227. ST. JEROME IN THE DESERT.
Florentine School (15th century).
See also (p. xix)
Kneeling below are Girolamo Rucellai and his son. The arms of the Rucellai family are at each end of the predella. The picture was originally an altar-piece in the Rucellai Chapel in the church of the Eremiti di San Girolamo at Fiesole. Formerly ascribed to Cosimo Rosselli, the picture is now conjecturally attributed to Botticini (for whom see under 1126).
St. Jerome (A.D. 342-420) who first made the great Eastern book, the Bible, legible in the West, by translating the Hebrew into Latin, was one of the chief saints of the Latin or Western Church, and was a favourite subject in Christian art; there are a dozen pictures of him in the National Gallery alone. One of the chief events in his life is told in the left-hand compartment at the bottom of this picture. Jerome is tending a sick lion, and in all the pictures of him a lion appears as his constant companion. The story is that one evening a lion entered the monastery, limping as in pain, and all the brethren fled in terror, as we see one of them doing here, whilst the others are looking on safely behind a door; but Jerome went forward to meet the lion, as though he had been a guest. And the lion lifted up his paw, and Jerome, finding it was wounded by a thorn, tended the wild creature, which henceforward became his constant companion and friend. What did the Christian painters mean by their fond insistence on the constancy of the lion-friend? They meant to foretell a day "when the Fear of Man shall be laid in benediction, not enmity, on inferior beings,—when they shall not hurt or destroy in all the holy Mountain, and the Peace of the Earth shall be as far removed from its present sorrow, as the present gloriously animate universe from the nascent desert, whose deeps were the place of dragons, and its mountains, domes of fire. Of that day knoweth no man; but the Kingdom of God is already come to those who have tamed in their own hearts what was rampant of the lower nature, and have learned to cherish what is lovely and human, in the wandering children of the clouds and fields" (Bible of Amiens, ch. iii. § 54). The other compartments depict incidents in the lives of St. Damasus, St. Eusebius, St. Paula, and St. Eustache—saints associated with St. Jerome. The picture itself shows an earlier period of his life, when, before he settled in a monastery, but after a life of pleasure in Rome, he left (as he himself tells us) not only parents and kindred, but the accustomed luxuries of delicate life, and lived for ten years in the desert in the effort to obtain some closer knowledge of the Being and Will of God. The saints who are made by the painter to keep St. Jerome company below are in sorrow; the angels above, in joy. The other kneeling figures are portraits of the patron for whom the the picture was painted.