聖アンデレの殉教

Ribera was a Spaniard who spent his career in Naples, then ruled by Spain, and he had absorbed the hard, unglamorous realism Caravaggio had brought to that city a generation before. He painted this Martyrdom of Saint Andrew in 1628. The apostle, an old man, is bound with ropes as his execution is prepared, his body lit like a real ageing labourer's, every wrinkle and slack muscle set down without flattery. Around him ordinary faces press in, some curious, some indifferent, the kind of onlookers Caravaggio had crowded into his own Crucifixion of Saint Peter. The picture later passed to the Esterhazy princes of Hungary, which is how a Spanish painter's Neapolitan canvas came to hang today in Budapest.