Funeral of St Jerome

Carpaccio's Funeral of Saint Jerome from around 1502 is part of the San Giorgio degli Schiavoni cycle, depicting the death and burial of the great biblical scholar whose life provided one of the cycle's three narrative strands. Jerome's death—surrounded by his followers in the Bethlehem monastery he had founded—gave Carpaccio an opportunity for a scene of communal grief and devotion that could be compared to the Lamentation over Christ. The monastery setting was rendered with Carpaccio's characteristic architectural precision, the monks' habits, the liturgical objects of a Christian burial, and the landscape of the Holy Land all contributing to a documentary record of early Christian monastic life as a fifteenth-century Venetian painter imaginatively reconstructed it. The Schiavoni cycle's three narrative strands—George, Jerome, and Triphun—gave Carpaccio exceptional range within a single commission.

The funeral procession creates a rhythmic, repetitive composition of monastic figures. Carpaccio's precise rendering of each monk's individual features within the collective formation demonstrates his remarkable powers of observation and organization.