Saint Jerome in the Desert

This one is small, 37 by 30 centimetres, and it was painted for a private patron rather than for a church. Jerome, the scholar who put the Bible into Latin, appears as a hermit in the wilderness, holding the stone he beat his chest with in penance, an open book near him and the tamed lion at his side. The rock behind him is worked out ridge by ridge, and the mountains beyond turn blue as the air thickens over the distance. On the back of the panel an old hand wrote Lamberti opus, the work of Lamberti. The 17th-century Venetian writer Boschini duly noted a fine Saint Jerome hermit by Lamberti, and part of the scholarship has since read the panel as the work of Pasqualino Veneto, whose family name was Lamberto. Brera gives it to Cima, around 1493 and 1494, and says the inscription has never been explained.