Saint Jérôme

This penitent Saint Jerome was painted in Florence in the early 1490s, just as the friar Girolamo Savonarola was drawing huge crowds with sermons calling the city to repentance. Filippino Lippi, son of the painter-monk Fra Filippo Lippi, shows the old scholar-saint as a gaunt hermit kneeling in a rocky wilderness, beating his breast before a crucifix fixed to a bare, dead tree. His red cardinal's robe lies discarded on the ground beside his lion. Everything is stripped down to penance and old age rather than learning and books. It is exactly the severe, inward mood that was taking hold of Florentine devotion in those years.