Ribera was one of the most prominent and original painters who came to Italy in the early seventeenth century. The artist appears to have been trained in the workshop of Ribalta in Valencia, and recent hypotheses suggest he left the Spanish city aged fifteen (in 1607/1608), bound for Italy. He must have soon met with success given that in 1611 an important patron such as Ranuccio Farnese could commission him to paint a Saint Martin Sharing His Cloak with a Beggar. In Rome, where he is documented as resident by 1615, he was in contact with the Northern followers of Caravaggio and probably became a member of the Accademia di San Luca. It was during this period (1614/1615) that Ribera painted one of his greatest masterpieces, the figures representing the Five Senses, cited by his biographer Mancini.
In 1616 he was documented in Naples, where he no doubt settled in conjunction with the appointment of the Duke of Osuna as Viceroy there that year. Osuna was his protector in the official circles of Naples and commissioned a series of paintings of clear Caravaggesque derivation; these have survived in the Collegiate Church in Osuna itself. During the first half of the 1620s Ribera applied himself to engraving in Naples and Rome. In the Papal City he was able to renew his admiration for the great masters of the Renaissance, to whom he was always indebted in his search for rigorous and monumental compositions. His close connection with the culture of the Northern caravaggisti led him initially towards a manner of pronounced and sometimes brutal naturalism, but he gradually evolved from strong expressive accents to smoother, more relaxed handling, less characterized by touches of tenebrismo - all this the result of a more considered reflection on the Classics, and at the same time as the new Venetian influence was making itself felt in Roman circles.His palette became lighter and his brushstrokes more free, as revealed by numerous paintings, particularly those with mythological subjects, executed in the 1630s (see, for example, the Apollo and Marsyas in the Museo di San Martino in Naples, signed and dated 1637). During the 1640s he was in charge of a busy workshop that was partly responsible for paintings that bear his signature. In 1651, a few months before his death, he completed the grand Communion of the Apostles (Naples, Certosa di San Martino) in which his style reaches its zenith of Baroque pictorial sensuality, while never abandoning Caravaggio's legacy of strong figural naturalism and dynamic contrasts of light and dark.