Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, The Temptation of Saint Jerome, Pushkin Museum of Fine Art
Discussions of Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo almost always begin by asserting how little is known about this Northern Italian artist. The agreed-to details of his biography can be summarized in just a few sentences. Scholars believe Savoldo was born around 1480 in Brescia, but did not spend much time there. Traces of his presence appear in painter’s guild records in Florence, in 1508, and he had some commissions in Milan, in the early 1530s, but he seems to have remained in Venice for the vast majority of his career and probably died in the Veneto sometime in, or shortly after, 1548. Savoldo’s reputation among other Venetian High Renaissance painters was swamped by competition with the likes of Titian and Giorgione. Giorgio Vasari, the great mid-sixteenth-century biographer of Italian painters, sculptors, and architects summarized Savoldo’s legacy in a terse paragraph which praised his work as “fanciful and sophisticated,” but which ultimately dismissed him because “he executed no large works.”
Savoldo deserves more than a paragraph. Today his works can be found at the Uffizi, the Metropolitan, the Getty, and the Timken among other prestigious collections. Our panel (not large enough to catch Vasari’s eye, apparently) depicting the Torment of St. Anthony is popular with San Diego audiences. Like the artist’s other impressive paintings, such as Elijah Fed by a Raven (c.1510) at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Timken’s composition pivots around its depiction of an aged, robed figure in a landscape. The attention to flaring draperies and the dramatic contrasts between light and dark elements remind me of a similarly haggard St. Jerome (1525) by Savoldo that hangs at the National Gallery in London. But unlike these other solitary representations of prophets and saints, the Timken’s composition is divided into two distinct parts. The hermit hurries toward a pastoral landscape at left, led by his praying hands, but turns his head to stare back at the hellish inferno behind him. The assortment of demons and tortures occupying the right half of the panel looks as if it could come from no other source than Hieronymus Bosch, while the countryside is rendered as a pure, Venetian High Renaissance scene.
It is possible Savoldo studied works by Bosch firsthand in Venice, but he was unlikely to do so before 1521. He painted a remarkably similar composition, The Temptation of Saint Jerome (after 1515) which is today at the Pushkin Museum. That painting suggests more or less direct knowledge of Bosch, or Pieter Bruegel, among others (Michael Jacobsen points out that the closest actual source is a woodcut by Lucas Cranach), so much so that it was acquired by the Moscow museum as a work by an anonymous Netherlandish painter. The Pushkin’s St. Jerome was mistaken for an image of St. Anthony at one point, too. Subsequent iconographical studies of the image identified the figure as St. Jerome because of his red Cardinal’s robe. Like the Timken’s slightly larger panel, the Pushkin’s image is separated into two roughly equal parts: one “light/good,” the other “dark/bad.” Both Saints look up to the right toward a fiery menace; Jerome recoils as a large, nearly nude figure carrying a decaying body moves toward him; St. Anthony bears the same terrified look on his face.
Another thing that the Saints Jerome and Anthony have in common is their association with pandemics. St. Jerome is credited as an early recorder of bubonic plague in his translation of the Greek bible to Latin. Similarly, a common, but devastating, illness known as St. Anthony’s Fire (today thought to be caused by fungus in grain supplies) ravaged Medieval Europe. Furthermore, the so-called Black Death was a recurrent part of Venetian life--at least 23 outbreaks were recorded in Venice between 1348 and 1528. Savoldo’s interest in these tormented saints seems highly self-conscious, therefore. Direct experience of human suffering during these repeated health crises must have informed his choice of subjects as well as his imagination. The many small inhuman threats that bedevil St. Anthony are somewhat baffling to us today, but Savoldo insisted on their real, terrifying presence. Not usually admired for understatement, maybe this is what Vasari had in mind when he characterized this artist as fanciful and smart.