Saint Jerome in His Study

In 1474, oil paint was still a novelty in Italy, worked out in the Netherlands and only just arriving south, and Antonello da Messina had learned to handle it with a patience most Italian painters could not yet match. You can see why he wanted it here. He set Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, inside a wooden study that sits like a stage in the middle of a great stone hall, and then he painted every surface for what it actually is. The brass basin, the glazed pots, the towel on its peg, the folds of the red robe all catch the light differently, the way oil lets them and egg tempera never could. A partridge and a peacock stand on the tiled floor in the foreground, birds that carried settled meanings for his viewers. Look into the shadow at the right and Jerome's lion is there, the one he tamed, half lost in the dark of the arch.