St. Jerome

Around 1640 Strozzi painted this small Saint Jerome, and in these last Venetian years he came back to the aging scholar again and again. Close versions survive in the city and in Florence, so the idea clearly stayed near his workbench. Jerome was the fourth-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, and painters usually pushed him out into the desert as a half-naked penitent beating his chest with a stone. Here the mood is quieter and nearer. The figure sits close to the front of a canvas barely larger than a sheet of paper, its thick, glowing paint giving the old man's skin and beard a real physical weight. Strozzi died in 1644, only a few years later. This picture reached the gallery in 1838, a gift from the Venetian collector Girolamo Contarini.