Record details

• generalData.authorNameInListings

  José de Ribera (1591-1652)

• generalData.title

  Saint Peter in tears

• technicalData.measurements

  75 x 63 cm

• technicalData.description

  Oil on canvas

• technicalData.complementaryDescription

  The painting, unpublished and in excellent condition, depicts Saint Peter repentant and in prayer after having denied knowing Christ in a tavern, following Christ's arrest, trial, and crucifixion. This is a work that, due to its stylistic solutions and the high quality of its execution, can be confidently attributed to the production of José de Ribera, dated or datable between 1628 and 1630/32. By this time, Ribera, a Spanish-born painter trained in Rome under the influence of Caravaggio’s naturalist works created there between 1600 and 1605, had already relocated permanently to Naples, the capital of the Spanish viceroyalty in southern Italy, since late 1616.
  
  In Naples, where he arrived with broad and solid success, the young Spaniard brought to full maturity the artistic decisions he had previously made, managing to reconcile, through both a careful study of Antiquity and the popular, everyday reality, and by the meticulous and expert use of drawing and engraving, Caravaggio’s legacy with new and growing demands for formal clarity, compositional richness, realism in fabrics, anatomies, skin tones, and facial features, as well as a deeply human and moving treatment of moods and emotional reactions.
  
  This is evident precisely in the canvas with Saint Peter Penitent analyzed here, a theme Ribera also painted at other moments in his extensive Neapolitan career, although in this case achieving peaks of expressiveness and visual communicative intensity. This is particularly remarkable for a devotional subject, a tone rarely found in similar examples by other painters from the Neapolitan or broader southern Italian region, all active during the same period.