Dürer and Jerome: Being Human
Considering Albrecht Dürer’s Engraving of Saint Jerome in His Study and What it Meant in the Northern Renaissance
The figure of Saint Jerome was a popular subject for artists during the Renaissance and, in 1496, Albrecht Dürer produced a small oil painting on pear wood, probably intended for private devotion, showing Saint Jerome in the wilderness accompanied by the lion tamed through kindness. This wilderness reflected the natural world around the city of Nuremberg where Dürer lived and which he studied and depicted in his work throughout his life. Here, he recreates aspects of a local quarry in the cliff face behind Saint Jerome, and native wildlife such as the grasses, flowers, finches, and insects. All this serves as a vivid, realistic, and timeless background.
Around the same time, he also produced a copper engraving for running-off prints of a variation on the theme sometimes referred to as Saint Jerome Penitent. It follows that Dürer’s later master engraving of Saint Jerome in His Study, produced in 1514, recreated in similar meticulous detail the interiors he and his Humanist friends lived in and experienced at the heart of contemporary Nuremberg.
In a preparatory drawing of Saint Jerome in his cell which Dürer executed in 1511, the saint is working in cramped…
