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| Antonello da Messina St Jerome in his Study ca. 1475 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Antonello da Messina St Jerome in his Study (detail) ca. 1475 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
The Intellectual, the Prelate, the Hermit
Father of the Church, Jerome is traditionally presented as the scholar par excellence, having translated the Bible into Latin. That work, the Vulgate, which became the official text for centuries, was drawn from three sources: earlier translations into Latin, the Greek translation of the Septuagint, and the original texts (Jerome having mastered Hebrew) – hence, the importance of his library.
Here, he is dressed as a Cardinal, which draws attention to his status: a Prince of the Church in his palace. In the foreground, two birds with a copper basin from which they might drink: the peacock perhaps symbolizing pride (a deadly sin plausibly attributable to Jerome as a young man), while more emphatically with its sunburst tail representing immortality; and the quail, emblem of the search for truth – in the Middle Ages quail were thought to recognize the call of their mother with infallible accuracy.
St. Jerome is often represented with much greater simplicity, garbed as a hermit in the desert. Yet he spent the largest share of his life in a monastery where he could best dedicate himself to the task of translation. It was there that he tamed the lion, dimly visible moving through the shadows on the right under the gallery of this monastery-palace, in the center of which we see coming to fruition the text destined to enlighten and rule the world.
Two plants are arranged along the edge of the dais: the one on the left appears to be a columbine, representative of scholarship in the sense of the melancholy that attaches to it*; the other might be a diminutive orange or lemon tree, traditionally evoking eternity because both flowers and fruit are borne at the same time. It could alternatively be a box tree, symbol of perseverance, reflecting the hardness of its wood and its evergreen nature.
The Altar of Translation
Architectural originality is on display where ribbing joins to pillars, played on by light and shadow, and where upper windows give onto the sky while the lower open onto countryside. Shimmering green paving-tiles and wooden dais tend to isolate the saint. Attention is focused on the desk, the chair, the little staircase that gives access to the scene, and then on the profusion of surrounding small objects: shelves and niches functioning as a library with books open and with others closed, repositories of the fermenting spirit to achieve the translation of this foreign Bible that Jerome is giving to the Romans. From the outer world to the interior, a succession of spaces is fitted one within the next, the dais functioning as an intimate altar of reading and translation.
The Place of Purification
One observes at the foot of the little staircase the shoes that Jerome no doubt removed before ascending the dais, and on the left a hanging towel which he could use for washing his hands. In the first place, he needed to exercise great care in turning the pages of the extremely precious objects that books were, but then after working would also want to wash his hands to remove traces of ink. The physical relationship between the sacred word and its medium, the book, called for a ritual of purification.
– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)
*in French, the word for columbine is ancolie, contained in the term mélancolie