St. Jerome

Jerome was the scholar who, around the year 400, put the Bible into the Latin that western Europe would read for the next thousand years. By Memling's day painters liked to show him not at his desk but as a hermit in the wild, kneeling in penance and striking his own chest with a stone. That is the Jerome on this small panel of 1485, an image made for private prayer rather than a church wall. The lion of his legend keeps him company, the beast he was said to have befriended after drawing a thorn from its paw and which then followed him like a dog. Behind the kneeling figure the land opens into quiet hills and a stretch of water, ordinary Flemish country set behind a man who had left the world. The whole picture stands under a metre high.