Saint Jerome writing

For 72 years this canvas was not in Madrid at all. From 1940 it sat on deposit in the Museo-Casa de Colon in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, catalogued as the work of Esteban March, a Valencian painter of the following generation. The Prado called it back in September 2012 to study and clean it, after Gianni Papi, an Italian specialist in the painters who followed Caravaggio, published it as an early Ribera. The museum presented it under the new name on 8 July 2013 and dates it to about 1615. Restorers found damp and woodworm damage along the edges and took off an oxidised varnish. Jerome is at his desk, the scholar who put the Bible into Latin and the hermit who beat his own chest, held in one figure. The painting had belonged to Elizabeth Farnese, queen of Spain, and hung in her palace at La Granja.