San Girolamo che legge nel deserto

Giovanni Bellini painted this small panel around 1480, and the real subject may be the landscape as much as the saint. Jerome sits reading in a rocky wilderness. He was both a desert hermit and the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, so Bellini shows him doing penance and doing his life's work at once. The lion resting nearby is his: the story says Jerome once pulled a thorn from its paw and it never left him. Behind, a city rises on a crag, and though it never existed, its buildings are real ones Bellini had studied and drawn, a church and a royal tomb from Ravenna, a Roman bridge at Rimini, a bell tower from Verona, assembled into one imaginary skyline he could carry from painting to painting.