Saint Jerome Reading in an Italian Landscape

Rembrandt never traveled far from the flat Dutch landscape, yet here he placed Jerome in a mountainous Italian setting. The artist lifted the elaborate architecture of the distant buildings from Venetian prints and drawings produced more than a hundred years earlier; yet the ambiguity of the overall space anticipates the work of Paul Cézanne two centuries later. The saint is immersed in a book as his trusted lion stands guard. Rembrandt's spare linework causes Jerome seemingly to dissolve in the noonday sun, a visual metaphor for the sacred realm.