MASP

Andrea Mantegna was an apprentice of artist Francesco Squarcione (1397-1468) from age 12 to 17, when he separated from his teacher and painted the famous frescoes of the life of Saint James at the Ovetari Chapel in Padua (1448-57), partially destroyed during World War II. The brother-in-law of artist Giovanni vni (1430/ 35-1516), Mantegna was the official court painter of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, Italy. The painting in the MASP collection, Saint Jerome Penitent in the Desert (1448-51), depicts the saint in the Chalcis Desert in Syria, as an example of a hermit who seeks intellectual development and penance in seclusion. The scene features some traditional elements of this saint who was both an ascetic and a scholar: the lion from whose paw Jerome was said to have removed a thorn, the red bishop’s hat, the candle burning in the cave in front of a crucifix and the saint’s immersion in prayer beside the closed books. For a long time, the authorship of this painting was questioned, but some characteristics of the work match with others made by Mantegna: the owl, which appears in his frescoes at the Ovetari Chapel, as well as the rocks and silvery cloud, similar to those painted in the Agony in the Garden, now part of the collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The stony aspect of Jerome’s figure, which tends to blend with the rest of the scene, is in keeping with Mantegna’s style, characterized by expressive drawing and by shapes inspired in the sculptures of ancient Rome.

— MASP Curatorial Team

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Eusebius Hieronymus, the most learned of the four Latin Fathers, was born in about 347 in Stridon, a small town located between Dalmatia and Pannonia that was destroyed by the Goths. Born into a well-to-do Christian family, as a boy he was sent to Rome in order to complete his literary and grammatical education and he studied with the famous grammarian Donatus, among other important scholars. During a later journey to Antioch, he decided to renounce his profane and rened erudition in order to dedicate himself to studying the Holy Scriptures, motivated, according to his famous letter to Eustace (xxii, 30) by a terrible dream in which Jesus Christ censured him for “being not a Christian, but a Ciceronian”. He retreated to the desert of Syria where he studied Hebrew and biblical exegesis and wrote e Life of Saint Paul the Hermit. Taking part in the so-called Antioch schism, Jerome, then an ordained priest, moved to Constantinople where he improved his Greek, followed the teachings of St. Gregory of Nazianzus and began a fundamental dialogue with the theology of Origen, whose homilies he translated. In 382, he participated in the Council of Rome convened by Dalmatius, but on the death of this literary pope in 384 he again retreated to the Orient and to his studies at a monastery in Bethlehem, where for thirty-ve years until his death in 420 he carried out important scholastic work, including theological controversies, translations, and exegeses. Although brief, his desert experience included the more important aspects of the complex Hieronymite theme. Firstly, it is important to dene the medieval theme of the “desert”, studied by Le Go­, in its symbolic dimension as the “other side”, the counterpart to associative life comprising the castle, the monastery, the community. In constructing the image of the saint, the concept of the desert acquires the value of reclusive self-discipline, and comprises two distinct aspects, penitence and intellectuality, which are diversely emphasized in the iconographic depiction of this saint, according to the spiritual atmosphere of the time and the devotional demands made by the Catholic Church. Despite the fact that the iconography of Saint Jerome goes back to the illumination of the Bible of Charles the Bald in the 9th century (Paris, Bib. Nat. Ms. Lat. 1, p. 3), this ambiguity is not openly declared until the 15th century, when the antro ombroso, that is, the cavern which is the setting for the saint’s abnegation of the world, acquires the form of a humanist scriptorium. It is only possible to fully grasp the meaning of the Masp painting –Saint Jerome Penitent in the Desert– through this humanistic interpretation of the image of Saint Jerome. Contrary to the other 15th-century representations of Saint Jerome in the desert, such as those by Marco Zoppo at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, or in the Mellon’s Collection at the Washington National Gallery, the small Masp panel does not present the saint in penitential exasperation but simply immersed in meditation regarding the truth of the Scriptures. e attributes normally depicted together with the saint –the stone slashing his chest in penitence for his lascivious dreams; the skull, the symbol of meditatio mortis, of respice nem, of cogita mori, etc. – in this work give way to a rosary and a book indicating that the saint’s reection was precisely born from the need for a concordantia, or an equilibrium, between faith and reason. The development from hermit to philosopher is specically evidenced in this painting inasmuch as the dove of Christian revelation has been replaced by the owl of Minerva, the sign of philosophical knowledge (Ca me sasca 1987, p. 40). In order to comprehend how this saint assumed a humanistic countenance in the 15th century, it is necessary to start with one of the most vivid examples of comparatio in the Renaissance: the symmetric and supplementary opposition between Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine. During this period, this polarity was born from the epistolary controversy between Petrarch (Ad Familiares, IV, pp. 15-16), penitent reader of the Confessions (from Mont Ventoux to Secretum), and Giovanni d’Andrea, author of Hieronymianus (c.1326), the most important source for Renaissance iconography up to Jeronimus, Vita et Transitus (Venice, 1485). This hagiographic emulation was one of the many modalities of the paragon, an exercise enjoyed by Florentine intellectuality. In humanistic ambiance this debate was, furthermore, impregnated with the tension between dialectic and eloquence, in which Jerome personied a Christian deeply engaged in a dialogue with the ratio of the ancient world. As noted by Christiansen (1992, p. 115) it was especially due to this reason that the theme of Saint Jerome in his antro/scriptorium was the most valued by the humanists, particularly those in northern Italy, such as Guarino Di Verona (Baxandall 1965, pp. 183-204), Angelo Decembrio, Janus Pannonius, Leone de Lazara, and Ulisse degli Aleotti, thought by Christiansen to have possibly been Mantegna’s patron for the Masp painting. It is known that the Jerome/Augustine controversy extended well into the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century with Francesco Filelfo, Erasmus, Johann Maier von Eck, and so on, and was also expressed vigorously in painting,as exemplied by the frescoes executed by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli for the refectory of the Ognissanti convent in Florence. The attacks of Luther on Erasmus and on Jerome himself, in addition to his vindication of Augustine, immersed this learned controversy in the religious turmoil of the 16th century and encouraged the anti-reform doctrinal apparatus in abandoning the humanist view of Jerome in favor of the penitential aspect of his experience as a hermit. Around the second half of the 16th century, the im- age of the Christian philosopher par excellence was denitively converted into the anguished penitent, a male counterpart of Magdalene or Mary the Egyptian, and completely divested of his initial image of a humanist polyglot. The legend of the leo mansueto, the lion tamed by the saint aer having removed a thorn from the animal’s paw, according to Réau (1958: iii, 2, p. 740) goes back to the Legenda Aurea, of Jacopo da Voragine (1267-1278). Although probably resulting from a fusion with the episode of the life of a Palestinian anchorite, Saint Gerasimus, the presence of the animal symbolizes the theological kinship of Jerome with Mark, according to the consecrated parallel with the four Evangelists and the four Doctors of the Latin Church. Since Borenius publication in 1936 attributing the work to Mantegna in his youth, the Masp’s painting has been controversial. In 1937, Fiocco (pp. 76-77) characterized it as a “subtle work, somewhat reecting the touch of the master [Mantegna] and Giambellino but translucent as only Marco Zoppo would have loved to execute it during his stay in Venice (circa 1470)”. Fiocco (1937, p. 182, n. 4) then linked the work to a drawing traditionally attributed to Mantegna, formerly in the Beckerath’s Collection, and today at the Berlin Museum. However, the Venetian scholar attributed this drawing to Bellini. e Zoppo attribution was reinforced by Ragghianti, but aer its European tour in 1953-1954, the work was invited to participate in the Mantuan Exhibition on Mantegna in 1961. Its absence was lamented by Longhi, who, for the second time (1956, p. 180, and 1962, p. 16) conrms his attribution to Mantegna of the “extremely subtle Saint Jerome of São Paulo”. In 1964, supporting the attribution to Mantegna, conrmed by Gamba (according to a letter of Bardi, kept at the Museum), Camesasca makes progress in dening the status of the work, both in relation to Squarcione (reinforcing his argument, the same scholar published in 1987 a decisive detail of Squarcione’s Madonna in the Vitetti’s collection) and in relation to the naturalism of “the tip of the paintbrush” (punta di pennello) of Roger Van der Weyden and to the sentiment of a landscape of Piero della Francesca in the Battle of Constantine. Berenson included the painting in the 1968 Mantegna catalogue, which was followed by Garavaglia in 1970. However Marco Zoppo’s theory was revived in 1976 by Armstrong in his monograph on the great painter from Ferrara. In 1986, Lightbown denied both attributions, but more recently, attribution to Mantegna has been conrmed by two painstaking direct studies of the work carried out by Camesasca (1987) and by Christiansen (1992), which respectively date it at approximately 1449-1451 and 1448-1449. ere is also a well known letter written by Mantegna to the Prior of St. Mary in Vado dated April 7, 1500, in which the artist states that he has not enough time to nish a Madonna or a Saint Jerome. If referring to Saint Jerome of the Masp, this mention will provide a sure terminus post quem for our panel, which would date from 1450-1451. Finally, in 1993, De Nicolò Salmazo “cautiously” attributes the painting to Nicolò Pizolo, a companion of Mantegna in the execution of the fragmented frescoes of the Ovetari Chapel that, according to Vasari, prematurely and tragically disappeared, leaving little precise information. One of the most positive arguments in this controversy regarding attribution is the morphological and pictorial coinci- dence between the cli­s of the Masp’s painting and those in the Vocation of St. James and Andrea of the Ovetari Chapel. Two supplementary details deserve further attention: the “owl” of our painting is the same that appears in the fresco of Martyrdom of St. James of the Ovetari Chapel, not only from the point of view of design and typology but also with regard to the technique utilized in its illumination; in second place, the small silver cloud and the dark gray of the Masp’s painting also appear identical to the Prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane at the National Gallery of Washington. e Masp’s painting seems to be the rst conserved work of Mantegna in which the poetic petried rhymes, his rime petrose, were declared, poetics which “fully intended to be classic, but was actually anti-classic” (Longhi) It is, in fact, the first painting that gives testimony to the words of Vasari, as restated in the famous letter of Longhi to Fiocco: “in the end it is doubtful whether Andrea has become more enchanted with marble itself or with the form it has taken in the ancient pieces with which he has come into contact; I am inclined to believe that the former prevailed, warning that around those stone men he created a nature that, if not wholly archeological, was at least fossil”.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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