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An essential difference between him and Caravaggio, though, was that Ribera believed strongly in drawing for its own sake -- no drawings by Caravaggio survive -- and was a passionate student of the 16th century grand manner, whose defining masters were Michelangelo and Raphael. Their works, he said, "demand to be studied and meditated over many times. For though we now paint following a different course and method, if it is not established upon this kind of study, ((our)) painting may easily end in ruin." This is why Michelangelesque poses often recur in Ribera's early work, such as the half- ruined, still impressive Crucifixion, circa 1625, whose twisting Christ is based directly on a famous Michelangelo drawing.
Caravaggio was the first Italian painter to make still life an independent subject, and Ribera follows him. The still-life details of his paintings, the luscious precise fruit bowls and the piles of books whose every parchment page is given its own stiffness and weight -- even the yellowed skulls that remind his saints (and his audience) of their mortality -- are not so much rendered as embodied. Like Caravaggio's, his early St. Jeromes and St. Sebastians seem transfixed by light, which hits them from a single-point source. In the days before gaslight, this was known as "cellar painting" because the only way to get the effect was by putting the model in darkness with a window that let in a single ray of sun. This gave their poses and gestures both the emphasis of drama and a degree of abstraction.
In some of Ribera's more complex figure arrangements, one seems to be looking at a mechanism of limbs and torsos that have suddenly frozen in mid- action. The models are muscular and, when old, stringy. One is left in no doubt that Ribera found them on the street, in their patched, tatterdemalion clothes, and got them into the studio for a few coppers. In his early Roman allegories of the five senses, The Sense of Smell is a beggar holding up not the flower that was usual in versions of this common subject, but a cut onion, so that tears trickle from his eyes. Touch, very movingly, is a blind man feeling out the broken nose of a classical marble head, which he can just apprehend by touch, while on the table in front of him lies a painted portrait that he will never see or apprehend.
This presence of the antique, which was an obsessive and recurrent aspect of all artists' experience in Rome or Naples, surfaces elsewhere in Ribera's work, sometimes in a disguised form. Looking at the great white belly-bulge of his Drunken Silenus, 1626, one sees it as gross and comic. Yet there may be something more behind it; namely, the sarcophagus figures of Etruscan bigwigs, each displaying his un-ideal paunch, a common sight around Rome.