On Sept. 30, many Christians observe Saint Jerome Day. Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer engraved an episode from Jerome’s journey to sainthood in “Saint Jerome Penitent in the Wilderness.”
Washington’s National Gallery of Art (NGA) holds the early engraving, which was 25- or 26-year-old Dürer’s first large-scale copperplate engraving. According to the NGA, only eight or nine impressions exist, and this engraving is the only one in America.
In the engraving, Dürer depicted Jerome paying penance in his desert hermitage, far from the temptations of Rome. He solemnly gazes at a crudely made cross sticking out of a crag, as he holds the rock he uses to beat against his chest.
Dürer so deftly rendered Jerome’s remorseful facial expression that it’s hard not to be moved. The lion Jerome tamed by pulling a thorn from its paw, lies by his side.
Dürer had recently returned from Venice, Italy, when he created this image of an older-looking Jerome, which was popular in Italy but less so in Germany. Dürer’s contemporary, the Italian artist Giovanni Bellini, shows how Italians handled the saint in the NGA’s painting “Saint Jerome Reading.” Dürer interpreted the biblical scene in his own Northern Renaissance manner, including the rocky landscape of the quarries near his hometown in Nuremberg.
Albrecht Dürer’s “Saint Jerome Penitent in the Wilderness” is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. To find out more, visit NGA.gov.
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