A poorly dressed blind man stands out against a dark background. With his hands, he touches a sculpted bust on a table that also bears a painting of a face. The work was signed by Jusepe de Ribera in 1632, but even without that signature there would be no doubt as to its authorship, as both its style and its subject matter are typical of his work. The figure is quintessentially Riberesque, as are the drawn-out manner of painting and the predominance of earth tones, as well as the highly contrasted light and shadows that bring out the elements of greatest expressive or narrative import, generating a profoundly emotional atmosphere. With these elements, Ribera creates an image illustrating one of his most frequently recurring themes, one that distinguished him from his peers and contributed significantly to his fame throughout Europe: allegorical figures and depictions of philosophers. That interest emerged in his work during his earliest period, in the second decade of the seventeenth century, and continued through the end of the 1630s.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this work hung in a hall at El Escorial, Madrid, dedicated to Ribera´s depictions of philosophers. There it was known as Gambazo, the blind man, famous for his sculptures - Blind Gambassi was a blind sculptor named Francesco Gonnelli who was born in 1603 and died in 1664. However, as Elizabeth du Gué Trapier points out, the apparent age of Ribera’s character discounts him from being Gambassi. The key for correctly identifying him lies in an early series of paintings that Ribera dedicated to the senses, which dates from around 1615. The one representing touch (The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, United States) shows a blind man touching a bust, and there, too, the table bears a painting of a head.

Between 1615 and 1632 Ribera’s style became more dramatic as he refined his approach to render emotions in a more believable manner. The two lightest and most intensely lit areas of The Sense of Touch, 1632, are also the most expressive, situated at the top and bottom of the painting’s central axis. At top, the blind man shows that, while he cannot see the light, he can sense it through his forehead, nose and closed eyelids. These convey an extremely subtle and extraordinary degree of reflection and attention, imparting to the viewer the sensations he receives through his hands as he slowly feels the bust near the bottom of the composition - which is also lighter and more brightly lit than the rest of the painting. This is Ribera’s way of emphasising the mental aspects of sensation and identification. Ribera’s occasional taste for paradox appears in the contrast between the aged and wrinkled figure of the blind man, marked by a lifetime of experiences, and the terse, youthful but lifeless appearance of the statue. The painting on the left further extends this paradox through a veiled allusion to one of the fundamental themes of art theory in that period: the contrast between painting (which is two-dimensional) and sculpture, which is three-dimensional and can be perceived not only visually but also through touch.