San Bruno che riceve la Regola

By 1643 Jusepe de Ribera had spent decades as the leading painter in Naples, a city then ruled by Spain, and the Carthusian monks high on the hill of San Martino were among his steadiest patrons. They commissioned this canvas, together with a Saint Sebastian and a Saint Jerome, for the private rooms of their prior, paying about 100 ducats for each. The subject is the order's own founder, Bruno of Cologne, the 11th-century scholar who walked away from a brilliant church career to live in silence in the mountains near Grenoble. Ribera shows him receiving the order's rule, the plain white habit and lowered eyes matching the monks' vow of near-total silence. The painting has never left San Martino. It still hangs where the prior once worked, now part of the museum that fills the old charterhouse.