Saint Jerome in the Wilderness

Saint Jerome in the Wilderness — the great Christian scholar retreating from civilisation to live as a hermit, flagellating himself and translating the Hebrew scriptures into the Latin Vulgate — was among the most popular devotional subjects in sixteenth-century Iberian painting, particularly suited to the contemplative and penitential spirituality of the Counter-Reformation. Morales's treatment, dated around 1570 and now in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, shows Jerome in his traditional setting among rocks, typically holding a stone with which he beats his breast and accompanied by a skull, a lion, and his cardinal's hat. The Irish collection's acquisition of this work reflects the circulation of Spanish devotional painting through the European art market in the nineteenth century. Morales's Jerome captures the ascetic tension between the saint's intellectual greatness — he was the pre-eminent biblical scholar of late antiquity — and his self-imposed physical mortification, the mind that produced the Vulgate housed in a body he relentlessly punished.

The wilderness setting requires Morales to engage landscape elements — rock, sky, the desert ground — that he rarely foregrounded in his devotional images. The canvas support gives the rocky setting a slightly rougher texture than his smooth panel works. Jerome's aged body — emaciated, weathered — is rendered with anatomical attention to the physical consequences of extreme asceticism.