St. Jerome in the Wilderness

This little panel has a second painting on its back, and the two belong together. Dürer made it around 1496, soon after his first trip to Italy. On the front Jerome kneels in the wilderness, beating his chest with a stone before a crucifix, the tame lion he once helped resting at his side. Turn the panel over and the whole mood changes: a dark night sky with a single fiery body streaking across it, trailing red. Nobody is sure whether Dürer meant a comet, a meteor, or an eclipse, but the reading that fits is the end of the world from the Book of Revelation. Jerome was thought in the Middle Ages to have heard the trumpets of the Last Judgment, so the penitent saint on one face and the burning sky on the other are two halves of one thought.