Saint Jerome in the Wilderness

Saint Jerome in the Wilderness

Antonio Rossellino

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The hermit-scholar Saint Jerome was particularly venerated in humanist Florence. Here, he kneels before a cruficifx, his cardinal's hat at his feet. A stream, the water of life, flows from beneath the crucifix in a landscape inhabited by various symbolic creatures. The stage signifies thirst for salvation (Psalm 42). The squirrel stand for endurace or the search for divinity. The lion, whose paw Saint Jerome healed, is followed by a lioness; they may symbolize constancy and also the dangers that the saint faced - certainly the meaning of the wyvern at bottom right. The camel alludes to Jerome's only glimpse of humanity in the wilds, the occasional camel driver. The traditional attribution to Antonio Rossellino has to be revised. The naive but felicitous plants and animals, the drill work, and the atmospheric staging find perfect counterparts in the earliest works believed to be by Benedetto: marble reliefs (1468–71) for the shrine of Saint Savinus in Faenza Cathedral, particularly a scene of his vision, the starting point of our Jerome. In both, Benedetto abandoned the linear perspective that had preoccupied his peers in favor of an arier continuum. The foreground spilling over the bottom edge derives from the reliefs of Lorenzo Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise" for the Florence Baptistry.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.