Saint Jerome (AD342-420), the most learned of the four Latin Fathers of the Church, was the creator of the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible. He came from Stridon in Dalmatia and lived for many years as a hermit in the Syrian desert before returning in 382 to Rome, where he had been educated and baptised. He is especially well known as the author of numerous scholarly works.

In this painting Jerome is shown as a hermit in the wilderness, kneeling before an altar in a ruined, Renaissance-style building. On the altar is a painting, a crucifix, a skull that refers to the transitory nature of life on earth and the saint’s attribute - the red cardinal’s hat and robes - which identifies him as a future Father of the Church. Another of Jerome’s attributes is the lion, which lies sleeping on a step behind him. According to popular legend, the lion became the saint’s loyal companion after he removed a thorn from its paw. Jerome is portrayed as an elderly man with a beard. He wears a simple red robe, open to the waist and in his right hand he holds a stone, the instrument of his penitence. In the background, a panoramic landscape extends to the far distance with hills and distant mountain ranges. In the middle distance, is a broad river valley and a little town. On the right, is a winding road that leads the eye over hill and dale, along which travellers are on the move with their animals.

There is very little biographical information available regarding the life of Lucas Gassel. The precise dates of his birth and death are not known, nor have any details survived concerning his artistic training. It is thought that he was born in the town of Helmond around the end of the fifteenth century. In his Schildersboeck of 1604, Karel van Mander states that the artist went from his native town of Helmond to Brussels, but he does not specify a date. Gassel apparently worked in Brussels and probably died there around 1570. He was a friend of the poet Domenicus Lampsonius (1532-99), who dedicated a poem to the artist in his Pictorium aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies of 1572. Lampsonius refers to Gassel as an old man who was dear to him and who had introduced him to the arts.

It has been assumed that Lucas Gassel began his career as an apprentice and then as a landscape specialist in the Antwerp workshop of Joos van Cleve (c. 1485-1540) and that he did not settle in Brussels until a later date. A painting of St. John on Patmos, of c. 1535 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Art Gallery) is attributed to Joos van Cleve and Lucas Gassel on the basis of certain aspects of the landscape. Gassel’s oeuvre, as far as it can be reconstructed, includes only eight signed and dated paintings and two drawings, spanning the years from 1538 to 1568.

Lucas Gassel was schooled in the Antwerp landscape tradition created by Joachim Patinir (c. 1475-1524) and developed by his nephew Herri met de Bles (c. 1500-1550-59). Patinir is commonly regarded as the first landscape painter in the Netherlands and the inventor of the so-called Flemish world landscape. This style of landscape is characterised by a high horizon and an elevated point of view that permits an encyclopaedic account of nature. Rocky outcrops, forests and meandering rivers extend to distant mountain ranges and seas. Although we cannot fail to be impressed by the realist treatment of detail in such landscapes, to the modern eye the overall impression is highly stylized. A formulaic colour scheme was also employed in order to suggest depth – brown tones for the foreground, green for the middle ground and blue for the background. However, these paintings cannot be considered as pure landscape paintings in the strictest sense, since they invariably contain small religious scenes, usually of a type that lend themselves to rural wilderness subjects, for instance, the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Saint john preaching, Saint Jerome in the wilderness and other hermit saints. Nonetheless, the small figures in these works are of secondary importance to the landscape and, significantly, contemporaries regarded such works as landscape paintings. Indeed, this branch of art was recognised as a northern speciality in Italy during the Renaissance. Michelangelo is reported to have said that “in Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that”[i] .

P.M.

[i] Francesca da Hollanda, Four Dialogues on Painting (translated by A. F. G. Bell), London, 1928, p. 16

(First Dialogue).