The Penitent Saint Peter

This canvas shows one of the most emotive scenes of the New Testament, which was canonical subject for painters in Spain and Italy during the 17th century. During the Last Supper, Jesus predicted that before the cock crowed in the morning, Saint Peter would deny him three times. Here, the repentant saint sits in grieved contemplation following Christ’s arrest, tears gathering in his eyes and on his cheeks, his face turned toward heaven and illuminated from above.

By the late 1620s, Jusepe de Ribera had established himself as the leading painter in Naples. The city was then the second largest urban center in Europe, alive with artistic creativity and a destination for painters from the rest of the continent. Ribera executed highly important commissions for the ruling Spanish viceroys and provided pictures for a burgeoning market of local and foreign patrons, drawn to his dramatic, naturalism.

This canvas showing Saint Peter is likely to be a workshop production of a composition that was repeated by Ribera on a number of occasions, and is perhaps best known through a signed and dated version, which is now considered to be a studio production, in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow (see N. Spinosa, Ribera, Naples, 2003, p. 359, no. C.16). The high quality of this particular version led Professor Nicola Spinosa to consider it an autograph replica (private communication, dated 23 April 2010), and it was sold as such in 2014.