St Jerome
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
The stone has not fallen. Harvard's Jerome grasps the stone with which he would violently beat his breast, the self-abuse sharpened by the muscular tension in his right arm against the worn, wrinkled skin elsewhere on the aged body. De Dominici wrote that Ribera procured old, decrepit men to paint from. The skull in the other arm stands for the transience of human existence; the body cradling it is being reduced to the same.
The red is a cardinal's, an office that did not exist in Jerome's lifetime — honour paid by a later Church. The stone is his own.
Sources: Harvard Art Museums, object 1920.7, Jusepe de Ribera, Saint Jerome, 1640, oil on canvas, 128 x 101.3 cm · Edward Payne, "Ribera's Saint Jerome," Open Arts Journal, Special Issue: Baroque Naples (2017-18) · National Gallery, London, 'Saint Jerome as Cardinal', possibly by El Greco, 1590-1600, collection page · Bernardo De Dominici, Vite dei pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani ([1742-5] 1840-6), vol. 3, p. 137, quoted and translated in Edward Payne, 'Naples in Flesh and Bones: Ribera's Drunken Silenus and Saint Jerome', Open Arts Journal 6 (Winter 2017/18), p. 109
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 7,748 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.