Saint Paul the Hermit by José de Ribera

Saint Paul the Hermit by José de Ribera, 1640

An old man in a cave

An old man lies stretched out on the floor of a cave. He is bald, with a long white beard, and so thin that his ribs, collarbones and the tendons of his arms show under the skin. He props himself on one elbow against a block of stone and crosses both hands flat over his chest; a string of rosary beads hangs from his wrist. His only clothing is a skirt of plaited palm leaves around his hips. His bare legs are folded on the ground, the soles of his feet toward us.

He looks down, not up. In front of him on the bare earth lies a skull, with a flat stone beside it. The rock of the cave arches over him, and through its mouth at the left we see a patch of daylight: a pale blue sky, distant blue hills and a dead tree. Low in the left corner is the number 433, painted in white. It is not Ribera's; it is an old inventory number from the Spanish royal collection.

The canvas is square, 143 by 143 centimetres, and Ribera signed and dated it at lower right: Jusepe de Ribera español, valenciano f. 1640 — Jusepe de Ribera, Spaniard, Valencian, made this in 1640.

The first hermit

The subject is Paul of Thebes, known as Paul the First Hermit, an Egyptian saint who by tradition lived about 227 to 341. His life was written in Latin by Saint Jerome, probably in 375–376. According to Jerome, Paul fled to the Theban desert as a young man during the persecutions of Decius and Valerian, around AD 250. He lived in a cave in the mountains near a clear spring and a palm tree; the palm's leaves gave him clothing, and its fruit was his only food until a raven began bringing him half a loaf of bread each day. Near the end of his life, when he was 113, he was visited by Anthony the Great. When Anthony returned, Paul was dead, and Anthony buried him with the help of two lions.

Ribera paints none of the legend's marvels — no raven, no lions, no Anthony. He shows the palm-leaf garment, the cave and a man alone with a skull, a common emblem of meditation on death.

A late work

The Prado describes the picture as coming from the final stage of Ribera's career, when he turned away from the darkness of his early years toward brighter light and a wider range of colour. The shadows here are still deep, but the daylight at the cave mouth and the warm light on the old man's skin belong to that later manner.

The painting belonged to the Spanish royal collection. In 1772 it was recorded in the Palacio Real Nuevo in Madrid, in the apartment of the Infante Don Javier, under number 433 — the number still visible on the canvas — and it remained in the royal palace in later inventories of 1794 and 1814–1818. It is now in the Museo Nacional del Prado (inventory P001075), where it hangs in Room 9. It was lent to the exhibition Fieramente humanos, on Hispanic portraits of Baroque sanctity, in Málaga in 2023–24 and Valencia in 2024.

The painter

Jusepe de Ribera, also known as José de Ribera, was baptised in Játiva, near Valencia, on 17 February 1591. He is first recorded in Italy in 1611, painting for a church in Parma, and by 1613 he was a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. In late 1616 he moved to Naples, then under Spanish rule, and stayed there for the rest of his life, running a large workshop. Italians called him lo Spagnoletto, "the little Spaniard". On this canvas he still signed himself a Spaniard and a Valencian, nearly thirty years after he is first recorded in Italy. He died in Naples on 3 November 1652.

Sources: Museo Nacional del Prado, Saint Paul the Hermit (P001075) · Wikimedia Commons, File:San Pablo Ermitaño, por José de Ribera.jpg · Wikipedia, Paul of Thebes · Wikipedia, Jusepe de Ribera