The Renaissance Period in Italy may be considered as lasting from 1400 to 1550.  The pioneer artists who mastered perspective and worked at the human figure till they could draw it correctly in any attitude, lived in the first seventy-five years of the fifteenth century.  They were the breakers of stone and hewers of wood who prepared the way for the greater artists of the end of the century, but in the process of learning, many of them painted very lovely things.

The painter of our picture lived within those seventy-five years.  He was, probably, a certain Antonello of Messina—­that same town in Sicily recently wrecked by earthquakes.  Of his life little is known.  He seems to have worked chiefly in Venice where there was a fine school of painting during the Renaissance Period; his senior Giovanni Bellini, one of the early great painters of Venice, some of whose pictures are in the National Gallery, taught him much.  It is also said that Antonello went to the Netherlands and there learnt the method of laying paint on panel invented by the Van Eycks.  Modern students say he did not, but that he picked up his way of painting in Italy.  Certainly he and other Venetians and Italians about this time improved their technical methods as the Van Eycks had done, and this picture is an early example of that more brilliant fashion of painting.  There is here a Flemish love of detail.  The Italian painters had been more accustomed to painting upon walls than the Flemings, for the latter had soon discovered that a damp northern climate was not favourable to the preservation of wall-paintings.  Fresco does not admit of much detail, as each day’s work has to be finished in the day, before the plaster dries.  Thus, a long tradition of fresco painting had accustomed the Italian painters to a broad method of treatment, which they maintained to a certain extent even in their panel pictures.  But in our St. Jerome we see a wealth of detail unsurpassed even by John van Eyck.

One needs a magnifying-glass to see everything there is to be seen in the landscape through the window on the left.  Besides the city with its towers and walls and the mountains behind, there is a river in the foreground where two little people are sitting in a boat.  Observe every tiny stone in the pavement, and every open page of the books on the shelves.  Here, too, is breadth in the handling.  Hold the book far away from you, so that the detail of the picture vanishes and only the broad masses of the composition stand out.  You still have what is essential.  The picture is one in which Italian feeling and sentiment blend with Flemish technique and love of little things.  There has always been something of a mystery about the picture, and you must not be surprised some day if you hear it asserted that Antonello did not paint it at all.  Such changes in the attributions of unsigned paintings are not uncommon.