Saint Jerome in His Study

Dürer finished this in March 1521 while he was traveling through the Netherlands, and he gave it away rather than sold it, to Rui Fernandes de Almada, a Portuguese official he'd befriended in Antwerp. For the face of Jerome he used a real local man, and we know it, because the preparatory drawing in Vienna is inscribed with the sitter's age, 93. That's what you're looking at: not an idealized saint but a specific old man's skull and temples, worked out inch by inch. Jerome points down at a skull on his desk, the reminder of death, while the light rakes across the paneled study. The picture stayed in the Almada family in Portugal until 1880, when it was given to the museum in Lisbon that still has it.