Master of El Parral’s Saint Jerome in a Scriptorium
The Master of El Parral’s Saint Jerome in a Scriptorium (1480–1490), a panel measuring approximately three by six feet, depicts the saint hard at work translating the Scriptures into Latin. He is seated under a canopy in a scriptorium, a monastic workshop charged with the production of manuscripts. Around him, four monks engage in various activities: one slumps in a chair while another massages the first’s weary arm; another, wearing magnifying glasses, flips through a volume on a bookstand, presumably checking for errors. An increased emphasis on textual accuracy in the fifteenth century assigned even St. Jerome a proofreader. Still another monk sits at his feet, holding an open book and looking towards Jerome.
Behind them, we get a glimpse into the cloister, where one monk prays the rosary and another bustles off to work. The panel is painted in a lively Late Gothic style, with animated figures, an empirical but unsystematized rendering of perspective, and a richly textured surface full of details.
We know this is St. Jerome and not just any scribe by his age, his halo, and his gilded canopy and cloth of honor; at his feet, his traditional attribute, the lion, whom he supposedly tamed in the wilderness, gazes upward with doglike devotion. The saint is usually depicted either penitent in his time in the wilderness (whence the lion), or alone in a study engaged in his writings.
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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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