Saint Jerome, 1521: Dürer’s Lisbon Painting

Jerome looks up from an open book, one hand at his temple, the other pointing at a skull. His gesture invites the viewer to share a scholar’s meditation on death. ^{[1] [2]}

Dürer’s 1521 Saint Jerome is an oil on oak panel, 59.5 × 48.5 centimetres, in Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (828 Pint). Its monogram and date are at lower left. It is distinct from his 1514 engraving of the saint’s study. Here, red cloth, a bearded head and two hands take up almost the entire available space. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Begin at the upper left, where the upright of the crucifix runs close to the edge. The ledge beneath Jerome’s supporting elbow carries that straight line into the picture. Across it, the robe rises in large, sharp folds, then changes into a succession of smaller creases around the opposite sleeve. The figure seems broad enough to fill a much larger panel. The cap nearly touches the top, the sleeve reaches the right border, and the skull is cut by the bottom edge. We meet fragments of a setting around a very substantial person.

Colour makes those crowded forms easy to separate. The green background stops abruptly at the red shoulders. The pale beard spreads over the chest, breaking the dark passage beneath the chin into curls and strands. On the cap, a broad light patch gives way to a rounded, almost black side. The illuminated forehead is a smaller, warmer surface, crossed by wrinkles that follow quite different directions from the folds above it. Dürer gives cloth, hair and skin their own rhythms.

The writing equipment occupies remarkably little room. A pale quill tilts out of a round black inkpot in the lower right corner. Across the table, the edges of closed books, loose ties and the angled stand make a compact construction under the open volume. The skull shares their level but breaks their straight lines. Its curved crown rises towards the pointing finger; the sockets turn towards us. The eye can distinguish these objects immediately, then return to examine the small differences between their surfaces.

Jerome’s identity connects the writing tools with a much older history. He was the early Christian scholar whose biblical translations from Greek and Hebrew became central to the Latin Vulgate. Artists commonly dressed him in a cardinal’s red, although that office did not exist in his lifetime. The robe therefore carries a convention of authority, while the books give that authority a practical occupation. ^[4]

The museum reads this interior as a mental space, placing meditation on mortality within the crucifix’s promise of redemption. ^{[1] [2]}

What Dürer gave Rodrigo

The diary of Dürer’s Netherlandish journey places the painting among meals, portraits, purchases and presents. In William Martin Conway’s 1889 translation, Dürer says: “I painted a Jerome carefully in oils and gave it to Rodrigo of Portugal.” The next clause records a ducat given to Susanna as a gratuity. We have the artist’s explicit description of a gift, together with a payment to a member of his travelling household. These are different transactions; the ducat is not a recorded price for Dürer’s painting. ^[17]

Conway’s preceding pages help identify Rodrigo’s place in the artist’s circle. Dürer calls him the Portuguese secretary and lists presents including cloths from Calicut, an ornamented cap and a green vessel containing fruit. The museum identifies him as Rui Fernandes de Almada, secretary of the Portuguese trading establishment in Antwerp. ^{[1] [2] [17]}

This friendship had a material texture. Rodrigo sent quince preserve and a large box of sugar; Dürer gave the messenger a tip. The gifts continued alongside sales of prints, money changed for expenses and payments for wood. Dürer also noted what he considered certain paintings worth. A small picture of the young Christ given to Francisco, another Portuguese recipient, was valued at ten florins. A painted Veronica face was valued at twelve. The Jerome entry supplies no comparable sum. ^[17]

The absence is useful. It leaves the painting’s value within the relationship unquantified, even though the same writer readily assigned figures to other works. The diary shows several ways art could circulate within a few pages: a present, a sale, a portrait exchanged within a larger relationship, or prints used to obtain something the artist wanted. Those distinctions survive the abbreviated bookkeeping. They are more revealing than treating every courteous exchange as a commission. ^[17]

At roughly the same stage, Dürer recorded dining with Pieter Aegidius when Erasmus was also present. He paid to ascend Antwerp’s tower, purchased materials, sold works and sent gifts home. The Jerome thus belongs to a period of sustained activity in the city, rather than to an isolated encounter remembered only because it produced a famous picture. The surviving entries allow us to follow small practical connections without recovering the conversations that passed between the people concerned. ^[17]

There is even a glimpse of the painting’s framing. Before the gift entry, Dürer mentions giving Peter the old frame of the Saint Jerome , together with money towards a frame for another portrait. Elsewhere nearby he records paying for Rodrigo’s case. These terse notices show attention to the furniture and containers around artworks, but they do not explain the complete history of the panel’s original frame. ^[17]

March 1521 is the secure setting for the gift. Conway’s page 115 places the Jerome sentence after an entry headed by Saturday, 16 March, when Rodrigo gave Dürer coconuts, coral and Portuguese coins. The painting appears in a subsequent paragraph without its own repeated day. That sequence is consistent with a March presentation; it does not independently fix the handover to the sixteenth. ^[17]

The next page supplies another distinction worth keeping. Dürer records making a large portrait of Rodrigo in black and white on paper. A separate oil portrait of Bernhard of Brussels brought eight florins, with additional gifts to Dürer’s wife and Susanna. Recipient, sitter, medium and form of payment all mattered to the diarist. The elderly saint in Lisbon should not become a portrait of Rodrigo merely because Rodrigo received it. ^[17]

A living man and four sheets of paper

A note on the related head drawing says that the Antwerp man was ninety-three and still healthy and vigorous. He is unnamed. Charles Ephrussi transcribed the substance of that inscription in his 1882 Albert Dürer et ses dessins , where he also described the dark brushwork, white highlights and violet ground. On the same page he recorded the arm study and a related elderly head in Berlin. The inscription preserves Dürer’s report about a person, not an independently verified birth date or a medical account. ^[18]

The ALBERTINA’s 1521 group comprises head 3167, 41.5 × 28.2 centimetres; arm and hand 3168, 39.3 × 28.3; skull 3175, 18.2 × 19.4; bookstand 3176, 19.9 × 27.8. Black brushwork and white lie on grey-violet ground; the head adds grey. ^[19]

The head drawing rewards looking closely at how its marks behave. The cap is a field of small curves, gathered tightly into the dark side on the right. The beard changes scale repeatedly: narrow, nearly parallel strokes broaden into long loops, then divide again into finer strands. Beside this activity, the cheek is held together by much softer transitions. The white on the forehead breaks into small patches around the brow, while the tip of the nose receives a more continuous light. These differences make the head feel built out of surfaces, rather than enclosed by a single descriptive outline. ^[20]

Heinrich Wölfflin made these drawings central to his account of Dürer’s later style. In the enlarged 1908 edition of Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers , he set close observation against deliberately decorative passages. A highly particular face could coexist with patterned locks of hair. He also drew attention to the hand’s organisation into light and dark areas, and to the increasingly delicate balance of tonal values. His discussion offers a productive way to examine the sheet: fidelity to an individual does not require every part to be described in the same manner. ^[20]

Follow the supporting hand down from the temple. Short bright strokes pick out the finger joints, while the larger expanse below them carries a more gradual movement towards shadow. At the wrist, the sleeve becomes a mesh of intersecting lines. On the opposite side of the head, the hair flows into repeated S-shaped bands. Wölfflin’s contrast between observed detail and decorative handling helps explain how these different kinds of mark can belong to one convincing figure. They serve different local purposes within the same surface. ^[20]

In the painting Jerome’s eyes rise from the drawing’s lowered lids to face the viewer. ^[19]

The old man’s recorded vigour also deserves attention. A long beard and a deeply creased forehead can identify advanced age without authorising a story about the model’s weakness, despair or impending death. Ephrussi’s transcription explicitly preserves the positive statement about his condition. Whatever the skull signifies within the saint’s image, it cannot supply the anonymous sitter’s thoughts. ^[18]

The arm sheet introduces another scale of looking. Ephrussi described a small version of the elderly figure beside a much larger forearm and hand. In the reproduction, the upper left figure is faint enough that its unfinished head almost disappears into the ground. The larger hand remains emphatic. White strokes map the knuckles and wrist, while long darker lines turn around the folds above the cuff. The extended index finger occupies a narrow peninsula of worked paper, surrounded by a much broader unworked field. ^[18]

Wölfflin’s emphasis on masses of light and dark is particularly helpful here. The marks across the sleeve repeatedly change direction as they cross a ridge or enter a hollow. At the hand, they become shorter and more closely fitted to the joints. A passage can be intensely finished while its surroundings remain open. The sheet makes the eye alternate between a large arrangement and a small, local description. ^[20]

Matthias Mende doubts the arm sheet’s date and monogram, not its attribution, and notes stronger painted foreshortening. He distinguishes the skull from Dürer’s small Cologne purchase; its origin remains unknown. ^[19]

Bone, paper and the bookstand

The skull and lectern sheets show how much attention could be given to things around the figure. Ephrussi included both among his descriptions of the 1521 drawings. He noted the open book above two closed volumes, the adjacent box and the skull laid across a table. His text placed them among still-life subjects, inviting attention to their arrangement as objects. Their usefulness to this painting does not exhaust what can be seen in them. ^[18]

On the skull sheet, a bright patch on the forehead has a grainy edge, while a thinner streak follows the ridge beside the eye socket. Most of the surrounding ground remains comparatively quiet. A dense network of pale strokes spreads across the supporting plane on the left; dark hatching extends from the object towards the right. The bone has a different range of transitions from the surface beneath it. Its large curved dome can be followed before the eye enters the smaller recesses of the nose and jaw.

The teeth provide a further change of scale. Some individual shapes stand out brightly against the dark mouth. Elsewhere, the contour breaks and the neighbouring surfaces merge. Ephrussi’s description of a skull lying across a table is physically apt: weight, orientation and contact matter as much as the object’s recognisable outline. In the painting, the finger meets the crown of that weighty object. The contact has force because the skull is more than a schematic sign. ^[18]

The lectern drawing is almost an essay in overlapping edges. The open volume stretches horizontally, with a deep central hollow at the binding. Below it, the stand’s uprights and crosspieces enclose the two books. A loose tie falls forward, while the round box introduces a shallow ellipse into a group otherwise dominated by rectangles. Ephrussi called the box metal; Mende describes wood. ^{[18] [19]}

The upper book curves under its own bulk; the volumes below it sit at different angles. Small irregularities keep the construction from becoming a diagram. Its carefully graded brushwork supplies a counterpart to the face and hand, with pages and bindings receiving the kind of attention elsewhere given to skin and cloth. ^[20]

In the panel, the lectern is shorter, the open book more cropped, and the round box absent. ^[19]

Wölfflin connected the later drawings’ abundance of detail with an ability to subordinate it. He argued that the decisive forms could remain clear while secondary passages continued to hold substantial information. The lectern sheet makes that argument tangible: its broad horizontal top registers at once, but the ties, book corners and crosspieces emerge at a slower pace. Looking does not have to choose between the whole arrangement and its particulars. ^[20]

Seven years after the engraving

The 1514 engraving gives Jerome a room: window light, ceiling beams, a great table, cushions and open floor. A lion and dog rest before him; the skull sits on the left window ledge. ^[3]

His small working figure occupies the far side of the table. In the panel, books and skull crowd the lower edge beneath his sleeves. The crucifix moves from the engraving’s spacious desk to a position beside the painted head. Animals and floor give the engraving a distance through which the eye can travel. The panel puts its scholar and immediate tools close to us. ^[3]

Another painter’s Jerome

Peter van den Brink distinguishes four autograph Joos van Cleve variants from wider workshop repetition. He reads their development as a shift from Dürer’s particular intellectual gift towards a marketable devotional subject. He also proposes Erasmus’s 1516 account of Jerome as a humanist context for Dürer’s picture. The diary records a dinner with Erasmus, but no discussion of this painting. The intellectual connection remains an interpretation; the later versions demonstrate adaptation without documenting what Dürer thought of them. ^[21]

Joos’s 1528 panel at Princeton, y1982-76, retains the supporting hand and pointing finger. Its wall motto, Homo bulla , means “man is a bubble,” a warning of life’s brevity. The window, glass vessels, hanging objects and candle distribute attention around the room. The painted date sits above Jerome’s cap, away from the motto. Below, a scroll and spectacles fill intervals around the bookstand and skull. Compared with Lisbon’s broad green background, these additions make the eye stop repeatedly at small, separated objects. The shared pose survives a substantially different arrangement of things. ^[22]

The original remained with the Almada family until the Lisbon Academy of Fine Arts purchased it in 1880, when it was in the chapel of the Quinta da Má Partilha at Azeitão. Its public life also changed how the preparatory sheets could be understood. Ephrussi’s 1882 account presented the elderly head, hand and still-life objects in his unfolding survey of drawings; Wölfflin’s later discussion explicitly assembled the studies around the recovered Lisbon painting. ^{[1] [18] [20] [2]}

That history gives us two rewarding ways to look. Each drawing can sustain attention to its own distribution of marks, tones and blank paper. Returning to the panel then restores the red robe, green background and compressed arrangement around the figure. The broad surfaces hold together at a glance; the smaller differences reward a much longer encounter. A modest oak panel can accommodate both kinds of looking. ^{[20] [2]}