The Penitent St. Peter

By the 1630s Jusepe de Ribera had spent two decades in Naples, then a Spanish possession, painting for a church that had made repentance one of its great themes. After the Council of Trent, Catholic patrons wanted their saints shown not in glory but in the act of turning back to God, and few fit better than Peter, the apostle who denied Christ three times before the cock crew and then wept. Ribera gives him as an old man, hands clasped, the keys of heaven resting on the rock beside him. From Caravaggio's followers in the city he had learned a hard, raking light, and here it falls on the face and the knotted hands and lets everything else go dark. He painted weeping, penitent saints like this one repeatedly in these years.