Saint Jerome

The plainest possible title

The record gives this work no episode and no adjective — only Saint Jerome. That is the title of a portrait rather than a narrative, and it throws the whole burden of identification onto the attributes. For Jerome the available set is well fixed: a book, a pen, a skull, a lion, and the red hat and robe of a cardinal, a costume assigned to him by convention long after his lifetime, since the office did not exist in the fourth century.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1476 and gives the Louvre in Paris as its location. No dimensions are recorded in this entry. It is filed under religious cultural heritage, with Northern Renaissance as the style and Flemish as the nationality. The measured colour family of the image is yellow.

A scholar among portraits

The same record holds a Saint Thomas Aquinas by this artist, also dated 1476 and also at the Louvre. Two learned saints, one year, one collection: the fields line up, and that alignment is all the record asserts. Both belong to a type — the seated or standing thinker, identified less by an instrument of death than by the tools of study — which gives an attribute system built for martyrs a way to handle men who died in bed.