Santa Inês

The story behind this comes from the legend of Saint Agnes, a Roman girl of about 13 who refused to marry and was condemned to be stripped and shamed in public. As the legend tells it, her hair suddenly grew long enough to hide her, and an angel brought down a white cloth to wrap her. Ribera paints that instant. Agnes kneels in near-darkness, gathering the falling cloth, her eyes turned up, while the rest of the scene dissolves into shadow. Ribera was a Spaniard who spent his career in Naples, then ruled by Spain, and he had absorbed the hard raking light of Caravaggio that the city's painters lived on. He made this in 1640. The picture later entered the collection of the Saxon electors in Dresden, where it still hangs.