Saint Jerome and the Angel

Simon Vouet

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the waist up, an elderly, balding, light-skinned man with a bushy white beard sits behind a table, facing us, in front of a winged angel who looks on in this shadowy, horizontal painting. The man sits with his body angled slightly to our right, and he turns his head to look in the opposite direction. His eyes are sunk in shadow under deeply furrowed brows, set in his lined face. His sparse, gray and white hair is tousled. He wears only a scarlet-red cloth draped across his lap and over his sinewy left arm, on our right. His open left hand is raised, palm up, at shoulder height. In his other hand, he holds a pen, hovering over a partially unwound scroll. His forearm rests on an open book beneath the scroll. He looks over his right shoulder at the curly-haired angel with snow-white wings. The angel wears a flowing, light blue robe with a golden yellow cloth draped around the chest and over the shoulders. Softly smiling, the backlit angel leans toward the man, face deep in shadow. With arms lifted, one hand gestures with a slightly crooked finger, pointing beyond the picture’s border to our left. In the other hand, the angel holds a golden horn in the dusky background behind the man’s left shoulder. Behind the man and angel and to our right, a single candle sits on two books lying in an arched wall niche. On the desk closest to us are a crumpled cloth on a book, a shiny rust-brown ball, a pair of eyeglasses, an inkpot, an hourglass, and a second book, to our right. Light coming from our upper left starkly illuminates the two people against the shadowed, earth-brown background.