Saint Jerome in prayer

Attributed to Rocca Giacomo

(active in Rome c. 1575.-1605)

This painting on slate appears for the first time in the 1642 inventory of the possessions of Ortensia Santacroce, through whose estate it entered the Borghese Collection no later than 1693. It depicts St Jerome, a Father of the Church, who is here portrayed kneeling in front of the Cross as he is about to pound his chest with a stone. Several of his attributes are visible next to him: a skull, symbol of the vanity of earthly life; a book, perhaps the Vulgate, his translation of the Bible into Latin; a cardinal’s hat; and the inseparable lion: according to tradition, Jerome healed the animal by removing a thorn from its paw, which from then on was the saint’s faithful companion.

In all likelihood executed by the painter Giacomo Rocca, the composition seems to also reflect Jerome’s ideas about feeding the soul and mind: ‘When I say the cross, I am not thinking of the wood, but of the Passion. [...] Happy the man who bears in his heart the cross’  (Commentary on Psalm XCV).

Object details

Commentary

This painting entered the Borghese Collection from the estate of Ortensia Santacroce, wife of Francesco Borghese and sister-in-law of Pope Paul V. One of her inventories, dated at the bottom ’30 June 1642’ (Borghese Archive, Vatican Apostolic Archive, 457, f. 27), contains the entry of ‘a painting with the Crucifixion and St Jerome on Lydian stone’ (Inv. 1642, no. 51; see Della Pergola 1959). The work was transferred to the Borghese Collection no later than 1693, when the family inventory of that year more precisely listed ‘a painting of two spans on slate, with Christ on the Cross, St Jerome kneeling as he pounds his chest, the lion at the foot of the cross with a skull, no. 37. Gilded frame, by fra’ Bastiano del Piombo’ (Inv. 1693; Della Pergola 1959).

While its provenance is certain, doubts continue to persist about the painter of this work. The inventory of 1693 attributed it to Sebastiano del Piombo, yet this name was already changed to Girolamo Muziano in that of 1790. The compiler of the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario evidently rejected this attribution but left the description of the work without naming a specific artist. Indeed Paola della Pergola (1959) published the composition as by an anonymous painter, and subsequent critics generally followed her lead (C. Stefani in Galleria Borghese 2000; Herrmann Fiore 2006).

What we can affirm is that the painting was executed by a late-Mannerist painter active in Rome in the early 17th century, as is suggested by the type of crucified Christ, which recalls Roman models, and by the support, namely slate. The use of this material was in fact rediscovered by Sebastiano del Piombo following the Sack of Rome in 1527 and was especially popular in that city, where beginning in the early 17th century small-format paintings commissioned primarily for purposes of private worship were in great demand on the part of sophisticated, cultured collectors.

The painter of this composition, then, most likely formed part of this circle. This was in fact the case of Girolamo Rocca, the artist from Rome who trained under Daniele da Volterra, whose works on stone were similarly successful. Roberto Longhi (1928) was the first to propose the name of Rocca; recently, the present writer expressed his agreement with this hypothesis (A. Iommelli in Meraviglia senza tempo 2022).

At the same time, this attribution must be made with great caution: unfortunately very few works have until now been ascribed to this artist with certainty. In his short biographical sketch of Rocca in Le vite’ de pittori, Giovanni Baglione (1642) wrote of a composition with a similar subject executed by the painter for the altar of the Ceuli chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome.

Antonio Iommelli