Saint Jerome Writing

This painting of Saint Jerome, one of Ribera's most recurrent subjects, combines the two traditional iconographies of the saint, which present him as a scholar and as a penitent. The feather quill in his hand references his monumental task of translating the Bible into Latin, the official version used by the Roman Catholic Church. Despite some specialists' reservations as to the painting's attribution, the work resembles various treatments of the same subject by Ribera and displays characteristic features of his work, such as the fanciful Hebrew script along the leather-bound book's spine.