Scholarly Article

Italian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century: Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1575/1585

Part of Online Edition: Italian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century

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A sinewy older man, his pale skin mostly exposed, sits on a stone low to the ground facing a table on our right in the center of this vertical painting. His gray hair is cropped short, and he has a graying, long beard. He faces our right in profile, and has a hooked nose, deep-set eyes, and the eyebrow we can see is bushy. The man's bare chest has a red wound flecked with darker red gashes. A smooth and shiny, rose-pink cloth drapes across his thighs and falls around his bare knees, its soft folds highlighted in white. A translucent white undergarment peeks out from beneath it. In the man’s left hand, farther from us, he holds the bottom of a wooden cross against the pages of an open book, which is propped up on a skull on a wooden table. The crucifix is as tall as the book. An hourglass sits on the corner of the table just beyond that hand. He clutches a palm-sized stone in his right arm, which is slightly bent and held down by his side. His legs are bent and cramped under his body as he sits on the low stone. A small lion lies in the shadows under the table. To our left and directly behind the man looms a brown, rocky arch with two wooden slats, like a fence, across its opening. Another rocky formation fills the space through the archway, leaving a sliver of blue sky while juniper-green bushes grow around its edges. To our right, a rolling wilderness stretches away to the horizon, with soft foliage of kelly green giving way to steep hills in soft blues. Hazy white squares suggest a cluster of buildings on the distant hillside. Pale gray and white clouds float across a sky that deepens from pale pink along the horizon to vivid blue along the top edge.
Veronese, Benedetto Caliari, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1575/1585, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.47

Entry

In keeping with a well-established iconography, the penitent, half-naked saint is shown contemplating a crucifix and about to mortify his flesh by beating his breast with a stone. Prominently visible are his attributes of a tame lion, the Bible he translated into Latin, and the memento mori symbols of a skull and an hourglass.

While the generic style is clearly that of Paolo Veronese, there exists some critical disagreement both on the extent of the master’s involvement and on its place in his career. Following Wilhelm Suida and Bernard Berenson, Terisio Pignatti and Rodolfo Pallucchini accepted the picture as autograph; but Richard Cocke called it a workshop piece, and Fern Rusk Shapley conceded that it is weaker in quality than Veronese’s altarpieces of the same subject from Santa Maria degli Angeli, Murano (now in San Pietro Martire), and Sant’Andrea della Zirada, Venice (now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia). Although the present appearance of the picture is compromised by its poor condition, details, such as the weak drawing of the saint’s right foot and the awkward conjunction of the lion and the saint’s left leg, do indeed seem to indicate that it is by a studio assistant. This assistant may perhaps be most plausibly identified as Paolo’s younger brother Benedetto Caliari (1538–1598), who is already recorded as a collaborator on the paintings at San Sebastiano in the 1550s, and who became Veronese’s primary artistic heir after his death in 1588. Benedetto’s own artistic personality is usually submerged beneath that of his brother, but the Gallery’s picture shares a number of stylistic traits with two of his best-attested independent works: the Washing of the Disciples’ Feet and the Christ before Pilate (both Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice), painted in the late 1570s for the now-demolished church of San Niccolò ai Frari. In particular, the treatment of the drapery in the Saint Jerome closely resembles that in the foreground draperies of the Washing of the Disciples’ Feet: hard, shiny, and planar; and in both works, the musculature, too, falls into similarly stylized patterns.

The attribution of the present picture to an assistant, perhaps Benedetto, rather than to the master himself in turn affects any assessment of the date. Whereas Pignatti and Pallucchini placed the picture close to the Murano Saint Jerome of 1565, Shapley and Annalisa Perissa Torrini argued for a rather later date, close to the Sant’Andrea version, which is generally agreed to date from circa 1580. This later dating is the more convincing: apart from the fact that the lion is closely repeated from its counterpart in the finer Sant’Andrea altarpiece, the Gallery’s picture shares with this work the planar pose of the saint and the twilit, atmospheric landscape, both of which contrast with the Murano version, with its clear projection of firmly modeled forms into space. The saint’s profile also closely resembles that of other elderly figures by Veronese of about this time, such as the foremost king in the Hermitage Adoration of the Magi of circa 1580–1582. A likely date, therefore, is one close to that of Benedetto’s two paintings of the late 1570s for San Niccolò ai Frari, or perhaps slightly later.

According to Suida, the work may be identical with “a little picture with Saint Jerome” by Veronese recorded by Carlo Ridolfi (1648), Marco Boschini (1664), and Anton Maria Zanetti (1733) in the passage leading to the sacristy in the church of San Sebastiano in Venice. This suggestion is not necessarily contradicted by the probable provenance of the Gallery’s picture from the collection of Sir Peter Lely in the late 17th century, since Zanetti could have been simply repeating the information of Boschini, without realizing that the picture had already been sold to England. Yet Ridolfi’s phrase “piccolo quadretto” seems to imply a picture considerably smaller than one measuring nearly four feet by three, and the identification remains doubtful.

Shapley recorded the existence of a coarse copy in the Museo Provincial, Gerona.

Technical Summary

The support consists of a twill-weave, medium-weight fabric. The painting has been lined and the tacking margins have been removed, with consequent damage along all four sides. It also appears from x-radiographs and examination with a stereomicroscope that the ground is either very thin or nonexistent. The sky and background were apparently painted prior to the addition of the figure, and the paint was applied unusually thinly, with impasto restricted to the yellow highlights and some of the white on the saint’s drapery.

The paint surface shows medium to heavy abrasion throughout and numerous scattered losses. Conservation treatment in 1986 involved the removal of extensive discolored retouching and overpaint, followed by extensive inpainting to match areas of original paint. Also removed at this time was a small branch above the saint’s head, which was found to be a complete addition.

Peter Humfrey and Joanna Dunn based on the examination reports by Ann Hoenigswald, Jia-sun Tsang, and Carolyn Tallent

March 21, 2019