St Jerome in His Study

Antonio da Fabriano's Saint Jerome in His Study, painted in 1451 and now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, depicts the Church Father Jerome in his scholarly retreat — the study or cave where he performed the monumental work of translating the Bible into Latin and wrote his numerous commentaries, letters, and treatises. The subject of Jerome in his study was an important vehicle for humanist values in fifteenth-century Italy: the solitary scholar surrounded by books, engaged in the difficult intellectual labor of philological and theological work, represented an ideal that Renaissance humanists like Petrarch and Valla identified with closely.

Tempera on panel. The study or cave setting provides the spatial framework, typically rendered with careful attention to the scholar's paraphernalia — books, writing implements, the hourglass, the cardinal's hat — all of which carry symbolic resonance.