Saint Jerome and the Angel of Judgement 

Courtois Guillaume called Borgognone

(Saint-Hyppolite 1628 - Rome 1679)

Mentioned in the inventory of Cardinal Gregorio Maria Salviati as an anonymous work, the painting was traced by critics to Guglielmo Cortese and dated to the seventh decade of the 17th century.

The scene depicts Saint Jerome who, having retired to a solitary place, turns to listen to the sound of a trumpet being played by an angel. The saint is portrayed with his typical iconographic attributes: the lion, from whose paw Jerome removed a thorn; the book, reference to the Sacred Scriptures translated by the saint from Greek into Latin; and the cardinal’s galero, or hat. The skull, next to the crucifix, and the stone Jerome holds refer to the saint’s resoluteness. He decided to withdraw from the world and live out the rest of his days between sacrifices and penances.

Object details

Commentary

According to Paola della Pergola (1959), this painting belonged to Cardinal Gregorio Salviati (1727-1794), identified by the scholar in the prelate’s inventory as an ‘exceptionally large, anonymous St Jerome’. This theory aside, what is certain is that the work is first documented in the Borghese Collection in 1790, when it was listed in the inventory for that year as a painting by Luca Cambiaso, an attribution repeated in the fideicommissary lists (1833) and Adolfo Venturi’s catalogue (1893). In 1912, Giulio Cantalamessa proposed an attribution to Francesco Trevisani, a name rejected by Roberto Longhi (1928), who instead favoured a ‘late, mediocre Baroque academic Roman similar to Ludovico Geminiani’.

After the painting was restored in 1958 by Gilda Diotallevi, Paola della Pergola recognised the hand of a Roman artist, tentatively proposing an attribution to Guillame Courtois, a French painter who was working for Giovanni Battista Borghese in the chapel of the cathedral of Monteporzio Catone in 1666. According to the scholar, the painting is in the style of Roman decorative painting popular at the end of the seventeenth century and found in works by Cortese. This theory was accepted by (Fagiolo dell'Arco 2001) and, in 2006, Kristina Herrmann Fiore.

The painting portrays Jerome, one of the most important saints in the Catholic Church and traditionally considered the author of the Vulgate. According to the oldest hagiographic sources, the saint withdrew to the Syrian desert where he led a solitary life devoted to prayer, contemplation and penitence. Here, the scene is constructed in planes, masterfully united by a sensitive, well-considered use of light and a palette that starts with the warm tones of the entrance to the cave and the saint’s clothing and then leads the eye towards the mountains in the distance and the clearing with a river and small forest, in fresh, bright hues. The sculptural rendering of the saint and the sinuous, delicate forms of the angel with a trumpet (symbolising the future announcement of the end of the world) seem to point to the effective fusion of classicism and the Baroque in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century that was led by Carlo Maratti, the style of whom, along with the influence of Pietro da Cortona, is typical of Courtois’s late period and is found here in the delicate features of the two figures and soft, warm light.

Antonio Iommelli