Santa Maria Egiziaca

Ribera signed this in 1641, working in Naples, which was then a Spanish possession and one of the busiest, roughest cities in Europe. He had built his name on saints shown as real, weathered bodies rather than ideal ones, and here the subject suits that exactly. Mary of Egypt, by legend a woman of Alexandria who spent decades alone in the desert doing penance, is painted as a gaunt old woman, her skin drawn tight over the bone, a coarse dark cloth about her. She holds her gaze upward and away from us. The Counter-Reformation church wanted images that made repentance feel physical, and a French collector, Francois-Xavier Fabre, later carried this one to Montpellier, where it has hung since 1837.