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AN UNKNOWN ST. JEROME FROM THE CIRCLE OF ALEŠI
Anne Markham Schulz
Sažetak
Over the first doorway on the Fondamenta S. Iseppo (S. Giuseppe) in Venice, concealed beneath the shadows of a balcony, a stone relief of St. Jerome is immured in the external wall of a house. The relief has been there at least since 1905. Very nearly square, the relief measures 32.7 cm. in width and 32.8 cm. in height. The sculpture is severely damaged: most of the saint’s lower right arm, both legs, the top and lower half of his staff, the lion’s head and the upper part of the tree on the right, are missing. In size and format, material, iconography, composition and relief technique, the relief closely resembles the reliefs of St. Jerome by Andrea Aleši, his shop or followers in the hermit church of St. Jerome at Marjan dated 1480, in the Galerija Umjetnina in Split, and over the portal of the Franciscan church at Kraj on the island of Pašman dated 1554. All four reliefs are reductions of the lunette relief at the east end of the Baptistry in Trogir executed by Aleši not long after 1467: in all four the setting has been compressed and the saint turned to the left. All the reliefs show St. Jerome in the desert retreat he occupied at Chalcis between 375 and ca. 377, much as he described himself in his famous letter to Eustochium. Meditating over a book, the saint is portrayed according to a Venetian convention of the Quattrocento: Florentine sculptors and painters of the time customarily represented St. Jerome beating brest in penitence. The saint seated in a niche hollowed from a cave. He is naked but for a tunic of sackcloth. His body shows the effects of fasts and vigils; has face is emaciated. But unlike Niccolò di Giovanni Fiorentino’s version of the theme in S. Maria del Giglio, Venice, there is no evidence in his countenance or posture of the deep depression into which the saint had fallen. Between the legs of St. Jerome there rests a staff and at his feet is the anomalous Cardinal’s hat – in St. Jerome’s day there were no cardinals – according to the recommendation of Giovanni di Andrea da Bologna’s »Hieronymianus« of 1346. There, too, is the lion, also recommended by the »Hieronymianus«, whose paw Jerome had healed and who supposedly inhabited the monastery later founded by the saint. In contradistinction to the Split and Marjan reliefs, a second dragon has been added to the upper left corner of the relief in Venice. Representative of the wild beasts which Jerome described, they probably derive from the drawings of Jacopo Bellini whose St. Jeromes are frequently beset by dragons. Only the author of the relief in Venice adopted from the Trogir relief the motif of a tree in leaf. Whether it also once possessed a withered branch (equivalent to the leafless tree in the Trogir relief) – a customary feature of scenes of St. Jerome intended to symbolize physical death as a precondition of heavenly life achieved by ascetic discipline and Christian meditation – we do not know. The relief technique, like that of all the St. Jerome reliefs, is characterized by forms either deeply undercut or carved entirely in the round. The amount of space depicted is very limited. Apart from the incline of the ground and the foreshortening attendant upon lateral views of individual portions of the body, no devices are employed which might have produced an illusion of a more ample space. On the contrary, the ladder-like arrangement of dragons, books, lion, and tree at either side, in place of naturalistic overlapping, accentuated the two–dimensionality of the composition. The impression of a restricted space in the relief in Venice is reenforced by the large scale of the saint, larger here than in any of the other Italian or Dalmatian reliefs of St. Jerome.
The relief in Venice does not bear comparison with the relief at Marjan – the only one of the three small reliefs discussed above which, in my opinion, in unquestionably autograph. Indeed, the inferiority of the relief in Venice qualifies it as the least successful of all the reliefs of St. Jerome which have so far come to light. Possibly it was made in Aleši’s shop or perhaps merely copied by an independent sculptor from a relief by Aleši or a follower. However that may be, it testifies to the popularity and wide diffusion of a composition associated with Andrea Aleši and his shop.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
150989
URI
Datum izdavanja:
2.2.1976.
Posjeta: 951 *