Saint Jerome by Albrecht Dürer

A lion rests beside the kneeling man in blue. According to a Christian legend, Jerome won the animal’s companionship by removing a thorn from its paw. The animal helps identify a saint otherwise absorbed in his own act of prayer. Albrecht Dürer, a German painter and printmaker, made this small panel around 1496. Jerome was a scholar associated with translating the Bible into Latin. Here, he kneels before a crucifix wedged into a tree stump and strikes his chest with a stone, sharing in Christ’s suffering through penitence. The setting is far from a bare desert. Trees, grasses, flowers and distant mountains give the wilderness a northern European character. Look near the stream for the tiny birds and compare their scale with the saint’s broad blue robe. The panel was painted on both sides, probably for private worship. Its reverse shows an unsettled sky with mysterious celestial forms. Their exact identity remains uncertain. The two sides offered the owner very different images to contemplate in the same small object.