Saint Jerome in Meditation

Caravaggio represents Saint Jerome as an elderly man with an exceptionally thin body, isolated within a dark space and absorbed in meditation. The saint appears partially nude, partly covered by a cloak, while holding or contemplating a skull, the traditional symbol of the transience of earthly existence and the inevitability of death.

Unlike representations of Jerome as the learned translator of Scripture surrounded by books and scholarly objects, Caravaggio drastically reduces the intellectual attributes in order to emphasize the saint's identity as a penitent and ascetic. Lateral illumination travels across the ageing body and reveals the bones, muscles and folds of the skin with uncompromising naturalism. Caravaggio makes no attempt to idealize the saint's old age; physical fragility becomes one of the painting's principal expressive instruments.