Lot Essay
St. Jerome (342-420) is one of the four Latin (western) Fathers of the Church. He is usually grey-haired and bearded, and is portrayed sometimes as a penitent, dishevelled and partly naked, kneeling before a crucifix in the desert, holding a stone with which he may beat his breast. According to a popular fable, Jerome pulled a thorn from the paw of a lion which thereafter became his devoted friend. Its subsequent adventures are told in the Golden Legend.
The figure of the penitent St. Jerome gave artists an excuse to depict the elderly male nearly nude and thus to demonstrate their mastery of anatomy. An anonymous sculptor who specialized in such representations on much this scale but in bronze was called by Planiscig and Weihrauch, on account of this type of subject, the 'Master of the Haggard Old Men,' but this grouping has been discounted by Dr. Leithe-Jasper (Renaissance Master Bronzes from the Collection of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, exh. cat., Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1986, nos. 73-74). Even so, a statuette of a kneeling St. Jerome with crucifix and lion in Vienna is similar, though Leithe-Jasper now dates that piece to the end of the 17th century and suggests a South German prototype, possibly by Georg Petel, of which he lists a number of replicas in wax, ivory, wood and stucco.
The present figure carved almost in the round, is close in stylization to Alessandro Vittoria's monumental marble statues in the Venetian churches of SS Giovanni e Paolo and the Frari. Yet the loving depiction of picturesque details of the landscape, the crucifix and the lion's muzzle and mane possibly betray an origin north of the Alps.
The figure of the penitent St. Jerome gave artists an excuse to depict the elderly male nearly nude and thus to demonstrate their mastery of anatomy. An anonymous sculptor who specialized in such representations on much this scale but in bronze was called by Planiscig and Weihrauch, on account of this type of subject, the 'Master of the Haggard Old Men,' but this grouping has been discounted by Dr. Leithe-Jasper (Renaissance Master Bronzes from the Collection of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, exh. cat., Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1986, nos. 73-74). Even so, a statuette of a kneeling St. Jerome with crucifix and lion in Vienna is similar, though Leithe-Jasper now dates that piece to the end of the 17th century and suggests a South German prototype, possibly by Georg Petel, of which he lists a number of replicas in wax, ivory, wood and stucco.
The present figure carved almost in the round, is close in stylization to Alessandro Vittoria's monumental marble statues in the Venetian churches of SS Giovanni e Paolo and the Frari. Yet the loving depiction of picturesque details of the landscape, the crucifix and the lion's muzzle and mane possibly betray an origin north of the Alps.