Saint 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
Rubens gives the Bible's translator a wrestler's build, after Michelangelo, and sets against him the one opponent he cannot throw. The hourglass is vanitas by the museum's reading: time running out against labour unfinished. Examination found the body painted slimmer first, then broadened into a combative scholar, not a starved hermit. The red cardinal's hat, sign of his calling, holds his pens.
The lion belongs to the thorn legend, which the National Gallery gives to another hermit saint. Jerome's lion was another man's. So was Rubens's picture: Diepenbeeck, then de Crayer and Janssens, until 1953.
Sources: Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, object record GK I 7578 · ZDF / SPSG, 'Geheimnis der Bilder': Peter Paul Rubens, Heiliger Hieronymus · The National Gallery, London, glossary entry 'St Jerome' · Christopher Norris, "The 'St. Jerome' from Sanssouci," The Burlington Magazine, vol. 95, no. 609 (December 1953), pp. 390-391, 393-394.
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 9,946 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.