Saint André

Jusepe de Ribera was a Spaniard who spent his career in Naples, then ruled by Spain and still under the long shadow of Caravaggio, who had passed through the city two decades earlier. Around 1631 Ribera painted this apostle in that hard Caravaggesque light, a single figure lit from one side against deep darkness. It is Saint Andrew, and Ribera gives him the body of a real old man, bare-chested, white-bearded, the skin worn. In one hand he holds the X-shaped cross of his martyrdom. In the other, a hook with a fish still caught on it, a reminder that before he followed Christ he had been a fisherman. Ribera signed himself in Naples as a Spanish painter far from home, and painted his saints as the laborers and old men he saw in the street.