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Pensionante del Saraceni, or the Lodger of Saraceni
The Penitent Saint Jerome in his Study, c. 1615
Oil on canvas
Puchased 2004
This touching and evocative painting of a humble St. Jerome deep in prayer by a mysterious
painter known as the “Pensionante del Saraceni” is a major discovery for the history of Baroque
art in Rome. Neither the artist’s real name nor his birthplace is known. However in 1943, the
highly respected scholar Roberto Longhi recognized a distinctive artistic personality behind a
small group of paintings that were close in style to the work of Carlo Saraceni, but which had
a distinguishing French or northern European accent. Longhi gave this elusive artist the sobriquet
of Pensionante del Saraceni – literally “Saraceni’s lodger” or “tenant.” Carlo Saraceni
painted in a Caravagesque style in Rome during the first decades of the seventeenth century.
An ardent Francophile, he dressed in French clothes, spoke the language fluently and had
several French students and followers. Despite today’s research techniques, it is not unusual
to encounter a seventeenth-century painter whose identity remains unknown.
The style of the Pensionante’s pictures indicates that he had direct knowledge of Caravaggio’s
early works and must have been working in Rome during the 1620s and 1630s. The Pensionante
responded not only to the immediacy of the emotional content in Caravaggio’s work, but also
to his vigorous naturalism and tenebrous lighting (strong contrasts of light and dark created
with a beam of raking light entering an interior space). Yet, the Pensionante also had a penchant
for detail, a tendency often associated with art of northern Europe. Even Dürer – a Northern
artist highly influenced by Italian art – reveals this penchant in his celebrated engraving of
St. Jerome in His Cell (1514). In fact, the interior still-life elements of shelves holding books,
candles, scissors, and the hourglass, which we see in the Pensionante’s rendition of St. Jerome’s
study, are reminiscent of Dürer’s print.
St. Jerome (342–420), one of four Latin Fathers of the Church, was a learned man who retired
as a hermit to the Syrian desert for four years while he studied Hebrew. He later translated
the Old and New Testaments into Latin. St. Jerome is most often portrayed in paintings as a
scholar at work in his study, or as a dishevelled and partly naked penitent in the desert, kneeling
before a crucifix, holding a stone with which to beat his breast, with a skull and hourglass
(symbols of mortality) lying nearby. The Pensionante has clearly combined both versions here
by placing a penitent St. Jerome deep in prayer in a corner of his study with his books and
writing implements left abandoned on the table behind him. Caravaggio painted several versions
of St. Jerome where he concentrated on the figure himself, omitting much of the setting
whether desert or study. However, the Pensionante’s haggard and barely clad St. Jerome
with his wrinkled face, grey hair and boney body, all revealed by the strong light from the left,
is clearly derived from Caravaggio. |
