A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

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1120. ST. JEROME IN THE DESERT.

Cima da Conegliano (Venetian: 1460-1518). See 300.

Another of the numerous St. Jerome pictures: see under 694 and 227. The saint has his usual company of animals. His lion is frowning, somewhat with the same expression as in 227—as if to deprecate the penance which his master is about to inflict on himself. On the branch of the tree above is a hawk, looking on with the expression of a superior person—one quite too sagacious to countenance such madness. Notice also the serpent which crawls from beneath the rock on which the Cross is placed. The picture, says Mr. Gilbert, "is rich, even brilliant, in colouring, and if there is a touch of oddity in the house perched upon a crag, there is loveliness in the mountain range, and in the amber and lemon tints that streak the evening sky" (Landscape in Art, p. 340).