Il martirio di san Lorenzo

Lawrence was a Roman deacon killed in 258, roasted on an iron grill, and he was held to have been born at Huesca in Aragon, which made him a Spanish saint. Spain treated him as one. Philip II laid out the Escorial on the plan of a gridiron because the battle of Saint-Quentin, in 1557, was won on Lawrence's feast day. Ribera came from Valencia and had settled in Naples, a city governed for Madrid by a Spanish viceroy and full of Spanish patrons. He painted this around 1625, on a canvas over two metres high, at the point in his career when the martyrdoms were what everyone wanted from him. The attribution has been argued over since. Dresden's own catalogue of its Spanish paintings keeps the picture under Ribera's name, while other listings hand it to his workshop, which repeated his large martyrdom subjects for the Naples market.