The seated figure of Jerome appears on the right, vigorously holding a crucifix, in his primitive dwelling, where heavy tomes resting on a rudimentary lectern emerge from the darkness behind him. 

We know neither who commissioned this masterpiece of Dosso Dossi’s maturity nor its original location.
The photographic archives of Federico Zeri include some prints of the work that shed new light on its provenance. Owned by an anonymous private collector in Dijon in 1961, it then passed through the hands of Eduardo Moratilla in Paris and Giancarlo Sestieri in Rome. Sold on the market as a work by Giovanni Cariani, it was first attributed to Dosso by Zeri, as stated in a note in his own hand (October 1961) attached to one of the photos mentioned above. While it is recorded as part of the collection of Leonardo Vitetti in 1962, it presumably belonged, before the above changes in ownership, to an unspecified private collection in the UK, as it is there that Zeri saw it, according to information given by Francesco Federico Cerruti - its last owner - to Mauro Lucco on the occasion of the Dosso Dossi exhibition of 1998-99. It entered the Cerruti Collection after being sold at an auction in Florence on 29 September 1983.1 

The seated figure of Jerome appears on the right, vigorously holding a crucifix, in his primitive dwelling, where heavy tomes resting on a rudimentary lectern emerge from the darkness behind him. His hermitage is near a stream crossed by a little bridge beneath the branches of a blossoming tree. A lion can be glimpsed behind him and slightly in front, towards the foreground, as though sent rolling forward by its paw, is a skull, another of the saint’s canonical attributes. The left side is instead taken up by the landscape, fading away into the distance, where a city emerges from the mist of an imaginary lagoon. 

The work was first published in 1963 by Roberto Longhi,2 who attributed it to Dosso Dossi and suggested a date around 1525, accepted also by Felton Gibbons,3 on the basis of stylistic elements such as the saint’s wizened chest (“looking forward to Ribera”). It was in this period that the painter sought to reconcile the Giorgione-Veneto tradition in which he had been trained with the advanced Florentine stimuli already widely adopted in central Italy (see in this connection the citations of some works by Rosso Fiorentino). The work was then discussed by Amalia Mezzetti,4 who suggests a later date on the grounds of similarities with some works of the 1530s, such as the Moscow Landscape with Saints. The latter displays a particularly close relationship with the work in question here, as Jerome appears in the same pose, albeit on a much smaller scale, and in a very similar landscape, halfway between dreamlike and naturalistic. A “St Jerome in the Wilderness” also appears with no chronological specification in the “lists” of Bernard Berenson5 posthumously published by Luisa Vertova.
Alessandro Ballarin at first regarded the work as produced in 1529-306 together with others that display the effect of the increased influence of Raphael on the painter in that period due to the presence of Giulio Romano in Mantua. He returned to the question shortly afterwards, publishing the Parisian description again in his monumental Dosso Dossi7 with a date of c. 1528. This was confirmed by Mauro Lucco8 on the occasion of its first public exhibition, which also offered the opportunity to record a large amount of information on the support and technique. According to Lucco, close examination of the painting reveals some formal imperfections (e.g. in the crucifix) that suggest the possible involvement of the artist’s brother Battista Dossi in the marginal areas in question. More recently, Ballarin has highlighted how the Cerruti St Jerome draws inspiration from the imposing figure of the analogous saint painted by Pordenone in the Immaculate Conception (c. 1525; fig. 1),9 formerly in the Pallavicino chapel in Cortemaggiore and now in Capodimonte (inv. no. Q86). 

[Jacopo Tanzi]

1 Sotheby’s Parke Bernet, Florence, Importanti dipinti antichi, 29 September 1983, lot 211. 

2 Longhi 1963, pp. 58-60. 

3 Gibbons 1968, pp. 131-132, 208-209. 

4 Mezzetti 1965, pp. 45-46, 56 notes 113, 115 and 116. 

5 Berenson 1968, p. 113.

6 Paris 1993, p. 422.

7 Ballarin 1994-95, pp. 105, 348.

8 Ferrara – New York – Los Angeles 1998-99, pp. 198-200. 

9 Ballarin 2019, p. 58, fig. 175.