Workshop of Pietro di Cristoforo Vanucci, called il Perugino

(Città della Pieve circa 1446–1523 Fontignano)
Saint Jerome in his study,
oil on panel transferred to canvas, 37 x 31.5 cm, unframed
Provenance:
Collection of Carlo Carozzi, Lombardy, 1935;
Private European collection

Literature:
A. Venturi, Gruppo di cose inedite, in: L’Arte. Rivista trimestrale di storie dell’arte medievale e moderna, no. 41, 1938, illustrated p. 49, fig. 4, pp. 53–54 (as ‘appartenent[e] al periodo umbro di Raffaello’);
A. Venturi, Storia dell’arte italiana. XI. Architettura del Cinquecento, vol. 1, Milan 1938, pp. 182–185, fig. 157 (as Raphael);
E. Bianchi, Adolfo Venturi tra collezionismo e ricerca: un caso milanese, in: Arte Lombarda, no. 160, 2010, pp. 97–98, 105–108, fig. 1

A similar composition is registered in the Fototeca Zeri under no. 26726 (as anonymous Umbrian, 15th/16th Century).

Technical analysis by Gianluca Poldi:
Reflectographic analyses demonstrate that the work was created on wood and was then, perhaps in the 20th century, transferred to canvas. The horizontal trend of the wood fibres can be deduced from the cracking pattern, evident in the IR images. This does not make it unlikely that the scene was part of a predella, presumably with stories of Saint Jerome. Pigments, detected by means of reflectance spectroscopy and portable microscopy, include azurite, with lead white, in the blue areas – sky, mountains and far landscape, dark book cover and the mantle of the man on the left – comprising the pale blue Renaissance window glass. Azurite is partially mixed to a finely grinded dark red lake, partially applied in a glaze over it to get the purplish hue of the monk’s habit in the background, preferred to the most common grey colour of this kind of cloth. The slightly different hue of Jerome’s robe is a mixture of azurite and the same red lake, but grinding is quite different: finer the former and coarser the latter. A lighter red lake constitutes the cloak of the saint.

A copper-based green (malachite?) was employed in the green meadows outside the window. The grey colour of the architecture is not a simple mix of white, black and ochre, but also includes very fine blue-green particles, reiterating the quality of the attention to colour expressed by the author. Flesh tones are still obtained, as per the fourteenth-century tradition, with a first pale green layer containing green earth, then covered with a thin layer of lead white and vermillion: a painting practice typical of Perugino and his workshop until after the turning point of 1500. The underlying drawing of the painting, recovered in different bands of IR wavelengths, is particularly interesting: carried out with lines just engraved in the architecture of the room, it becomes a little freer in outlining the saint’s chair, where fine sequences seem to exist of dots (pouncing) along some lines. The drawing that articulates the figures, carried out with a thin brush, is rather free, studying the folds of the clothes and in some cases correcting itself. Hints of hatching can be seen under some shadows of Jerome’s cloak, while a black hatching on the surface of the painting creates the shadows of the niche in the background.