Saint Jerome Writing

Caravaggio painted Saint Jerome Writing around 1607–08 during his turbulent years in Malta, where he had fled after killing a man in Rome. The painting — commissioned for a chapel in St. John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta — depicts the learned Church Father in the act of translating the Bible into Latin, his aged body rendered with Caravaggio's characteristic tenebrism. Jerome's skull, book, and quill are treated with the same material attention as the saint's own furrowed face and powerful hands, creating a still-life-within-portrait that is characteristic of Caravaggio's ability to merge figure painting and object study. The directness and lack of idealization give the elderly scholar an immediacy that makes this one of Caravaggio's most compelling late religious works.

The dramatic raking light illuminates the saint's weathered body and the open books on his desk, while the skull and cardinal's hat serve as traditional attributes rendered with Caravaggio's unflinching naturalism.