St. Augustine in “St. Jerome's Study”: Carpaccio's Painting and its Legendary Source

* This study was first made as an M.A. thesis in 1956–1958 under the direction of Professor James S. Ackerman at the University of California at Berkeley. It developed from a consultation with Professor Edward E. Lowinsky concerning the music in Carpaccio's painting. His immediate observation that the painting seemed more suitable as a representation of Augustine than of Jerome provided the stimulation of doubt concerning Carpaccio's subject matter and led to a reexamination of Carpaccio's cycle and its possible literary sources. I am very grateful for the continued assistance of Professors Ackerman and Lowinsky.

For his generous response by letter to my request for information, I should like to thank Dr. Erwin Panofsky of the Institute for Advanced Study. I am also grateful for the assistance of Drs. Daryll Amyx and Juergen Schulz of the University of California, and Michelangelo Muraro, formerly of the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti, Venice. I should also like to extend personal thanks for chores kindly performed and suggestions given by Dr. and Mrs. Robert Brentano, Eugene Brunelle, Dr. Herschel Chipp, Ernest Mundt, and by traveling friends who kindly obtained information for me. For assistance in obtaining photographs I should like to thank Mr. Ernest Nash of the Fototeca di Architettura e Topografia dell'Italia Antica, and those who have furnished me the means of approaching the possessors of the pictures discussed, as well as the institutions and firms who have provided the photographs. I greatly appreciate the kindness of the staff of the Scuola Dalmata dei SS. Giorgio e Trifone in facilitating my examinations of the painting.

Abstract

CARPACCIO'S painting of an ecclesiastical scholar in an oratory (Fig. 3), which hangs in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice to the right of two scenes from the life of St. Jerome, has been universally referred to as a representation of St. Jerome. Apparently no interpretative description prior to Ruskin's of 1884 exists,¹ and no document dating from Carpaccio's period of activity has been found that refer to the painting, or, for that matter, to any of the paintings of the cycle.² The subject matter is to be inferred only from the contents of the painting itself and from its position in the series, both of which present incongruities if the seated figure is considered to be St. Jerome.