St. Jerome

The date 1502, painted at the bottom of this panel, makes it the earliest dated painting by Cranach we know. He was about 30 and living in Vienna, where the Emperor Maximilian had just founded a college of poets and mathematicians around the humanist Conrad Celtis. The men of that circle read Greek and Latin, edited old texts and prized learning above almost everything, and their saint was Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin. The museum suggests the panel was made for one of them, the imperial councillor Johannes Fuchsmagen or the physician and historian Johannes Cuspinian. Cranach shows their saint at his least scholarly, doing penance in the wilderness, stripped to the waist before a crucifix, one hand pulling at his long flowing beard. A lion, the animal he was said to have freed from a thorn, stays close by. On the ground lie the red cardinal's hat and cape he has cast aside, a rank Jerome never held, which painters gave him centuries after his death so that viewers would know him at once.