Pinacoteca Room IX

In Leonardo’s St Jerome, some passages are developed further than others. The unfinished surface leaves stages of the painter’s work visible. Jerome, a Christian scholar and translator of the Bible, appears here as a hermit, and the body carries much of the picture’s tension. The painting is usually dated around 1482. Its earlier history is uncertain, and the panel was cut into several pieces before it entered the Vatican collection in the nineteenth century. The image’s survival has its own history alongside the work of making it. Giovanni Bellini’s Lamentation over the dead Christ gives you another close grouping of bodies. It once formed the upper element of an altarpiece made for a church in Pesaro around 1475. Mary Magdalene, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea gather around the dead Christ. Its original elevated position belongs to the composition’s history, even when you encounter the detached painting in a museum room.