Tityos

Jusepe de Ribera signed this in 1632 in Naples, then under Spanish rule, where he had become the leading painter of unflinching bodies in pain. The giant Tityos lies chained in the underworld while an eagle tears at his liver, which grows back each day so the punishment never ends. His crime, in the old myth, was assaulting one of Jupiter's lovers. Ribera painted him as one of a set of four condemned figures from mythology, the Furias, of which this and Ixion survive while Sisyphus and Tantalus are lost. He gives you the strain of the muscles and the open mouth at close range, in the raking light and deep shadow he had learned from Caravaggio's example. Within two years the four canvases had passed into the Spanish royal collection.