Domenichino
Bolognese, 1581–1641

Landscape with St. Jerome, 1610 ca.
Oil on panel
17 5/16 x 23 1/2"

Glasgow Museums, Archibald McLellan Collection, purchased 1856
139

COMMENTS

According to the Golden Legend, a celebrated medieval compendium of the lives of the saints, St Jerome spent four years as a penitent in the ‘vast solitude of the desert, burnt with the heat of the sun’. In keeping with a tradition that had developed in Italy from the mid 15th century, Domenichino shows the saint using his eremitical existence to undertake the scholarly task of translating the Bible into Latin.

On the rock that acts as his writing desk are a copy of the scriptures, an inkwell, and a skull serving as a reminder of human mortality. Beside him are his tame lion – or rather, lioness – his attribute of a cardinal’s hat, and a cross made of sticks. Likewise in keeping with Renaissance tradition, Domenichino uses the ‘desert’ setting to explore his interest in landscape painting.

- Glasgow Museums Collections Navigator
http://collections.glasgowmuseums.com/starobject.html?oid=166840

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Nominally the subject is St. Jerome who, according to the Golden Legend, a medieval biography of the saints, spent four years as a penitent in the “vast solitude of the desert, burnt with the heat of the sun.” Domenichino has taken liberties with the location but otherwise hews to tradition, showing Jerome at work translating the Bible into Latin on the rock he used as a writing desk, along with his attributes, a skull, cardinal’s hat, a cross made of sticks—and the tame lioness who was his companion.

But Domenichino’s real subject is the landscape, not the desert but probably an idealized version of the countryside around Rome, verdant, serene, and luminous. It is an ideal vision of man and nature in harmony that was enormously influential on later landscape painters.

- Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond, 2015