Saint Jerome

This Saint Jerome reached the dukes of Savoy while its painter was still alive. The Galleria Sabauda counts it among the pictures already gathered by Charles Emmanuel I, who died in 1630, two years before Valentin de Boulogne. In Turin it was a modern picture, the work of a Frenchman then working in Rome in the manner of Caravaggio.

Jerome was the scholar and hermit who translated the Bible into Latin. Valentin painted single saints like this one in the years before he took on a full set of the four Evangelists around 1624 to 1626, and the gallery dates the canvas to about 1618 to 1622. It hangs on the first floor in Sala 18, among the gallery's followers of Caravaggio.