Saint Jerome with Girolamo Petrobelli

While this painting is already large in size, it is but one part or fragment of a much larger altarpiece known as the Petrobelli Altarpiece. Here, the patron Girolamo Petrobelli, dressed in dark garments, kneels at the side of his namesake, Saint Jerome (or San Girolamo, in Italian). The saint is dressed as a Cardinal and holds a church, referring to his status as one of the four Fathers of the Church. A lion, one of Jerome’s attributes, a symbol associated with the saint, peaks its head into the lower right corner of the frame. At the left edge are the hand holding a balance, and part of the drapery of a figure of Saint Michael trampling the Devil (whose forearm appears at the bottom). 

This altarpiece was commissioned by Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli for their family’s burial chapel in the Church of San Francesco in Lendinara, a small town in northern Italy. In the late eighteenth century, the church was demolished. By 1789, the painting was with a Venetian art dealer, and it was with him that the altarpiece was divided up and sold in separate pieces – this fragment to the founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery, Noel Desenfans and Francis Bourgeois. The edges had been overpainted to erase the remnants of Saint Michael and the Devil in an attempt to conceal the fact that the painting was a fragment. It was not until around 1950 that these parts were uncovered. The lower left portion of the altarpiece, depicting Saint Anthony Abbot and Antonio Petrobelli, is now in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, the upper portion portraying the dead Christ in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the head of Saint Michael in the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas.