1455, Fra Filippo Lippi, Saint Jerome in the Desert with Saints John the Baptist and Ansanus -- Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge)
From the museum label: Filippo Lippi was a celebrated painter and a lapsed Carmelite friar: in his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari claims that Cosimo de’ Medici once shut Filippo in his palace to force him to work rather than chase women. This painting was commissioned for the Carmelite church in the city of Prato, northwest of Florence, where the artist worked for more than a decade. Its remarkable landscape, a mountainous wilderness that plunges from the top right and divides behind Saint Jerome, who stands in a crevice at its center, brings together three hermit saints. Turning to face a bloodstained crucifix, a penitent Jerome beats his breast with a rock; his own blood spills onto the ground. Beside him are Saints Ansanus, who holds a palm leaf and a heart, and John the Baptist, who wears a hair shirt. Despite some vegetation, the landscape is hard and austere, itself a symbol of penance. Because of the abrasion of the paint surface, the vigorous underdrawing is visible in places.
1455, Fra Filippo Lippi, Saint Jerome in the Desert with Saints John the Baptist and Ansanus -- Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge)
From the museum label: Filippo Lippi was a celebrated painter and a lapsed Carmelite friar: in his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari claims that Cosimo de’ Medici once shut Filippo in his palace to force him to work rather than chase women. This painting was commissioned for the Carmelite church in the city of Prato, northwest of Florence, where the artist worked for more than a decade. Its remarkable landscape, a mountainous wilderness that plunges from the top right and divides behind Saint Jerome, who stands in a crevice at its center, brings together three hermit saints. Turning to face a bloodstained crucifix, a penitent Jerome beats his breast with a rock; his own blood spills onto the ground. Beside him are Saints Ansanus, who holds a palm leaf and a heart, and John the Baptist, who wears a hair shirt. Despite some vegetation, the landscape is hard and austere, itself a symbol of penance. Because of the abrasion of the paint surface, the vigorous underdrawing is visible in places.