San Jerónimo penitente

Caravaggio painted Saint Jerome more than once, and this version, now at the monastery of Montserrat near Barcelona, has a strange afterlife. It shows the old scholar-saint half-stripped in the dark, a skull beside him, meditating on death in the plain, unheroic way Caravaggio liked. Most scholars place it in his late Roman years, around 1605 to 1606, though the exact date is still argued. What is striking is how the picture nearly vanished from the record. In 1915 a Benedictine monk, Father Bonaventura Ubach, bought it cheaply at an auction of furniture and odds and ends in Rome, drawn simply to the figure of Jerome, the man who translated the Bible into Latin. It was not sold as a Caravaggio at all. Only decades later, when the scholar Roberto Longhi showed it in a 1951 exhibition, did specialists accept it as the master's own work. That single strong light raking across the body, and the way the darkness swallows everything it does not touch, is the sign of his hand. It hangs today in the Museum of Montserrat.