Saint Jerome 1570

Bartolomeo Passerotti painted “Saint Jerome” with oil on canvas, and it now resides in the National Gallery of Ireland. The composition immediately draws your eye to the muscular figure of Jerome, whose aged body is rendered with striking physicality. Note how the artist uses light and shadow to sculpt the form, emphasizing the tension between flesh and spirit. The skull, book, and lion serve as symbolic elements, arranged to construct a narrative. Passerotti complicates the traditional representation of the saint through his dynamic and somewhat unsettling composition. It is as though he has destabilized established meanings, values, or categories. The artist invites us to question not only the nature of faith and knowledge, but also the very act of seeing and interpreting. It challenges us to deconstruct conventional symbols, and to find new meanings within the tension between the work's aesthetic form and its historical context.