Room 1
Saint Jerome in his Study (National Gallery,
London), one of the greatest masterpieces of
Renaissance Europe, and one of the most
famous of the artist’s mature works, is the
painting that introduces the work of Antonello
da Messina in this Scuderie del Quirinale
exhibition. The painting which Marcantonio
Michiel – a cultivated art connoisseur – saw in
1529 in the house of a rich merchant Antonio
Pasqualigo, clearly shows why the Venetian
aristocrats competed to acquire Antonello’s
portraits and small devotional paintings as
soon as the artist from Messina set foot in
Venice. The ingenious architectural setting in
this picture must immediately have appeared
an unprecedented novelty to everyone, with
Jerome’s study inserted into a powerful, dark
church, rather like a set of Chinese boxes,
backlit from windows opening onto an airy
rural landscape. The Saint Jerome, with its
silent luminosity, its minute descriptive detail,
the highly skilful syntax of perspective
obtained through the light that makes
everything clear and limpid, must have been admired as an absolute masterpiece, on a par
with the great Flemish painters such as van
Eyck or Memling, to whom it has sometimes
been attributed.
