Penitent Saint Peter

Jusepe de Ribera, the dominant Spanish painter of seventeenth-century Naples, made the penitent saints of the 1620s and 1630s — Peter, Jerome, Mary Magdalene — the most imitated expression of his harsh tenebrist naturalism. This bust-length Penitent Saint Peter dates from about 1630, at the height of that manner, when he was rendering weeping saints and weather-worn philosophers in the same unflinching light. The subject, Saint Peter mourning his denial of Christ, was a staple of Counter-Reformation devotion, and Ribera’s austere version spoke directly to the piety of his Neapolitan patrons. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.