Landscape with Saint Jerome

In the 1570s the Dutch engraver Cornelis Cort, working in Rome, made a series of prints after the painter Girolamo Muziano showing hermit saints in wild country. They were hugely popular, and for decades painters in Rome, northerners above all, filled rocky landscapes with small holy figures. Saint Jerome suited the formula well, and the Church of those years gave him particular prominence. Here he sits in the shaded foreground, bent over a book, with his lion and a skull beside him. Beyond the rocks the light opens onto a river with swans and a town on a hill. The museum gives the canvas to the Antwerp painter Frederik van Valckenborch, while noting that scholars still waver between him and the circle of Paul Bril. The Borghese inventory of 1833 had listed it as a landscape by Francesco Viola of Bologna.