Saint Jerome as Cardinal

Saint Jerome lived in the fourth century, long before cardinals wore red robes. Painters dressed him that way anyway, because he had served as secretary to a pope, and in El Greco's Spain the costume carried extra weight. In 1546 the Council of Trent had declared Jerome's Latin Bible, the Vulgate, the Church's authentic text, and the translator was much honoured in Counter-Reformation Spain. El Greco painted this half-length figure in Toledo, sometime between about 1590 and 1610, and it belongs to a group of closely related versions now in London, New York and Madrid. The museum in Bayonne suggests the saint may hide a real face, Cardinal Gaspar de Quiroga, archbishop of Toledo and one of the painter's protectors, who died in 1594. Léon Bonnat, a painter and collector, left it to the French state in 1922, and it hangs in the Bayonne museum that bears his name, which reopened in November 2025 after 14 years of closure.