A Saint Holding a Staff

Introduces an unpublished and unfinished painting by Jusepe de Ribera depicting a half-length Apostle holding a staff

Introduces an unpublished and unfinished painting by Jusepe de Ribera depicting a half-length Apostle holding a staff

This handsome book is devoted to the scholarly study of an unpublished and unfinished painting by Jusepe de Ribera depicting a half-length Apostle holding a staff, datable to the artist’s mature Neapolitan period, around 1630. The work, preserved in a private collection and previously unknown to scholarship, is here presented and examined for the first time through a combination of stylistic, iconographic, historical and technical analysis. 

The book brings together contributions by leading specialists in Ribera studies, including an introduction by Nicola Spinosa and an extensive iconographic enquiry by Francisco Camacho Herrera, as well as visual comparison and documentary evidence and a detailed technical analysis.

By presenting a rigorously documented case study of an unpublished work, this volume contributes significantly to ongoing debates surrounding Ribera’s artistic development, workshop organization, and the boundaries between finished and unfinished painting. It offers scholars a new point of reference within Ribera’s oeuvre and a broader reflection on naturalism, seriality, and artistic identity in seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting.