Saint Jerome

Rubens painted this in Antwerp during the Twelve Years' Truce, the pause in the war with the Dutch Republic that held from 1609 to 1621. Churches emptied of their images during the religious upheavals of the previous century were being fitted out again, and his workshop was taking on more altar-scale commissions than one pair of hands could manage. Jerome appears as the hermit of the desert legends, the scholar who left Rome for the wilderness, and the heavy body is built on Titian's treatment of the subject, which Rubens had studied during his years in Italy. The lion asleep at his feet came out of drawings he made from a live animal. A few years later his own assistant, the young Anthony van Dyck, painted the same saint in a rougher, more agitated way, and both canvases are in Dresden today. Rubens marked this one at the lower left with three letters, P.P.R.