St. Jerome
1465
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1465
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
St. Jerome is a 1465 by Unknown, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a black-and-white image of Saint Jerome sitting at a desk, a lion at his feet, in a small, cluttered room. This wasn’t painted—it was stamped. A metal plate was carved, then hammered with tiny tools to break up the dark areas into patterns. The effect is like lace made of ink. Only three copies of this print exist, and this one is still glued into an old prayer book. Look up *chiaroscuro* to see how light and shadow work in other prints.
Produced in the second half of the 15th century in Germany and France, metal cuts created a distinctive decorative effect. The craftsman first engraved the plate with the outline of the subject. Then large, plain surface areas, which would print as an unrelieved black, were broken up using punches and stamps. There are only three impressions known of Saint Jerome, but this one is perhaps the most fascinating because it remains attached to the binding of William Durandus’s Rationale divinorum offciorum , into which it was glued near the end of the 1400s. Published in Basel before 1477, the…
Read the full account in the museum source.
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