Saint Jerome

This panel was probably painted around 1470 for a Franciscan brotherhood whose members whipped themselves in imitation of Christ's suffering, and they would have recognised themselves in Saint Jerome. He kneels in the wilderness, stripped to the waist, his body as thin as a crucified man's, raising a stone to strike his own chest. Back on the right a figure in red kneels with Saint Francis, probably the man who paid for the picture. An owl watches from the tree above. Jerome is gazing upward at a vision of Christ on a glowing cross, which Tura painted in the upper part of the panel. That piece was later cut out, and it is now in the Brera gallery in Milan. The National Gallery bought what remained in 1867 from Lady Eastlake, widow of its first director, for the price her husband had paid.