Saint Jerome Sealing a Letter

Saint Jerome is usually painted translating, writing, or beating his breast in the desert. Guercino, still working in his home town of Cento around 1617 or 1618, shows him doing something very unusual, sealing a letter. It is probably addressed to Pope Damasus, who in the 4th century encouraged him to translate the Bible. There are two versions of the scene. The other, in the Patrizi family collection, is more finished, and only there can you read the written pages and the pope's name on the letter. For most of the 20th century this canvas was taken for a copy of that one. It was sent on deposit to the Accademia dei Lincei, where scholars lost track of it, and in 1968 the Guercino specialist Denis Mahon described it as a good copy. X-rays taken by the art historian Rossella Vodret in 1999 made the case for Guercino's own hand. When the two pictures were seen side by side in Padua in 2000, Mahon changed his mind and coined a word for this one, bozzettone, a big sketch. He meant a full-size canvas that Guercino left loose and unfinished before painting its finished twin. Many more such pairs have turned up since. The picture belonged first to the Santacroce family in Rome, who valued it at 200 scudi in 1670, and then to the Torlonia, who gave it to the gallery in 1892.