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Ribera was a Spaniard who spent his whole career in Naples, then ruled by the Spanish crown, and he built his reputation on exactly this kind of figure: an old man, half-naked, lit hard against the dark in the manner Caravaggio had made famous in the city a generation before. Paul was a 3rd-century Egyptian who fled into the desert to escape the persecution of Christians and, the legend says, lived there past the age of 100, fed each day by a raven that brought him bread. Ribera puts that raven up in the sky and gives the saint a skull and a gaunt, deeply creased body, the paint worked thick to read as old skin. A cleaning in 2013 turned up the date painted into the picture, 1642, placing it near the end of his life.