Saint Jerome dans le desert

Lo Spagna's Saint Jerome dans le désert, painted around 1512 and now in the Louvre, is a work by one of Perugino's most gifted followers — a Spanish-born painter who trained in Perugia and became so thoroughly assimilated into the Umbrian tradition that he was nicknamed 'Lo Spagna' (the Spaniard) to distinguish his origin. Jerome in the desert — the great scholar-ascetic beating his breast before a crucifix in the Syrian wilderness — was one of the most popular devotional subjects of the period, combining the veneration of a learned Church Father with the ideal of penitential self-mortification. Lo Spagna brings Perugino's characteristic sweet melancholy and atmospheric landscape treatment to the subject, producing an image of quiet devotional intensity now preserved in the Louvre's Italian Renaissance collection.

Jerome is placed in a richly observed wilderness landscape that shows Lo Spagna's debt to Perugino's atmospheric treatment of natural settings. The saint's emaciated form and penitential gesture are rendered with emotional directness. The palette is silvery and atmospheric, characteristic of the Umbrian school.