San Girolamo nel deserto

Mantegna was still a teenager when he painted this, barely out of the Padua workshop of Francesco Squarcione, the master he would later drag through the courts for exploiting him. Freed to take his own commissions around 1449, he made this small panel of Saint Jerome, the scholar who withdrew to the desert to translate the Bible. Even this young, Mantegna paints rock as if he loved it more than flesh, every ledge sharp and geological. Jerome kneels gaunt before a crucifix, his red cardinal's hat set aside, a candle burning in the cave and his tamed lion nearby, the beast whose paw he was said to have healed. The picture now hangs in Sao Paulo, about as far from Padua as it could travel.