Saint Jérôme soutenant deux jeunes pendus

This is a small panel, one of three that once ran along the base of an altarpiece dedicated to Saint Jerome. Perugino painted it in the early 1470s, when he was a young man not long out of training in Florence, in the busy workshop of Verrocchio where Leonardo da Vinci was learning at the same time. The scene comes from a medieval legend: after his death, Saint Jerome appears to hold up two young men who had been hanged for a crime they did not commit, and saves them. Perugino shows him in the middle, in the red robes of a cardinal, steadying the two naked figures. That cardinal's dress is an old convention, since Jerome lived centuries before there were any. Panels like this, low and close to eye level, were where a congregation would read the saint's story in pictures.