Saint Jerome Writing (Saint Jerome in His Study or simply Saint Jerome)

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Saint Jerome Writing (Saint Jerome in His Study or simply Saint Jerome): Caravaggio

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Caravaggio Oil Painting - Saint Jerome Writing (Saint Jerome in His Study or simply Saint Jerome)

Keywords: Saint, Jerome, Writing, Saint, Jerome, Study, simply, Saint, Jerome

Work Overview: Saint Jerome Writing (Saint Jerome in His Study or simply Saint Jerome)
Artist Caravaggio
Year c. 1605–1606
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 112 cm × 157 cm (44 in × 62 in)
Location Galleria Borghese

Saint Jerome Writing, also called Saint Jerome in His Study or simply Saint Jerome, is an oil painting by Italian painter Caravaggio. Generally dated to 1605-1606, the painting is located in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

The painting depicts Saint Jerome, a Doctor of the Church in Roman Catholicism and a popular subject for painting, even for Caravaggio, who produced other paintings of Jerome in Meditation and engaged in writing. In this image, Jerome is reading intently, an outstretched arm resting with quill. It has been suggested that Jerome is depicted in the act of translating the Vulgate.

The painting is generally dated to 1605-1606, largely on the statements of 17th-century art historical biographer Gian Pietro Bellori, though Denis Mahon suggests 1602-1604.[2][3][4] According to Bellori, Caravaggio produced the piece at the behest of Cardinal Scipione Borghese,[5] who became a cardinal in 1605, but it is possible that Borghese acquired it later as it is not mentioned in a 1613 poem by Scipione Francucci that described the Borghese Caravaggio collection.[2] Whether or not the dating is accurate, the work is believed to have originated from Caravaggio's late Roman period,[6] which ended with the painter's exile to Malta in 1606.[7]

That Saint Jerome Writing is the work of Caravaggio is sometimes brought into question, as it was attributed to Ribera in the Borghese inventories from 1700 until 1893.

Just as Protestants wished to translate the Bible into local languages to make the Word of God accessible to ordinary believers, so Catholics were keen to justify the use of the standard Latin version, made by St Jerome in the late fourth century. Jerome had been baptized by one pope, had been given his task as translator by another and had called St Peter the first bishop of Rome. Among the Latin Fathers of the Church he was a powerful ally against modern heretics, who attacked the cult of the saints, restricted the use of Latin to the learned and viewed the papacy as the whore of Babylon. It was wholly appropriate that this image was bought by Scipione Borghese soon after he was made a cardinal in 1605 by his uncle, the new Pope Paul V.

In pre-Reformation days Jerome was shown with a pet lion and a cardinal's hat. Now Catholic reformers wished to pare religious art down to its essentials, and the good-living cardinal, whose ample features were to be sculpted and caricatured by Bernini, acquired a painting that was as austere as it was sombre. The thin old man, whose face is reminiscent of the model who had been Abraham, Matthew and one of the Apostles with Thomas, sits reflecting on a codex of the Bible while his right hand is poised to write. Whereas in the Renaissance, Antonello da Messina and Dürer had made him into a wealthy scholar, Caravaggio reduces Jerome's possessions to a minimum. The text he holds open, a second closed one and a third kept open by a skull are perched on a small table. Harsh lighting emphasizes the sinewy muscles of his tired arms and the parallel between his bony head and the skull - man is born to die, but the Word of God lives forever.

St. Jerome Writing was painted, according to Bellori, for Pope Paul V's nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who only arrived in Rome in the summer of 1605, but rapidly became a keen collector of Caravaggio's work. Obviously the model was the same as that for the Montserrat St. Jerome, but the handling of the paint is here much more fluid, especially in the head, face and left hand. Such a feature could either be interpreted as an exuberant, incipiently Baroque moment in Caravaggio's development or possibly as a sign that the work was, in fact, unfinished at the time of his flight from Rome in the summer of 1606. A similar, though slightly less marked, quality is discernible in the contemporary Ecce Homo. The conception of St. Jerome Writing is itself a remarkable achievement in which composition and subject-matter strongly reinforce each other: the aging saint, feverishly concentrating on what he has written, absent-mindedly stretches out a sinewy arm to the ink well on the far side of the table and, in so doing, indicates the skull, a reminder of death which observes him, symmetrically, in his very struggle to overcome it.

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Saint Jerome Writing (Saint Jerome in His Study or simply Saint Jerome)

Caravaggio

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