Saint Paul the Hermit

Saint Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, wrote the life of Paul of Thebes, whom he called the first Christian hermit. Paul fled into the Egyptian desert as a young man to escape persecution and lived there for the rest of a very long life, in a cave beside a spring and a palm tree that gave him both food and clothing. For 60 years, Jerome says, a raven brought him half a loaf of bread every day, and when the aged hermit Anthony came to visit, the bird arrived with a whole one. Preti gives the old man his raven and its bread.

In Verona the canvas belonged to Bartolomeo Dal Pozzo, as the museum records. Dal Pozzo was a knight and admiral of the Order of Malta, the order Preti worked for on its island, and in 1718 he published a book of lives of Verona's painters.