Saint Jerome in the Desert

Saint Jerome, the fourth-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, lived for a time as a hermit in the desert, and painters liked to show him there. Jacopo Bellini puts him in the Thebaid, the Egyptian wilderness of the first Christian monks, and crowds a whole menagerie around the meditating saint. The museum notes that these animals compete with the work of the local and Lombard painters who specialised in them, the tradition of Pisanello, whose Madonna of the Quail hangs in the same room.

The landscape stands with one foot in each age. Behind Jerome the rocks rise like an old Gothic backdrop, but a castle sits on the mountain top, and on a column stands a stylite, one of the early Christian ascetics who spent their lives on top of pillars. The museum sees in such details the humanist backgrounds that the Paduan painter Andrea Mantegna would go on to paint. The panel entered the civic collection in 1855 from the Veronese collector Giulio Pompei. In 2015 it was among the paintings taken from the museum in a robbery, and it was recovered the following year. Its frame is a 19th-century addition.