Caravaggio (1571-1610)
San Girolamo (Saint Jerome)
c.1606
Oil on canvas, 116 x 153 cm
Galleria Borghese, Roma
According to Giovanni Pietro Bellori, the painting was made by the artist for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a sophisticated and avid collector, known among his contemporaries for being one of the greatest admirers of the promising Lombard painter.
The painting depicts St. Jerome, a doctor of the Church, studying the Sacred Scriptures which, according to tradition, he translated from Greek to Latin. In fact, the saint is hailed for his qualities as a studious man, portrayed as an elderly humanist hunched over the complex exegesis of the sacred text.
The compositional partitioning into two large fields of colour, distinguished by warm tones – such as the skin of the saint and the purple mantle – and cold ones – the skull and white cloth standing out against the open book – seems to emphasise a symbolic dialogue between contrasting contents: life and death, past and present.
Because of some rapidly painted details and the straightforward way the paint was applied, some critics have hypothesised that the canvas was never completed. (GB)