Saint Jerome in a Landscape

Jerome, the 4th-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, spent years as a hermit in the Syrian desert, and painters loved to show him doing penance there. Cima catches him mid-movement. He has dropped to one knee on stony ground, his arm swung back with a white stone in his fist to beat his own chest, and he looks up at a cross made of two thin branches tied together. A snake on the ground stands for the temptations he was fighting. His lion lies under a ledge of rock. The landscape follows the body, with diagonals running the same way as his lunge and a road winding down into the valley. A note on the back says the panel was bought in Venice in 1770. It later belonged to the English collector William Beckford, and the Gallery bought it at the Duke of Hamilton's sale in 1882.