Saint Jerome in the Desert

Bellini's Saint Jerome in the Desert (c. 1450) at the Barber Institute, Birmingham, is an early work showing the Church Father in the wilderness setting of his self-imposed penitential exile. The young Bellini was still absorbing the influence of his father Jacopo's workshop and his brother-in-law Mantegna's revolutionary classical approach to figure painting, and the rocky landscape setting shows the beginning of his lifelong engagement with the relationship between devotional figures and natural environment. Jerome's desert — rendered as a precise rocky terrain rather than the atmospheric landscape of his later treatments — reflects the influence of Mantegna's sculptural stone surfaces.

Bellini's early technique displays the sharp, angular style of his Paduan period, with crisp contours, firm sculptural modeling, and the precisely rendered rocky landscape characteristic of Mantegna's influence on the young artist.