Saint Jerome Meditating

Jerome was the fourth-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, and by the time Bassano painted him around 1556 the saint was usually shown this way, as a gaunt old hermit who has left the world behind. The light is a cold autumn dusk. The objects around him all pull one direction: an hourglass with the sand running down, a skull, a stack of worn leather books set aside. His body is wasted thin from years of deprivation, and the colour warms into life only in small flares, a red cloak, a gleam on bone, where Bassano lets the dim scene breathe. The hourglass sits nearest to us, its upper glass almost empty.