The penitent St. Jerome

Martino Piazza's Penitent Saint Jerome, painted around 1510 and now at the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, depicts the great Church Father in his most dramatically ascetic mode — beating his breast with a stone in the wilderness, before the vision of the crucifix, attended by the lion whose paw he had healed. Jerome's penitential desert retreat in Syria was the formative experience that gave him the moral authority to translate the Bible and produce the Vulgate, the standard Latin text of scripture. As a subject for painting, the penitent Jerome allowed for the combination of a partially nude, aged male figure with landscape setting and intense spiritual drama. Piazza was a Lombard painter from Lodi active in the early sixteenth century.

The landscape setting frames the aged, emaciated figure of Jerome in a rocky wilderness. The stone held in his raised hand, the crucifix before him, and the lion in the background complete the iconographic program. Lombard warmth of palette softens the austerity of the subject.