1496
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
St Jerome in Penitence is a 1496 by Albrecht Dürer, a Northern Renaissance work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
The painting shows St Jerome in a landscape, surrounded by rocks and trees. He's kneeling, looking up. This print is interesting because it shows how Dürer used his studies of nature in his work. He traveled through the Alps and made watercolour studies of quarries and cliffs. To learn more about the artist's use of contrast between light and dark, look up the technique: chiaroscuro.
Albrecht Dürer’s engraving shows Saint Jerome kneeling in a rocky landscape, his bare chest exposed as he strikes his chest with a stone in an act of penitence, a small crucifix before him. A lion rests nearby, and the sparse terrain includes a distant inlet of water, a spired chapel, and a castle on the right. The composition draws on Dürer’s Alpine travels and his detailed studies of cliffs and quarries near Nuremberg. The scene interprets the desert where Jerome fasted, reflecting the saint’s growing veneration among northern artists in the late 15th century.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Albrecht Dürer spent his life in Nuremberg, a busy German city where artists traded prints like currency.
See the richer artist page
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