Antonello da Messina - St. Jerome in his Study, 1475, 46 x 36 cm. St. Jerome (347-420) was a monk and a scholar who compiled the standard Latin translation of the Bible. We see him as a dignified scholar dressed in a cardinal’s red robes, sitting in a snug wooden study erected in a Gothic building. A tame lion is shown in the shadows to the right, representing the legend of Jerome extracting a thorn from a lion’s foot. The painting shows the effects of light as it streams in from the viewer’s space through the opening in the foreground, and through the windows behind him, casting sharp or graduated shadows, reflecting from different surfaces, and illuminating the landscape beyond the lower windows and the distant sky above. Birds wheel in the sky and settle on the window ledges, figures row a boat on the river, and there is a walled city with gentle mountains rising beyond.