Saint Jerome Penitent in the Wilderness

Albrecht Dürer

National Gallery of Art

Printed with black lines on light tan paper, a balding, bearded, muscular man kneels next to a small lion in a rocky landscape in this vertical engraving. The man’s beard comes down beyond his chest, and his hair is long behind his receding hairline. His torso is bare while his lower body is wrapped in a cloth that falls in deep folds. He faces our left, gazing at a broken tree trunk with a cluster of weeds growing near its roots. A small crucifix is thrust into the broken trunk. He holds a rock in his outstretched right hand, on our left. The lion crouches next to him with his eyebrows gathered low as he looks off to our left. Beyond them, a landscape rises along either side of a path leading toward a church in the distance. On the left side are the cracked walls of a building with plants growing out the top. On the right is the craggy face of a cliff with tall, slender trees growing on its top slope. The path darkens as it passes the cliff and reaches the church to our left of center. In the far distance to the right of the cliff is a castle-like structure with square towers. Deep shadows around the man and lion and along the path are created with areas of densely spaced, black hatched lines, and unmarked areas create bright highlights. The artist signed the work with monogram made of a capital D tucked between the legs of an uppercase A.