St Jerome (Leonardo da Vinci)

Jerome's chest and shoulder emerge from a surface where other areas remain barely worked. Leonardo da Vinci left this painting unfinished around 1482. Follow the difference between a contour, a shaded muscle and a passage of paint. You can see several stages of making a picture together, rather than a uniform finished surface. Jerome was a Christian scholar who translated the Bible. Leonardo gives him a lean, strained body. The unfinished state leaves the work unusually open to close looking. Spend a little time with the turn between his head and torso, then compare it with the less developed surroundings. The panel has also survived physical damage. It had been cut into five pieces before entering the Vatican collection under Pope Pius IX in 1856. Its earlier travels are uncertain. The familiar account of Cardinal Fesch discovering separate parts belongs to the painting's traditional history. The joins and the uneven stages of painting belong to two different parts of its life, damage after Leonardo and work he left incomplete.