This vertically grained panel is a devotional image displaying particular care in the intense pathos of the figure of St Jerome mortifying his flesh in the wilderness of Palestine and the depiction of the rugged and varied natural setting inhabited by small animals. The gilded frame on the front is original and so apparently are the wholly unusual shaping of the thickness, with double moulding, repainted in the middle with a spurious blue, and the carving of a frame also on the back with strips of wood 3.5 centimetres in width held in place by old nails (the upper strip alone is missing), possibly with a view to painting on both sides that was not executed. The apparently 17th/18thcentury inscription on the modern plaster in the lower right corner of the back reads “[Frances]cho Squarcione”.

The barren, rocky landscape and the projection of the saint’s body in a state of accentuated tension must have recalled similar baptismal scenes, such as those of Andrea Mantegna and his followers, given that as a young man he signed himself and was known as a follower of Squarcione or even as “Andrea Squarcione”. It is indeed with this improbable attribution that the work was published by Gustavo Botta in the 1936 catalogue of the Agosti-Mendoza Collection in Milan, for which it was purchased from Achillito Chiesa. The painting has never been the subject of any more authoritative discussion, however, and has surprisingly escaped the attention of studies on Sienese painting of the Renaissance period. It had been known for years from the black-and-white photograph in the Agosti-Mendoza catalogue to the present author, who recognised it as a rare masterpiece of the late maturity of the Sienese painter Neroccio de’ Landi and awaited its reappearance with great curiosity. The small panel certainly lived up to expectations with its fascinating handling of colour, the limpid atmosphere - inconceivable in the painter’s work before around 1480 - being faintly tinged with light green and old rose. In the meantime, Federico Zeri had also identified Neroccio as the author and recognised the importance of the work to the point of devoting a special file to it in his archives among those compiled with a view to papers on new attributions and connections.¹ In typological terms, the panel is practically unique in the painter’s catalogue. It cannot, in fact, be compared with the two mystical depictions of the Vision of St Catherine of Siena (Settignano, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University, Berenson Collection, and a private collection²), which are not individual paintings but sections of a horizontally grained predella and belong to the very different period of the master’s association with Francesco di Giorgio, which ceased in 1475. In the latter, precarious architectural elements artificially embroider views of interiors with mottled marble. Here instead, the same fundamentally fragmentary vision is employed for illusionistic effects of greater sensitivity and naturalness, still tangled up in countless details but also expanding towards a remote, light blue horizon.

The work marks a by no means negligible development in the artist’s large and, in some respects, slightly mechanical production of devotional images of the Virgin and Child with bust-length saints with no elaborate settings, in line with the tradition initiated in Siena in the first half of the century by masters like Sano di Pietro. Here we are instead struck by the freshness of the natural setting on which the light plays sensitively, attesting to the previously unsuspected influence not only of Luca Signorelli, in Siena around 1488-90, but also of the Florentine sphere of artists like Ghirlandaio and Jacopo del Sellaio, to which the younger Sienese painter Pietro di Francesco Orioli also looked.

This is also the source of the gentler pathos of the agonised expression (comparisons can also be drawn with other painters active in Siena towards the end of the century, like Pietro di Domenico and the sublime Master of the Story of Griselda). The pose of St Jerome, who genuflects with both knees pointed forward and almost braced against the ground, is derived from a felicitous invention of Francesco di Giorgio to capture the forward impetus of figures almost splintered by the intensity of motion (see in particular the two versions of the stucco relief Allegory of Discord in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Chigi Saracini Collection in Siena). Taken up more than once also by Liberale da Verona and Michele Ciampanti around 1470, this can also be discerned in the Archangel Gabriel of Neroccio’s Annunciation in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. The master’s more characteristic sharpness and pale flesh tones give way here, however, to a richer handling of paint, not least through the now explicit experimentation with oils.

This again suggests a very late date, in the last few years of the century, in line with the smoother and gentler shading of the splendid altarpiece in the parish church of the Santissima Annunziata in Montisi, his last, unacknowledged masterpiece, dated 1496. Despite this uncharacteristic pictoriality, the figure of St Jerome presents the painter’s typical features of high cheekbones and deep-set eyes with the locks of the hair curved and those of the beard cleanly separated. He was, however, not always so successful in rending an equivalent of the three-dimensional values, suggested but also deftly shaped, that he pursued in marble and wood, being both a painter and a sculptor, like Francesco di Giorgio.

Beating his chest until it bleeds before a crucifix transformed into flesh and blood by the intensity of his prayers, the saint kneels outside a cave in a rocky crag with smooth walls like the one in the Uffizi predella showing St Benedict receiving food from St Romanus. The provenance of this predella, listed in the records of the Poggio Imperiale Collection from 1625 as the work of Alesso Baldovinetti, is still shrouded in mystery. Initially assigned too early a date when it was thought to have formed the lower section of Francesco di Giorgio’s altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin (1472-74) in Monteoliveto Maggiore (now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena), an error demonstrated also by the black colouring of the saint’s habit, it was then erroneously connected with a documented commission of 1482 in Lucca and dated to that year.³ It can probably be seen as exemplifying Neroccio’s narrative style just after his break with Francesco di Giorgio in the second half of the 1470s. Comparison with the Cerruti Collection St Jerome in the Wilderness, another very rare scene set in a landscape, proves illuminating.

On the one hand, it appears to confirm in numerous details, with no room left for doubt, that Neroccio is the author of the devotional image. On the other, it shows considerable development towards a softer and more enveloping handling of atmosphere and away from the sharply defined and minute draughtsmanship that still characterises the predella. The shadows cast on the ground by the saint (whose halo has disappeared without trace) are more substantial. The light strikes the figure from the left so that his left arm also casts a shadow on the side of his naked body. While a hint of aerial perspective could already be discerned in the predella scene of St Benedict, here instead the distant shades of pale blue quivering between earth and water are still more evocative, outstripping both Signorelli and Jacopo del Sellaio in terms of modernity and pictorial felicity.

The setting, like a stretch of beaten earth, is a glowing shade of ochre in the foreground by a pool with a quivering surface on which the rocky crag and some marsh reeds are reflected. It then blends into tonalities of old rose, slashed in thin cracks by blackish shadows, while a green meadow clinging to the rock unravels at the edge, suggesting the influence of Verrocchio’s smears of vegetation, something still unknown in Francesco di Giorgio’s Scenes in the Life of St Benedict and indeed in his Nativity (1475-76) in the church of San Benedetto fuori porta Tufi. At the top, the black silhouettes of withered, twisted trees stand out against a vast sky in an extraordinary invention sparkling with the Sienese painter’s exquisite sensitivity. In the foreground on the left, a splendid purple heron (ardea purpurea), somewhat fancifully depicted with green wings and a ruby red breast, neck and beak, swoops on its prey amongst the rocks and rushes (fig. 1). On the ground, between a lion as docile as a puppy and the barefoot hermit, are a crab, a small scorpion and two green snakes. It should be remembered that Sano di Pietro already included snakes and scorpion in his depictions of this subject in a number of predellas and a smaller devotional panel (Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 265, 34 x 26 cm). This lay at the origin of the limited popularity in Siena of the subject, which was instead widespread in the rest of Italy, especially in the second half of the century. (For Siena, we can recall a panel by Benvenuto di Giovanni, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with a more static figure, blood-stained stone in the right hand and circulum precatorium in the left, and rocky landscape smeared with vegetation).

While Neroccio produced numerous devotional images, this appears to be the only one of its kind. Oddly enough, he appears to have had no paintings ready for sale in the shop but rather to have produced them to order, for which reason, given the marked investment in terms of invention and execution alike, this work can be seen as a special commission. In the inventory of property drawn up on the master’s death, 26 November 1500,⁴ the workshop materials include numerous heads of plaster and terracotta, three Virgins of stucco, one by Donatello and the other two his own work, an unfinished St Bernardino of Siena by Vecchietta, probably a statue (“a rough figure”), as well as pieces of marble, porphyry and serpentinite, but only one painting. As this is mentioned in the midst of bed linen and chests (“A picture of Our Lady in a tabernacle frame with curtains”), it was probably a devotional image for his own use in the bedroom. The presence of curtains bears out this hypothesis.

Andrea De Marchi

¹In the final phases of printing this catalogue I have in the meantime commented on Federico Zeri’s attribution in a volume dedicated to the unpublished materials in his archive (A. De Marchi, “Un San Girolamo en plein air di Neroccio, dolceagra apertura al protoclassicismo”, in Bacchi et al. 2019, pp. 269-277).

²See A. Angelini, in Strehlke, Brüggen Israëls 2015, pp. 491-494, dated 1468-70.

³Cf. M. Maccherini, in Siena 1993, pp. 328-331. For a clarification, see also F. Caglioti, in Prato 2017- 18, pp. 188-192.

⁴Cf. Coor 1961, pp. 152-159.2.

[4] Cf. Coor 1961, pp. 152-159.