Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (through October 6)
by John Haber

Saint Jerome took to extremes. As theologian and scholar, he traveled to the Holy Land to master Hebrew, translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin, churned out commentary after commentary, and defended church doctrine with warnings of hell. And then there was the sinner, shamed by his conduct among women, converted to Christianity after a vision, and living alone in the desert but for a lion and for a stone to beat his breast.

Leonardo da Vinci took to extremes, too. A prodigy and authority among painters, he invented the High Renaissance, mastered science and architecture as easily as art, polished lenses for a telescope a century before Galileo, observed everything, and charmed everyone. And then there was the stubborn recluse who left commissions unfinished, went into self-imposed exile in France, gave up painting altogether, wrote backward to hide his traces, and devoted himself to notebooks that amount to a single extended study of humanity and nature that he could never complete. He could well have identified with Jerome. His unfinished painting of the fourth-century saint, Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness, on loan from the Vatican, comes to the Met through October 6 as a show to itself five hundred years after his death. But which version of Jerome or Leonardo is on display?