The Raising of Lazarus

This is early Ribera, painted around 1616, when he was in his mid-twenties and moving from Rome down to Naples, a young Spaniard soaking up everything Caravaggio had done a decade before. You can see it in the staging: figures shoved close to the surface, a raking light that pulls faces and hands out of near-total dark. Christ lifts his hand and Lazarus, four days dead, comes back, the moment caught in the shock on the faces around the tomb rather than in any glow of miracle. For a long time no one was sure the picture was Ribera's at all. The Prado bought it in 2001, and study of it since has made it a touchstone for how the young painter actually worked.