Saint Jerome in Meditation

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Saint Jerome in Meditation: Caravaggio

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Caravaggio Oil Painting - Saint Jerome in Meditation

Keywords: Saint, Jerome, Meditation

Work Overview: Saint Jerome in Meditation
Italian: San Girolamo in meditazione
Artist Caravaggio
Year c. 1605
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 140.5 cm × 101.5 cm (55.3 in × 40.0 in)
Location Museum of Montserrat, Montserrat

Saint Jerome in Meditation (c. 1605) is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, now in the Museum of Montserrat, next to the Monastery of Santa Maria, Montserrat (Museu del Monestir de Santa Maria).[1]

Saint Jerome, hermit, Father of the Church, and responsible for the translation of the Bible into Latin, (the Vulgate Bible) was a popular figure in Caravaggio's time, and the artist painted him at least eight times (only three survive). Whether this was from personal choice or at the request of patrons is unknown, but it gave Caravaggio the opportunity to explore the potential - from an artist's perspective - of aged and wrinkled flesh. Jerome is shown here contemplating one of his symbols, the skull, a reminder of the inevitability of death and the vanity of worldly things.

The painting is probably from the Giustiniani collection (the collection of Caravaggio's patron the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani and his brother the cardinal Benedetto). Benedetto built up a large collection of religious works by the artist, and a St Jerome of the same dimensions as this one is in the Giustiniani inventory of 1638.

Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb points out that the brooding, introverted mood of this painting is strikingly similar to that of John the Baptist, now in Kansas City at the Nelson Atkins Museum, painted at about the same time.

Only acquired from Italy by its present owners in 1917, the Montserrat St. Jerome is possibly the picture of similar measurements listed in the Giustiniani inventory of 1638. Caravaggio painted the subject of St. Jerome quite often [there are three surviving works and five others mentioned in the sources] but it is not known whether he did so through choice or the exigencies of commissions. The subject certainly gave him an opportunity to portray the folds and wrinkles of ageing male flesh, but one should not underestimate St. Jerome's wider and more specifically religious appeal for contemporaries. He was a mystic and hermit whose stern asceticism helped to kindle one strand of Counter-Reformation fervour, as witnessed by the increase in the number of Hieronymite hermits during the period, but he was also a great scholar who had translated the Bible into Latin and ranked, as one of the Four Fathers of the Church, almost as a second founder of the Christian religion. Furthermore, the graphic power of his message, with its insistence on the contemporaneity of the Gospels, must have seemed to the religious very much akin to Caravaggio's paintings: 'We have to translate the words of Scripture into deeds; instead of talking of holy things we must enact them.' The saint's pose in the picture recalls that of St. Matthew in the second version of St. Matthew and the Angel.

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