow by a hard raking light, the lesson of Caravaggio taken further. Sebastian was a Roman officer shot with arrows for his Christian faith and left for dead. Ribera returned to him again and again, partly because the saint was believed to guard against the plague and so was in constant demand across Catholic Europe. Here the figure is cut off at the waist, bound to a tree, the arrows placed to draw the eye down his lean, straining torso as he lifts his face toward a light coming from somewhere above the frame.