We are looking through a weighty stone archway into a very curious space. A large Gothic building, with to one side an incongruously elegant classical arcade, has within it, plonked on a patterned tiled floor, a wooden construction consisting of a platform, shelves and a desk at which St Jerome, in a Cardinal’s red robe and cap, sits perusing a book. To the left is an ordinary-looking square window with a view of distant green hills and fields. Altogether, the picture is a bewildering hotch-potch of style and scale.
St Jerome of Stridonium was one of the Doctors of the Church (the others were St Augustine of Hippo, St Ambrose of Milan and Pope Gregory the Great; Stridonium was a Roman town in Dalmatia, where he was born). He lived from 342 to 420 AD, and is mainly famous for having translated the Bible into Latin. That text, known as the Vulgate, is still used today in the Catholic Church.
Rather like St Augustine of Hippo, he was a libidinous youth who came to regret his wild behaviour and retired into the desert to act out his repentance. Paintings often show him as a hermit, living with a lion for companion. But almost as often he is depicted as a scholar, and, in this small picture, Antonello gives him an intimate space surrounded by his books and other personal possessions. Here, the minutely observed still-life of crockery, books and potted plants, the shawl hanging from a peg, seem unusual for an artist born in Sicily and working much of his life in southern Italy where the purpose of painting was primarily to embody the mysteries of the Christian faith. It clearly betrays Antonello’s familiarity with Flemish painting of his time.
He was also a master of portraiture and created some of the most moving likenesses of the period. He even made portraits of some of his images of saints, the Virgin Annunciate, for example, who appears very much as if painted from an actual, living young woman.
His links with Northern Europe come as a surprise, though we should never underestimate the mobility of artists in the Middle Ages, and particularly their propensity to travel to famous centres of technical innovation, and places where admired artists practised. He certainly travelled to the Low Countries and came under the influence of the Van Eycks, Hubert and Jan, who were claimed to have invented oil painting, and Rogier van der Weyden, whose personalities seem vividly present in the style and technique of this picture. Although it is an ideal representation of Jerome, it has many of the features of an intimate portrait; and the oddly mixed architecture makes sense as a kind of embodiment of the hybrid character of the saint’s likeness.
