Saint Jerome

The grey stone in the old man's raised hand is not a prop chosen by the painter. Jerome described it himself. In a letter written from the Syrian desert around 384, he told a young Roman woman how he had gone out to live among scorpions and wild beasts, and how he beat his own chest to drive off the thoughts that followed him there. Painters took him at his word, and from the 16th century the stone became one of his attributes, along with the skull on the ledge, the crucifix in his other hand and the lion that sits in the shadow at the lower left. The books are the rest of his life, the years spent turning the Bible into the Latin that Western Europe then read for a thousand years. The Prado is careful about who painted this. Its record says attributed to Ribera, which means the museum thinks the hand is probably his and stops short of saying so. The canvas came to the museum in 1967, left by the marqués de Fontana.