Saint Jerome in His Study (National Gallery, NG1418)

A small oil-on-limewood panel by the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, dated to about 1474 to 1475, showing Jerome seated barefoot on a raised wooden cathedra within an open Gothic hall, absorbed in reading at a writing desk. The composition demonstrates its painter's mastery of Netherlandish-influenced perspective and light, with a stone archway framing the scene and further architectural bays receding behind it, lit from several windows at once. A lion crouches in the foreground, recalling the legend in which Jerome draws a thorn from the beast's paw and it becomes his lifelong companion, while a peacock and a partridge stand near the threshold. Acquired by the National Gallery in 1894, the panel is one of the most admired small devotional images of Jerome as scholar and ascetic, the fourth century translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible and a Doctor of the Church.