Saint Jerome Penitent

This panel is tiny, about 30 centimetres tall, a picture to hold close rather than to see across a church. Jerome, the fourth-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, is shown as a penitent in the wilderness, a favourite subject for private prayer around 1500. Perugino and his workshop turned the composition out many times, in several sizes and with more or less help from assistants, so the question with any single version is how much of it is his. The museum lists this one as attributed to him and points to the fineness of the brushwork as the sign of his own hand. It came to the Habsburgs early. In 1663 it was moved from Innsbruck to Ambras, the castle above the town where the Tyrolean archdukes kept their famous collections.