Saint Jerome

Saint Jerome at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna was a subject of particular significance for both humanists and reformers in the early sixteenth century. Jerome — the fifth-century scholar who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin (the Vulgate) — was a hero of Renaissance humanism for his commitment to textual scholarship and linguistic precision, and a figure whom Luther's own Bible translation enterprise implicitly honored and challenged simultaneously. Erasmus had edited Jerome's works in 1516, and the year before Cranach painted this (1515), Erasmus had produced his first Greek New Testament with a new Latin translation — a scholarly enterprise that directly fueled Luther's Reformation by revealing the gaps between the Vulgate and the original texts. Cranach's 1515 Jerome thus participates in a moment of intense scholarly and theological ferment, the saint associated with the very kind of textual return to sources that was about to transform Christianity. The Kunsthistorisches Museum's version is one of several Cranach Jerome subjects, the Vienna collections holding his most important early Wittenberg works.

Detailed landscape setting with precise botanical observation recalls Cranach's early Danube School training under the influence of Albrecht Altdorfer. The aged saint's emaciated body is rendered with sympathetic naturalism, the skin hanging loose over visible bone structure.