Le Calvaire

Ribera was a Spaniard who spent almost his whole career in Naples, then ruled by Spain, and this early Crucifixion is one of the first of his pictures to travel back the other way. Around 1618 the Duke of Osuna, the Spanish viceroy in Naples, was shipping art home to his family's town in Andalusia, and several Riberas reached the collegiate church there, where this one still hangs. It is the work of a young painter steeped in Caravaggio, the bodies lit hard against darkness, Christ pale on the cross, Mary and the other mourners pressed close below in deep shadow. The realism is deliberate and unsparing. The feet and the hands are those of an ordinary labourer.