The subject matter of this picture is St. Jerome, (c361-420) one of the four doctors of the Church and translator of the Bible into Latin (The Vulgate). The landscape background reflects to the Saint’s sojourn in the Wilderness of Chalcis where he went in order to learn Hebrew, rather than working  from  Greek translations of the Bible which were current at the time in the fourth century. The lion refers to the legendary healing of the beast when the Saint removed a thorn from his foot. St. Jerome is often shown with his Cardinal’s hat, but this is omitted here as he did not become a Cardinal until after he had translated the Bible. The workshop from which this version, one of the five currently known, is thought to have originated is that of Ambrosius Benson. Modern scholarship, however, is still ambivalent about the definition of this group especially as this composition itself could well have been derived from one originated by Jan van Hemessen (q.v.).

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