Saint Jerome in Penance

In Venice a man named Girolamo Amadi commissioned this picture, and the choice of subject was personal. Girolamo is simply the Italian form of Jerome, so Amadi was honouring the saint whose name he carried. Veronese shows the old scholar-hermit out in the wilderness, a penitent doing hard bodily penance before a crucifix. Off to one side kneels a smaller, richly dressed man at prayer, Amadi himself, placed at the edge of his own devotional picture, watching his name-saint. Veronese painted it late in his career, around 1580, and set the scene against a soft, ordinary-looking landscape rather than a savage desert. The canvas hangs in the Accademia in Venice, cleaned in recent years so its deep reds and low light carry again.