“This painting is to some extent a summation of the early Ribera. It has both the typical half-length figure of his Roman period, where the subject is separated from the viewer by a table. It also contains perhaps the clearest reference to Caravaggio in his entire oeuvre, borrowing the composition from the latter’s painting of the same subject intended for the Contarelli chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, which was rejected by the client. A feature of the picture by Ribera is also the lamentable state of the saint’s reading matter, because in contrast to the Italian artist, Ribera prefers time and again to show well-used, sometimes even dog-eared books.” (Michael Scholz-Hänsel, “Master of Spanish Painting”, p. 16). 

 

When exhibited in Naples in 1989, this painting was dated within Ribera’s early Neapolitan period, together with the Strasbourg Saints Peter and Paul and The Flagellation and Saint Andrew, now in the Quadreria dei Girolamini, Naple, and before de Crucifixion in Osuna, which was under way in early 1618. Craig Felton has connected the work with some payments made in 1619 for three half-length figures of evangelists commissioned from Ribera in Naples by Prince Marcantonio Doria of Genoa. Doria, who was a patron of Caravaggio when he was in Naples, of Ribera’s father-in-law, Giovan Bernardino Azzolino, and of Battistello Caracciolo, paid Ribera twenty-five ducats in May and thirty five ducats in November of 1619 through the prince’s Neapolitan intermediary, Lanfranco Massa, at the Banco del Popolo. By then, the canvases had already been consigned. Evidently, they were part of a series of the four evangelists commissioned earlier, since in July 1616 Doria paid Ribera fifteen ducats for a Saint Mark that had already been sent to Genoa (now lost). This series must have been commissioned when Ribera had just arrived in Naples, prior to his marriage to Azzolino’s daughter in late 1616. He evidently already obtained this prestigious commission from Doria, which was followed by others. 

 

Acceptance of Felton’s suggestion does not necessarily imply that the Saint Matthew was executed in 1619. The strong stylistic affinity it shows with the Saint Peter and Paul in Strasbourg and with other paintings that can now be dated to the period between the end of Ribera’s Roman sojourn and 1617, and the absence of those effects of iridescent light that appear in the Osuna Crucifixion of 1618, support a dating shortly after Ribera arrived in Naples, chronologically close to the lost Saint Mark. Notable in this painting, as in other works by the young Ribera, is the reference to a specific work by Caravaggio: the rejected first version of the altarpiece for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, then in the Giustiniani collection (Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, destroyed during the Second World War).