San Pedro y San Pablo

Around 1616 Ribera was a young Spaniard making his way in Rome, soaking up the harsh light and rough naturalism that Caravaggio had left behind in the city a few years earlier. He painted the two founding apostles of the Roman church, Peter and Paul, deep in talk, as two weathered, barefoot working men lit against a black ground. On the edge of the table he signed himself a Spaniard from Xativa in Valencia, of the Academy of Rome, staking his claim in the city. Soon after he left for Naples and stayed for the rest of his life. The painting surfaced in a Strasbourg museum in 1890, its trail before the previous century lost.