Saint Jerome as Scholar

El Greco painted this in his final years in Toledo, around 1610, and he came back to Saint Jerome again and again, with at least five versions surviving. Here Jerome is the scholar, seated in the red robes of a cardinal before an open book. The costume is an anachronism, since the college of cardinals didn't exist in the fourth century when Jerome lived, but tradition had long dressed him that way. What mattered in Counter-Reformation Spain was the book. Jerome had translated the Bible into Latin, and that Latin version was the one the Catholic Church defended against Protestant translations. El Greco gives him the elongated hands and gaunt features that run through all his late Toledo figures, the white beard spilling down over the pages.