St. Jerome in a Landscape

Anonymous, Italian, Venetian, 15th to 16th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This delicately cross-hatched, naturalistic scene is quietly contemplative in mood. The manner of envisioning the figure in the foreground with a roving pastoral landscape beyond is characteristic of Venetian painting at the time of Giovanni Bellini. The composition portrays the emaciated hermit Saint Jerome, kneeling in prayer before a small crucifix in a rocky promontory, slightly off-center to the left. Seen in a profile view, the figure of the saint seems especially poignant as a lifelike, anti-classical portrayal of old age, which is indebted to Northern European art. The overall tonal modulation across the composition is especially striking because it is attained entirely by cross-hatching strokes in pen and ink, an inherently linear technique. Elements throughout the composition are outlined with jaggedly expressive contours full of tonal articulation, a graphic habit that would certainly be beyond the capacity of anyone but an artist of the first rank. (Carmen C. Bambach, 2001)

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art