Saint Jerome in Penance

Around 1580 the Augustinian nuns of Sant'Andrea della Zirada, a small convent church on the western edge of Venice, commissioned a canvas over two and a half metres high from Veronese. He gave them Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, as an old hermit under a lean-to of branches, striking his own chest with a stone before a crucifix. The furniture of the legend lies around him, the tamed lion, a skull, books, an hourglass, and a red cardinal's hat hung on a tree trunk, a rank that did not exist in the 4th century when Jerome lived. On the crag behind stand a church and an obelisk, Italian scenery in place of the desert. The painting moved to the Accademia in 1971 for safekeeping, and the church it was made for still stands, out of use, behind the car park at Piazzale Roma.