The Penintent Saint Jerome

Jusepe de Ribera worked his whole life in Naples and never came back to Spain, and yet a young painter in Seville could study him without leaving Andalusia. The Duke of Osuna, who had governed Naples as viceroy, sent pictures home to the collegiate church at Osuna, about 90 kilometres east of the city, and the Prado puts this Saint Jerome beside one of them, the Penitent Saint Peter there, which Murillo very probably saw. Jerome kneels full length before a crucifix laid on the rock, hands joined, a single hard beam of light reaching him from outside the picture. The objects around him divide up his life: books, papers and writing things for the scholarship, the skull for his penances, the red hat for the cardinal's rank later tradition awarded him. Who painted it was argued over for a long time. Charles Curtis was the first to give it to Murillo, in 1883. August Mayer followed in the 1930s, and Diego Angulo accepted it in 1981 with reservations. The museum treats the question as closed now, and has identified one more source behind the figure, a print of the same subject by the Genoese engraver Bartolomeo Biscaino, who died in 1657 at 28.