St. Jerome

St. Jerome, having shed his tunic, is portrayed beating his breast as he gazes towards an unspecified spot on his left. The iconography is that of the saint at the time that he had withdrawn to the desert to live a life of fasting, prayer and atonement in 375–6 AD. Scholars identified this masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture some time ago as the “St. Jerome made of wood” which Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian from Arezzo, tells us Donatello fashioned for Faenza, an identification further echoed in Sienese writer Ettore Nini’s guide to Faenza published in 1630, in which he describes “the wooden St. Jerome” as being “by Donatello” (Carabellese 2023). The importance of the sculpture for the local school of art is also borne out by a drawing by Sigismondo Foschi, a painter born in Faenza but trained in Florence, who portrayed the sculpture in a drawing formerly in the collection of Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici and now in the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi (Ng 2019). Yet the circumstances and chronology of the sculpture’s commissioning are still an object of scholarly debate. It is not clear whether it should be associated with the patronage of Astorgio II Manfredi or with that of his son Federico, who was bishop of Faenza from 1470 to 1478. This uncertainty also accounts for scholars’ differences of opinion over its attribution, given that Astorgio and Federico, despite living within a few years of one another, are separated by a crucial event: the death of Donatello in 1466. This date has sparked a lively debate between those who argue in favour of the sculpture being by the hand of Donatello, thus commissioned by Astorgio II, and those who claim that it was commissioned later, while Federico was bishop, and is thus by a different hand. A significant moment in the sculpture’s critical history was the 1968 exhibition entitled Donatello e i suoi, where the St. Jerome was shown with an entry by Bruce Boucher stating that it was by the hand of Donatello. Writing only a few years later, in 1992, however, James Draper (1992) included it in his monographic work on Bertoldo di Giovanni, “Donatello’s pupil, an expert bronzesmith, a master of sculpture and also a carver of wood” (Lucidi 2016). This hypothesis has attracted the support of such authoritative scholars as Gianluca Amato (2022), Alfredo Bellandi (2004-2005), Francesco Caglioti (2008a; 2008b; 2009-2010; 2019) and Massimo Ferretti (2011), who flesh out their attribution to Bertoldo by highlighting affinities between the St. Jerome and certain small bronzes definitively attributed to Bertoldo. Yet we cannot ignore the very strong bond linking the St. Jerome to the Penitent Magdalen which Donatello carved in wood for the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence. The two sculptures share a withered body whose emaciation is accentuated by the swollen veins pressing up from beneath a rubbery skin, and locks of thick, tangled hair surrounding skeletal faces marked by expressions of shock. Both figures are also characterised by an unstable, precarious pose, their feet resting on a rocky outcrop as though they might slip at any moment, a feature extremely typical of the figures that Donatello carved. The St. Jerome is thus highly likely to have been commissioned from the ageing sculptor in the final years of his career, when he was busy working on the bronze pulpits for the church of San Lorenzo. At that point in his career, Donatello was surrounded by his pupils – their number including Bertoldo di Giovanni – who may well have collaborated on the execution of the St. Jerome. What is certain, at any rate, is that behind the St. Jerome worn down by atonement there can only be the same mind that conceived the Magdalen in the Baptistery in Florence, namely Donatello.