Saint Jerome in Penitence

Titian was well into his sixties when he painted this around the 1550s for the Venetian church of Santa Maria Nuova. By then he was the most sought-after painter in Europe, working for the Habsburg emperor, and he had begun loosening his brush into the smoky, half-dissolved late manner that later painters would prize. He set Saint Jerome deep in a dark wilderness at night, kneeling before a small crucifix, a stone in his hand to beat his own chest in penance. Around him Titian scattered the props of the ascetic life: a skull, an hourglass, worn books, ivy climbing over the rocks. Little of it is sharply drawn. The forms surface out of shadow and broken light, so that the old scholar seems less described than glimpsed.