Saint Jerome

Saint Jerome, the great translator of the Bible into Latin, appears in this 1426 panel at the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, part of the dispersed Pisa Altarpiece. Jerome"s scholarly attributes—books, writing materials, and the cardinal"s hat he supposedly wore—identify the saint whose biblical translations made Scripture accessible to the Latin-speaking world. Masaccio renders the elderly scholar with a naturalistic dignity that conveys both age and intellectual authority.

The aging saint is modeled with Masaccio"s characteristic attention to the effects of light on form, with the wrinkled face and bony hands rendered in warm, naturalistic flesh tones. The cardinal"s robes provide a strong color accent—deep red against the gold ground—while the books and writing materials are painted with the material specificity that Masaccio brought to all his observed details. The figure"s solid, three-dimensional presence demonstrates Masaccio"s revolutionary break with the flat, decorative quality of International Gothic painting.