Woodland landscape with St Jerome

Saint Jerome, the fourth-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, spent some years as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis in Syria. Here, though, he sits in a dense wood. The museum sees this copper as typical of Brueghel's early work, where the Netherlandish way of making a landscape is joined to Italian motifs, and it points to the waterfall, which recalls the cascades at Tivoli, where the river Aniene drops down east of Rome. The saint himself, given over to his studies in the solitude of the forest, was painted by Hans Rottenhammer, a painter born in Munich in 1564. The plate measures about 26 by 35 centimetres, and the museum dates it to 1597, with a question mark after the year.