at his red-robed kneeling supplicant—a portrait in
profile of the painting's commissioner—with a gaze that
is stern but not unkind. The saint, in white tunic, sits
upon a stone bench with an open book. I thought of the
numerous images of reading one finds in Renaissance art
and literature; who can forget the very different reading,
by the too-ardent lovers Paolo and Francesca, and its
result in Canto V of Dante's Inferno:
One day for our own pleasure we were reading
Of Lancelot and how love pinioned him.
We were alone and innocent of suspicion.
Several times that reading forced our eyes
To meet and took the color from our faces.
But one solitary moment conquered us.
When we read there of how the longed-for smile
Was being kissed by that heroic lover,
This man, who never shall be severed from me,
Trembling all over, kissed me on the mouth.
That book — and its author — was a pander!
In it that day we did no further reading.
These words evoke an idea and image the opposite of
St. Jerome's literary and Biblical devotions, yet Dante's
idea that reading may stir us to deeds—right or wrong—
is pregnant in this painting. St. Jerome entreats his
commissioner to take up the pleasurable penance that
reading represents, the solitary immersion in other lives
HYLAND
