Farewell to Saint Jerome
Saint Jerome on display at Château du Clos Lucé
It was an honour and privilege to gaze upon you. A mini-miracle in fact. Considering this is the only painting by Leonardo the Vatican owns (the Louvre has five) it’s a wonder it was let out of sight. All credit to Château Clos Lucé in Amboise for the power of persuasion.
Leonardo’s Saint Jerome is unusual, not because it’s not finished (or said, by experts, to be unfinished) nothing new about that. Leonardo’s fame rests partly on a human frailty many of us can relate to. Displacement activities. That’s too hard, or too boring, or too time consuming, or not in the mood, leave it for now, on to something else. Leonardo often never started a commission, let alone finish one.
The reason this painting is unusual because art experts who often dispute authorship of Leonardo’s works have to agree over this one. Why? Because it, literally, has the master’s fingerprints, not exactly all over it, but certainly on it.
It’s said that parts of the painting were done with chalks. If so it must have been painted after 1499 because Leonardo knew nothing about the medium until he met the French artist John Perréal.
He first met Perréal, Court Painter, when Charles VIII was in Pavia in 1494. He met him again in 1499 when Perréal was in Milan with Louis XII and again in 1515 when Perréal was in Milan with Francis I. In 1499, in Milan, in what is now known as the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo scribbled himself an aide- memoire:
Learn from the French painter Jean Perréal, also called Jean de Paris, his way to dry colour …
Perréal’s dry colour chalk sticks, invented in France, were not known in Italy. They were made from natural pigments. For red, iron oxide was ground to a powder mixed with potters earth and a binding agent. For black, he probably used carbon.
Fastidious Leonardo improved on the French method by inventing pastels which are less messy.
No-one knows why Leonardo painted his anatomical take on an emaciated Jerome but the real mystery, never mind the Florentine landscape in the Syrian desert, is how the Saint managed to shave during the four years in the wilderness.
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art). Photography by Mark.
Leonardo da Vinci
The Amboise Connection
