Maria Egiziaca

By 1651 the old story of Mary of Egypt had fresh urgency in Naples. She was a hermit saint, a woman said to have spent decades alone in the desert repenting a wild youth, and the city had just taken her up: after the bloody revolt led by the fisherman Masaniello in 1647, John of Austria paid to restore her church and pressed Rome to make her a protector of Naples. Ribera, the Spaniard the Neapolitans called Lo Spagnoletto, painted her here in his last years. He gives her none of the beauty of her Alexandrian past — a lined, sun-worn face, hands clasped, the plainness he trusted more than any glamour. He signed and dated the canvas in 1651, and was dead within about a year.