Saint Jérôme dans le désert

Lorenzo Lotto signed and dated this in 1506, when he was a young painter working around Treviso, on the mainland near Venice. Saint Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, was often shown late in life as a hermit who had gone into the wilderness to do penance, beating his chest with a stone. He is here, small, kneeling before a crucifix. What takes over the picture is the country around him, piled rocks, a thread of far-off water, the damp northern-Italian light that the young Giorgione had just made fashionable in Venice. The saint almost vanishes into it, a tiny figure of devotion swallowed by wild land. It is the earliest of several versions of this subject Lotto would paint across his long, restless career.