Saint Jerome in the Desert

In 1891 the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans published Là-bas, a dark book about Satanism in modern Paris, and in it he cited this panel, which he owned. The same novel opens with a long description of a Crucifixion by Grünewald.

Joachim Patinir painted this landscape around 1520. He put Saint Jerome, the scholar who became a hermit, into a ragged thatched shelter under towers of grey rock. The saint kneels with a stone in his hand, ready to strike his chest in penance, his red cardinal's cloak thrown on the ground. Around him the world carries on regardless, a river winding to the horizon, farms and flocks, a road climbing toward a great monastery. After Huysmans died the picture went to his half-sister, then to the dealer Joseph Duveen, who gave it to the Louvre in 1923.