St Jerome and the Sadducees

Initially attributed to Jusepe de Ribera and then to his school, St Jerome and the Sadducees was long thought to be the work of the Flemish artist Hendrick van Somer (or, more properly, De Somer), a pupil and imitator as self-confident as he was faithful to the style of the Spanish old master, active in Naples from the 1620s to the 1650s.
The painting certainly shares similarities with Ribera’s early Neapolitan work, at times seeming more Riberesque than the originals which inspired it, so insistent is its display of wrinkly senescent archetypes – here not even offset by the presence of a beardless youth, as is instead the case, for example, in Ribera’s Dispute in the Temple at the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, which would appear to have inspired this composition. However, its boxy spatial quality and its old-fashioned style, the intensified chromatic range and the carefully observed surface details (most notably, the very precise rendering of the damasks) are undoubtedly all hallmarks of the work of Filippo Vitale, one of the first and most important exponents of early southern Italian naturalism.[G.P.]