Frederik van Valckenborch
1566–1623 · Habsburg Netherlands, Holy Roman Empire · Northern Renaissance, Mannerism
The story
Saint Jerome meditates in a wooded landscape with his lion and skull, under the strong contrasts of light and shadow that Paul Bril, the Flemish landscape painter in Rome, made fashionable. For a long time the canvas passed as the work of Bril's school. The Hungarian scholar Teréz Gerszi proposed Frederik van Valckenborch instead, and his name was adopted for the exhibition of Flemish painters in Rome in 1995. The Galleria Borghese still describes the attribution as wavering between the two Flemings.
Frederik came from Antwerp and from a family of landscape painters, the son of Marten van Valckenborch. He was in Italy in the 1590s and later settled in Nuremberg, where he died in 1623. The canvas is dated to around 1595 to 1605 and may have come from the pictures confiscated from the Cavalier d'Arpino, a leading painter in Rome, in 1607.
