St jerome painting da vinci
Caravaggio full name
Caravaggio saint jerome writing meaning...
Saint Jerome
Merisi Michelangelo called Caravaggio
(Milan 1571 - Porto Ercole 1610)
According to Giovanni Pietro Bellori, the painting was made by the artist for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a sophisticated and avid collector, known among his contemporaries for being one of the greatest admirers of the promising Lombard painter.
The painting depicts St.
Jerome, a doctor of the Church, studying the Sacred Scriptures which, according to tradition, he translated from Greek to Latin. In fact, the saint is hailed for his qualities as a studious man, portrayed as an elderly humanist hunched over the complex exegesis of the sacred text.
The compositional partitioning into two large fields of colour, distinguished by warm tones – such as the skin of the saint and the purple mantle – and cold ones – the skull and white cloth standing out against the open book – seems to emphasise a symbolic dialogue between contrasting contents: life and death, past and present.
