St. Jerome

Saint Jerome, a scholar of the fourth century, withdrew for a time as a hermit into the desert of Syria and later spent years translating the Bible into Latin. His version, the Vulgate, was still the Bible of the Catholic Church when Tintoretto painted him here, around 1571 to 1575. The painter pushes the old man right up to the front edge of the picture, folded into a cramped, bent pose, his heavy body strongly lit against a dark landscape that is barely sketched in. Around him lie the signs a Venetian viewer would have known at once, the book of the Bible he translated, a cardinal's robe, although he never was one, and the lion he is said to have tamed by drawing a thorn from its paw. By 1677 the picture belonged to Giovanni Roetta, a collector in Venice.