Saint Jerome the Penitent

Saint Jerome the Penitent, painted in 1487 and held at the Museum of the Last Supper of Andrea del Sarto in Florence, depicts the great Church Father in his most common devotional guise — stripped to the waist, kneeling in the wilderness, beating his breast with a stone as penance. Jerome was enormously popular in late fifteenth-century Italy, his combination of scholarship and asceticism resonating with both humanist intellectuals and devout laypeople. The penitent Jerome in the wilderness was specifically associated with private devotion and meditation on sin and forgiveness, making it a natural subject for small-format devotional panels.

Tempera or oil on panel. The penitent Jerome's conventional attributes — the stone for self-mortification, the lion reclining nearby, a cross before which he kneels, books and the cardinal's hat discarded at his side — are condensed into a landscape setting. The figure's half-naked state required careful attention to the body's modelling.