San Girolamo penitente

Titian painted this near the end, in the last years before his death in 1576, when he was somewhere in his eighties and had turned again and again to subjects of suffering and old age. Jerome, the scholar-saint who withdrew to the desert to repent, crouches half-naked among the rocks, a crucifix wedged into a cleft above him and his lion resting in the corner. The paint is thick and broken, worked in places with his fingers, the way Titian handled these last canvases. It is hard not to feel the old painter in the old hermit. He died in Venice in 1576, during an outbreak of plague that emptied much of the city.