St Jerome

Saint Jerome, attributed to Botticelli and dated around 1490-95, depicts the scholar-hermit Jerome in the wilderness — his typical penitential setting with the lion who became his legendary companion after he removed a thorn from its paw. Jerome was one of the most popular saints in Renaissance Florence, chosen as patron by humanist scholars who admired his learning and his translation of the Bible into Latin. Botticelli painted Jerome in both a wilderness penitent mode and as a learned scholar in his study; this Hermitage version likely shows the hermit in the desert, his cardinal's red robe providing color against the rocky landscape. Botticelli's Jerome paintings belong to the intense devotional turn of his late career following Savonarola's influence.

Tempera or oil on panel with Botticelli's characteristic linear refinement — the aged saint's body rendered in the elongated, expressive manner of his late works, the rocky wilderness setting using the painter's distinctive treatment of landscape as a schematic backdrop of rock formations and sparse vegetation.