Baptême du Christ

Ribera was a Spaniard who spent his whole career in Naples, then ruled by the Spanish crown, and he built his name on hard, unsparing naturalism, real bodies and deep shadow with nothing idealised. He painted this Baptism of Christ in 1643 for a church in Madrid, showing John pouring water over Christ at the Jordan with the light falling sharply across their skin, in the manner Caravaggio had made famous a generation earlier. By then Ribera was the leading painter in Naples, admired for exactly this frank, physical handling of sacred scenes. The canvas left Spain long ago. Since 1881 it has hung in the fine-arts museum of Nancy, in eastern France.