Saint Jerome Supported By Two Angels, Early 17th Century Venetian Painter

Saint Jerome supported by two angels
Early 17th century Venetian painter

Oil on canvas
86 x 67 cm. - In frame 103 x 84 cm.

The proposed painting offers us an intense portrayal of Saint Jerome, Doctor of the Church who lived between the 4th and 5th centuries, according to the typical iconography that sees him immortalised in the desert, and in accordance with the literary tradition that illustrates his period of solitude spent in the desert.

Stripped of his traditional cardinal's attributes, Jerome is depicted in the guise of a hermit saint, his livid flesh marked by old age and the bitterness of fasting. Exhausted by the fatigues of study, he collapses next to the sacred texts that lie scattered on the ground, miraculously supported by the pitiful gesture of two florid angels.

Before him lie the skull, a symbol of the vanity of earthly life, and the books, a sign of those studies that gave rise to the drafting of the ‘Vulgate’, the translation of the Bible into Latin. The lion at his feet recalls episodes handed down by the sources, including the Legenda Aurea by Jacopo da Varazze (late 13th century), according to which the beast, wounded by a thorn stuck in its paw, was healed by the saint, and therefore remained faithful to him, accompanying him throughout his retreat.

Completing the iconography are the other attributes that distinguish him: the stone with which he struck his chest as a sign of penitence, the cardinal's hat that identifies him as the pope's secretary, and above him the angels blowing the trumpets of judgement.

A stream of light mercilessly reveals the folds and wrinkles of his flesh, from which the intense red of the ample drapery surrounding the hermit saint's body stands out.

An analysis of the painting allows us to place its execution in the northern Italian school, executed by a Venetian artist in the early 17th century, although the style is still anchored in the Renaissance dictates of the previous century.

Both the pictorial manner and the colouring in which the bright red of the drapery that envelops the Saint's body, an allusion to the dignity of cardinals, dominate, are reminiscent of Titian.

Examining its stylistic characteristics, we find great consonances with the achievements of the workshop of the Venetian Jacopo Negretti, known as Palma il Giovane. His painting, and the fascination derived from it, is the result of a mixture of different influences: that of the Venetian school, of Titian and Tintoretto, and that of the Florentine-Roman school of Raphael and Michelangelo, which he learned during his four-year stay in Rome.