Saint Jerome

The name under this figure reads HIERONYMO, Latin for "to Jerome", and the grammar is a clue. Each portrait in Federico da Montefeltro's study at Urbino stood above a line of dedication offered by the duke to the man in the picture. When the boards were later sawn into single portraits most of that lettering was cut away, but the full texts had been copied and printed in 1592. The Louvre credits the panel jointly to Justus of Ghent and the Spanish painter Pedro Berruguete.

Jerome sat in the lower row, with the churchmen, as one of the four Latin Fathers of the Church on the same wall, beside Gregory, Ambrose and Augustine. He wears the red hat and robes of a cardinal, a rank from a much later Church that painters had long given him because he once worked in Rome as secretary to Pope Damasus.

What earned him his place in a scholar's study is the book open on his knees. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, and in these same years Federico was paying Florentine scribes and illuminators for an enormous two-volume Latin Bible of his own, which is now in the Vatican Library.