Saint Jerome (verso)

Saint Jerome appears on the verso of a Bowes Museum panel attributed to the Master of the View of Saint Gudula around 1467, accompanying the Agony in the Garden scene on the recto. Jerome — the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, producing the Vulgate — was among the most frequently depicted saints in Northern European devotional painting, shown either as a red-robed cardinal in his study or as a penitent in the wilderness with a lion. The verso placement in this multi-panel altarpiece group made Jerome one of the protective exterior images viewed when the altarpiece was closed, framing the Passion scenes within a wider context of Church scholarship and authority.

Oil on panel with the Flemish attention to material detail — Jerome's distinctive attributes of cardinal's hat or red robes, the lion, the stone of self-mortification, and open books rendered with the same care given to fabric textures and architectural settings in the interior panels.