1521
oil
panel
From the collection of National Museum of Ancient Art
Saint Jerome in His Study is a 1521 oil by Albrecht Dürer, a Northern Renaissance work, depicting Jerome, held at National Museum of Ancient Art.
This painting shows an old man with a long, curly white beard. He's wearing a red robe and a gray hat. His right hand is touching his head, and his left hand is pointing down. There's a book open in front of him. The old man seems to be in a quiet room. The background is green, and there's a wooden frame on the left side. The man's clothes and the frame look rich and detailed. The way the light falls on the old man's face and clothes is interesting. It's like the artist used special techniques to make the light look real. If you want to learn more about how artists use light and shadow, look into the technique of chiaroscuro.
St. Jerome in His Study is an oil on panel painting by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, completed March 1521. It is now in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga of Lisbon, Portugal.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The work was executed by Dürer during his stay in the Netherlands 1520–1521, using an aged local man as model. A preparatory drawing exists in the Albertina of Vienna with an annotation of the man's age (93). The artist donated the painting to the head of the Portuguese trade mission in the Netherlands, Rodrigo Fernandes de Almada. It remained in the latter's family collection until 1880, when it was donated to the current museum.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Among Dürer's depiction of St. Jerome, this is the one more resembling a portrait, with little space left for the study and its details (such as in his 1514 etching, where the saint is a small figure in the background). The subject is portrayed with great attention to detail, including the wrinkles to the white-yellowish beard. Also differently from the etching, the memento mori suggestion of the finger above a skull has a greater visual relevance. Details in the foreground include the inkpot at right and the bookrest at left, as well as a crucifix on the top left.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Albrecht Dürer spent his life in Nuremberg, a busy German city where artists traded prints like currency.
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