San Girolamo nello studio

No bigger than an oversized postcard, this panel turns Saint Jerome, the early Christian scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, into a quiet Renaissance humanist at his desk. The lion that legend gave Jerome dozes at his feet, tamed almost into a house pet, while the shelves around him hold the gear of a learned man, a brass candlestick, an hourglass, glass bottles, an open book. The painting carries the date 1442, the year after van Eyck died, so much of it was probably finished by his workshop from his design. When it arrived in Detroit in 1925 it was catalogued under a different Netherlandish painter's name. A slip of paper on the desk is painted to look as if the date were pinned there.