St. Jerome at Prayer

St. Jerome kneels before a crucifix, while crouching at his feet we see the lion from an episode in the hagiographic tradition according to which the beast, who had been hurt by a thorn stuck in his paw, was healed by the saint and promptly became his loyal companion. In a cave, the penitent saint steadies the cross with one hand while preparing to strike his breast with a stone held in the other.

The frieze was fashioned by an artist of Ferrara named Alfonso Lombardi for his friend Sabba da Castiglione (Milan, c. 1480 – Faenza, 1554), a Knight of Malta and a scholar, to decorate the study that Sabba had devised for himself in a room in the bell tower of Santa Maria Maddalena della Magione in Faenza’s Durbecco neighbourhood. In his Ricordi, Fra’ Sabba mentions the sculptor “Alfonso Lombardo from Ferrara, excellent and ingenious with figures in marble, but more so in earth [terracotta], whose sweet and delightful manner is universally pleasing to all men of good taste”, and the frieze “in earth, but emulating bronze” in reference to its original colour, which imitated that particular metal and of which minimal traces of a dark hue still present on the terracotta surface have survived (Ferretti, 2004).

In addition to his ability to imitate materials, in this small relief Alfonso Lombardi reveals his skill as a modeller in his naturalistic handling of the crags and rocks. He has also given a three-dimensional quality, imparting greater depth to the scene, to the small, headless demon with a goat’s legs on the craggy outcrop behind the saint, who symbolises the temptation to sin with which Jerome had to grapple while in retreat. The relief’s composition presents a number of similarities with a relief of the same subject on Pietro Barilotto’s Pasi Tomb in Faenza cemetery, and is indicative of the relationship between Alfonso Lombardi and the sculptors working in the Faenza area.

Lombardi must have made this relief for Sabba some time in the second half of the 1520s, when he was working in Bologna in Santa Maria della Vita and on the marble reliefs for the left door of San Petronio, and in Faenza where he made a monumental group depicting the Virgin and Saints – it, too, now in the Pinacoteca (Giannotti 2020) – for the Oratory of San Giovanni Battista. On the button fastening the saint’s tunic, impressed in the clay, we can make out the tiny figure of a man lifting a vase. The figure depicted is Butades of Sicyon, a mythical potter from Corinth whom Classical authors (including Pliny the Elder) and modern sources (such as Pomponio Glauco) tell us was one of the first craftsmen to work with terracotta. Used by Alfonso Lombardi as a seal to close several letters addressed to Federico Gonzaga, it probably serves here as a form of signature (Calogero, 2020). At his death, Sabba left this item, along with his books and other objets d’art, to the library of the school for poor children that he had founded in the Commenda della Magione (Cortesi, 2000).

In addition to this terracotta relief, which was originally enshrined in a wooden tabernacle, the Pinacoteca di Faenza has several furnishings from Sabba’s studio in the Commenda, including «an ancient oriental alabaster urn veined with chalcedony» mentioned in the Ricordi, a marble bust of St. John the Baptist as a Young Boy attributed to Benedetto da Maiano and a table top inlaid by Fra’ Damiano Zambelli.