Saint Jerome in the Desert

This is thought to be the earliest surviving work by Giovanni Bellini, painted around 1450 when he was still very young, perhaps not yet 20. Bellini would go on to lead Venetian painting for half a century, but here he is just starting out. The subject is Saint Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin and then withdrew to live as a hermit in the wilderness. Bellini shows him small among the rocks, book at hand, with the lion he was said to have befriended nearby. Already the young painter cares about the landscape as much as the saint, working out the layered cliffs and distant light that his mature pictures would become famous for. It now hangs in the Barber Institute in Birmingham.