San Girolamo che legge in campagna

Saint Jerome sits reading in the wild, the scholar who first turned the Bible into everyday Latin, shown here as the hermit he later became, alone among the rocks with a ruined Roman bridge far behind him. What Bellini cared about most was that distance, the light on the hills and water, the tender kind of landscape Venetian painting was only then learning to build a whole picture around. The panel carries a date of 1505, though its style looks a decade older, so scholars suspect Bellini began it earlier and finished it, perhaps with workshop help, only later. Among the rocks he tucked a lizard, a squirrel and a hare, small living things keeping the old saint company.