Saint Jérôme

Caravaggio painted this around 1606, in years when he badly needed powerful friends. He had a violent streak and a growing list of enemies in Rome. The old scholar bent over his desk is Saint Jerome, who spent his life translating the Bible into Latin, and Caravaggio gives him a working man's bald head and a skull set on the books beside him as a reminder of death. The picture went to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew and one of the most powerful collectors in the city. The timing was no accident. Within months Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl and fled Rome, and a gift like this was the kind of thing that kept a protector close. It still hangs in the Borghese collection today.