キリストの十字架降下

For centuries this dark, close-up Deposition sat on a side altar in the cathedral of Castellammare di Stabia, a port town below Vesuvius, more or less unremarked. It was Count Vincenzo Coppola who recognized it there and gave it to the local bishop, and the name attached to it is Jusepe de Ribera, the Spaniard who spent his career in nearby Naples painting saints and martyrs with exactly this kind of raking light and heavy shadow. Whether it is Ribera's own hand or a close follower's is still argued. What is not in doubt is the manner: the body of Christ lowered into the foreground, lit as if by a single lamp, the mourners pressed in tight around him with nowhere for the eye to escape.