Temptation of Saint Jerome

Around 1640, Francisco de Zurbarán was the painter Spain's monasteries turned to, and the Hieronymite monks of Guadalupe, in the hills of Extremadura, gave him one of his richest jobs, a whole cycle for the sacristy and a small chapel beside it. This canvas hung in that chapel, dedicated to Saint Jerome, the 4th-century scholar the order was named for. Jerome had spent his youth in Rome reading Latin poets and chasing pleasures, and he never quite forgave himself. Here he kneels in his cave, gaunt and half-lost in shadow, turning sharply away from a group of finely dressed young women who have appeared to test him. Zurbarán loved this kind of contrast: the pale, worn body against the dark, the shimmer of silk on the intruders. These are the only monastic paintings by him that still hang exactly where they were meant to.