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Lot Essay
This canvas shows one of the most emotive scenes of the New Testament, which became a canonical subject for painters in Spain and Italy during the 17th century. During the Last Supper, Jesus predicted that before the cock crowed twice 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 at the height of its power, the second largest urban centre in Europe, alive with artistic creativity and a destination for painters from the rest of the continent. In this landscape, which was at times unsparingly competitive, Ribera dominated. He 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, magnetic naturalism.
In this prolific period of activity Ribera covered a range of subject matter with startling originality and virtuosity. He produced the renowned series of philosophers for the Duke of Alcalà, together with many images of saints, in states of penitence and ecstasy. 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 the version, signed and dated 1628, in the Corporation Art Gallery, 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.
The use of chiaroscuro and the expressive gaze of Saint Peter betray the influence of Caravaggio, who was key to Ribera’s early development in Naples and whose decisive impact continued to be felt in the city in the decades after his death. The expressive, upward gaze of Saint Peter finds an echo in Ribera’s Saint Jerome and the Angel of Judgement, one of the outstanding masterpieces of the Neapolitan baroque, executed in 1626 for the church of Trinità delle Monache (now Naples, Museo di Capodimonte). The need to make pictures that reinforced the teachings of the Counter Reformation, by focusing the viewer on individual characters from the Bible, was reaffirmed by Cardinal Federico Borromeo’s De Pictura Sacra, published in 1624. Ribera, perhaps more than any other artist of the era, excelled in producing works of such spiritual depth, typified here in this picture through the saint’s emotive expression.
By the late 1620s, Jusepe de Ribera had established himself as the leading painter in Naples. The city was then at the height of its power, the second largest urban centre in Europe, alive with artistic creativity and a destination for painters from the rest of the continent. In this landscape, which was at times unsparingly competitive, Ribera dominated. He 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, magnetic naturalism.
In this prolific period of activity Ribera covered a range of subject matter with startling originality and virtuosity. He produced the renowned series of philosophers for the Duke of Alcalà, together with many images of saints, in states of penitence and ecstasy. 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 the version, signed and dated 1628, in the Corporation Art Gallery, 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.
The use of chiaroscuro and the expressive gaze of Saint Peter betray the influence of Caravaggio, who was key to Ribera’s early development in Naples and whose decisive impact continued to be felt in the city in the decades after his death. The expressive, upward gaze of Saint Peter finds an echo in Ribera’s Saint Jerome and the Angel of Judgement, one of the outstanding masterpieces of the Neapolitan baroque, executed in 1626 for the church of Trinità delle Monache (now Naples, Museo di Capodimonte). The need to make pictures that reinforced the teachings of the Counter Reformation, by focusing the viewer on individual characters from the Bible, was reaffirmed by Cardinal Federico Borromeo’s De Pictura Sacra, published in 1624. Ribera, perhaps more than any other artist of the era, excelled in producing works of such spiritual depth, typified here in this picture through the saint’s emotive expression.