Saint Jerome

Ribera signed and dated this one under the saint's arm, in 1644. The old scholar who translated the Bible into Latin is shown as an ascetic in the desert, hands clasped, a skull on the ledge in front of him. Everything that carries the picture is stripped down to a few decisions: the dark ground, the strong red of the drapery, the light picking out the ribs and the knuckles, the paint laid on thick. The Prado's own guide points to that economy of means as the mark of his last decade. There is a second thing worth knowing about where it hung. It came to the museum from the prince's lodge in the grounds of El Escorial, the royal monastery staffed for centuries by the Hieronymites, the order that takes its name from this saint.