在荒野中阅读的圣哲罗姆

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.