The sense of taste

When Ribera painted this in Rome around 1613, he was a young Spaniard barely into his twenties, working in a city still crowded with painters imitating Caravaggio, who had died only a few years before. The job was a set of the five senses, an old subject Northern artists usually dressed up as elegant figures. Ribera threw that convention out. For taste he painted a heavy, unshaven man at a table, sleeves shoved back, one fist around a jug of wine and a bowl of pasta before him, caught in the plain moment before eating. The light strikes hard from one side and drops the rest into shadow, the lesson every young painter in Rome had taken from Caravaggio. It is among the earliest works we can firmly give to Ribera, made before he moved south to Naples and made his name. The five canvases were later separated, and taste now hangs in Hartford, Connecticut, a long way from the Roman table it was painted at.