Saint Jérôme

In May 1498 the friar Girolamo Savonarola, who had run Florence for four years on a programme of repentance, was hanged and burned in the main square. Botticelli was about 53 and his brother Simone was among the friar's followers. The painter's late work turns away from the mythologies he is remembered for toward small, severe religious panels like this one.

Jerome was the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin and then went out to live in the desert, and here he stands on a board 44 centimetres high. It has a twin, a Saint Dominic of the same size, and the two were the wings of a small portable altar whose centre is no longer with them. Both belonged to the Stroganov family in Saint Petersburg and came to the Hermitage in 1922, by which time the paint had already been transferred off its wooden panel onto canvas.