St. Jerome and the Angel of Judgment

Ribera signed and dated this in 1626, working in Spanish-ruled Naples, then one of the largest cities in Europe and a stronghold of the dark, dramatic manner that Caravaggio had left behind there. He shows the old scholar Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, startled mid-study as an angel swoops in blowing a trumpet, the sound that was said to announce the Last Judgment. Jerome twists toward it, half-lit against deep shadow, his skull and books at hand. The trumpeting angel is borrowed almost directly from a Caravaggio altarpiece Ribera would have known. It was made for a side chapel in a Naples convent church, and after the order was suppressed in the early 19th century it passed into the royal collection that became the Capodimonte museum.