The Temptation of Saint Jerome

Giorgio Vasari — best known today as the author of "Lives of the Artists" — painted this Temptation of Saint Jerome between 1541 and 1548. The work shows Jerome beset by temptations in the wilderness, a subject Vasari treated with the sophisticated Mannerist style he absorbed from his teachers Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo. Vasari was a prolific painter and architect who served the Medici court, and this panel demonstrates his facility with complex figure compositions and dramatic narrative staging typical of mid-sixteenth-century Florentine art.

The oil on panel displays Vasari's characteristic Mannerist approach: polished surfaces, carefully articulated musculature derived from Michelangelo, and an elaborate compositional arrangement that fills the picture plane with dynamic, intertwined figures.