Saint Jerôme Comes Home
Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise
The Vatican Museums in Rome have only one work by Leonardo da Vinci, Saint Jerôme in the Wilderness, aka Saint Jerôme in the Desert. All the more astonishing then that the Vatican has loaned it to Château Clos Lucé* in Amboise.
Nothing can prepare you for seeing a five hundred years old original da Vinci up close and personal. It’s very moving. What a privilege.
Saint Jerôme, Leonardo da Vinci
Devotees have until 20 September 2022 to be blown away.
Leonardo’s painting of Saint Jerôme is very unusual in as much as all experts agree it’s authentic.
They also say it’s unfinished, a work in progress, but if it achieved all Leonardo wanted, if nothing could be added or taken away, if it could not be improved upon, he may have considered it finished.
Leonardo owned a skull and studied the cranium endlessly. He noted that the optical nerves carry images to a specific part of the brain. Following the trail of other bundles of nerves, he was convinced he reached the site of emotions. Arriving at the central ventricle he said he had found the site of the human soul where common sense, memory and personality are located.
Given that Leonardo believed the seat of the soul is in the head, that the eye is the mirror of the soul and that the soul is manifested in facial expressions, he captured the agony in the soul of Saint Jerôme.
The story behind the painting beggars belief. To begin with, no-one knew it existed until it was listed among the belongings of the painter Angelica Kaufmann who died in 1807.
No-one knows who commissioned it if indeed it was commissioned.
Where was it between 1483 when Leonardo painted it and Ms Kaufmann acquired it?
Signora Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums
Signora Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, thinks it was with Leonardo all the time he lived in Clos Lucé.
What happened to it when Leonardo died? How and when did it come into Angelica Kaufmann’s possession? What happened to it when she died? It disappeared.
The story goes that the wooden panel was cut in half. The piece with the torso of Jerôme was turned into a table. The other half became a stool.
Tradition also has it that in 1820, Joseph Fesch, an art collector ** spotted the table in a junk shop in Rome and spent the next few years looking for the other piece.
When he died the restored masterpiece was auctioned off a number of times until Pius IX bought it for the Vatican in the 1870s.
Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus aka Jerôme de Stridon was born into a wealthy Christian family in (what is now) Croatia in 342. He became a Cardinal in Rome when he was in his late twenties.
Guilt ridden, Jerôme spent four years in the desert as a hermit doing penance for his youthful misdemeanours. As he was not canonized until 1767 it can only be that he was always considered saintly.
In 383, as secretary to the pope, he translated the Bible into Latin. When the pope died, Jerôme went to Bethlehem and founded a monastery. He spent the next fifteen years translating the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Old and New Testaments into Latin. He died in Bethlehem in 420.
Sitting at the feet of Saint Jerôme in Leonardo’s painting is a lion. According to The Golden Legend, an encyclopaedia of saints written in the 1200s, a lion became his companion after he removed a thorn from his paw, not in the desert but in his own monastery. This figment of the imagination might have been inspired by the fictitious story of Androcles who tamed a lion.
Lion or no lion, it is difficult to stand in front of Leonardo’s Saint Jerôme and not think his message to us from the grave is (to quote Shelley) Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
* in 2021 TIME, the world's largest weekly news magazine with a global readership of twenty-five million, listed Château Clos Lucé among the World’s Greatest Places to visit.
** Joseph Fesch owned works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Botticelli. His nephew Napoleon Bonaparte appointed him a Cardinal.
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art). Photography by Mark.
