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In 1616 a young Spanish painter left Rome for Naples, one step ahead of creditors he could not pay. Naples was then a Spanish possession, ruled by a viceroy sent from Madrid, so a Spaniard there could work for the local Neapolitan elite and for visiting Spanish nobles at once. Ribera settled in for good. That same year he married Caterina Azzolino, daughter of a Neapolitan painter, a match that opened doors a newcomer needed.

He painted in the dramatic dark-into-light manner pioneered by the Italian painter Caravaggio, who had worked in Naples a few years earlier and died there in 1610. Ribera pushed the naturalism further, painting martyred saints, aged philosophers and the flayed satyr Marsyas with a bluntness that earned him the nickname Lo Spagnoletto, the little Spaniard. Spanish viceroys bought his canvases and shipped them home to Spain, which is how a painter who never returned there still became one of its most famous artists, ranked today alongside other Spanish Baroque masters like Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán.

By the early 1630s his lighting had softened from stark contrast toward something more diffused. A 1642 painting of a beggar boy with a clubbed foot, now in the Louvre museum in Paris, shows the boy grinning and holding a paper inscribed, in Latin, with a request for alms for the love of God.