Description
Saint Jerome in the Wilderness – the unfinished painting that was cut to pieces
Saint Jerome in the Wilderness is one of Leonardo’s most affecting paintings and also one of the strangest: he never finished it, and the panel was later cut into pieces and only reunited by chance. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this brown-green, almost translucent image into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A painting that stopped at the drawing
Leonardo began the Saint Jerome between 1480 and 1490 and never completed it. The composition is laid onto the primed wooden panel in monochrome – an underpainting in which the bodies are already fully modelled while the colour is still absent. That is exactly what makes the work so valuable for understanding the master: we see the moment when the form is there and the surface is not yet. The original is painted in tempera and oil on a walnut panel, measures 103 × 75 cm, and is held in the Vatican Pinacoteca.
What the painting shows
Jerome kneels in a rocky landscape, looking towards a crucifix. In his right hand he grips the stone with which, by tradition, he beat his breast in penance; his body is wasted, while his neck and shoulders are painted with an anatomical precision no one else of the time could match. At his feet lies the lion – the animal that, by legend, stayed loyal to him after he drew a thorn from its paw. Behind them opens a lake ringed by steep mountains that dissolve into the air.
Cut apart, sold, and put back together
A picturesque legend circulates about how the painting was found: that the torso served as a table top and the head as a cobbler’s wedge. It is a fine story, but it is not true. The documented account is less romantic and more brutal: the Roman dealer Pietro Camuccini cut the panel apart with straight incisions so that the better-finished head could be sold separately. In 1819 Cardinal Fesch bought the head. Later, in a Roman antiques shop, he came upon a panel in the same style with a hole exactly where the head should have been – and when he set the two pieces together, they matched precisely. In 1856 the work was acquired by Pope Pius IX.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Every reproduction of Saint Jerome in the Wilderness is entirely hand-painted in oil on canvas – not a print, but a real painting created for you by an experienced artist. It is available in eight sizes, stretched on a wooden frame on request and in a frame from our 3D range. The restrained, earthy palette suits a study, a library, or a quiet corner of a living room. Among our canvas wall art you will also find Leonardo’s other unfinished works: The Adoration of the Magi, The Battle of Anghiari (Detail) and La Scapigliata.
- Subject: Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480–1490
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 8 dimensions, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: the panel was cut up so the head could be sold separately – Cardinal Fesch found the two pieces apart and reunited them
