Saint Jerome

Saint Jerome is one of twelve works attributed to the enigmatic Pensionante del Saraceni (‘boarder of Saraceni’). First identified by Roberto Longhi in 1943, who assigned four works to the artist, Saint Jerome was added to this small corpus in 1968. Comparisons between the saint’s head and the heads of the bearded men in two works included in Longhi’s original group, namely the Fruit Vendor in the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Bird Seller in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, lend credence to this attribution. Ultimately, this motif derives from Carlo Saraceni, the Venetian painter who was the Pensionante’s host in Rome, and whose Saint Benno Retrieving the Keys of the City of Meissen, painted in 1617 for the German church of Santa Maria dell’Anima, includes a similar bearded male figure at its very center. Meanwhile, the hourglass enclosed in a red leather case, which together with the skull refer to the saint’s penitence, can be found in the Pensionante’s Saint Jerome in his Study  in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, previously attributed to Carlo Saraceni. Indeed, Saraceni’s softer, restrained approach to Caravaggism seems to have had a significant impact on the Pensionante, resulting in his still, contemplative, even mysterious figural compositions in which the protagonists do not meet the viewer’s eye. Saraceni was an ardent Francophile, speaking fluent French and lodging at least one French painter, Jean le Clerc, in his home. The Pensionante may have been French, though scholarly attempts to prove this have been unsuccessful.

Given that the Pensionante was Saraceni’s lodger, it seems reasonable to suggest that he was a visitor to Rome, possibly a young artist at the beginning of his career. Although some painters who came to Rome from abroad in the 1610s sought out the patronage of distinguished collectors, others sold their works on the open market, through dealers or via artists’ workshops. It is possible that Saraceni assisted the Pensionante in this way. A modestly sized painting like Saint Jerome would, most likely, have been placed in a secondary and more private area of the house, perhaps even a bedchamber, though visitors were often brought into these rooms as well. Many such works were sourced by collectors of varying status on the art market. Moreover, the image of Saint Jerome is a meditative one. Representing the saint in a moment of interiority, absorbed by his reading and on the verge of writing, possibly in the act of translating the Bible into Latin, his most famous achievement, with penitential emblems arranged before him, the painting encourages the viewer to consider their own learning and contrition in the face of their own inevitable mortality. Each element in the work is painted with scrupulous attention to detail and painterly finesse, and thus both aesthetically and functionally it would have been best appreciated in an intimate setting. Of particular interest is this painting’s provenance. It was formerly in the collection of the scholar Anna Ottani Cavina, author of the 1968 monograph on Carlo Saraceni. ❖

Virginia Brilliant