''The Last Communion of Saint Jerome'' is a painting by the

Italian Renaissance The Italian Renaissance ( it, Rinascimento ) was a period in Italian history covering the 15th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Europe and marked the trans ...

master Sandro Botticelli, finished around 1494–1495. It is now in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. The picture was inspired by the pseudepigraphical medieval Epistle of

Eusebius Eusebius of Caesarea (; grc-gre, Εὐσέβιος ; 260/265 – 30 May 339), also known as Eusebius Pamphilus (from the grc-gre, Εὐσέβιος τοῦ Παμφίλου), was a Greek historian of Christianity, exegete, and Christian ...

to Damasus, also known as ''De morte Hieronymi''.Pabel, Hilmar M. “Portraying Jerome”. Herculean labours : Erasmus and the editing of St. Jerome's letters in the Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, 2008. (online) Rita Lizzi Testa writes, “The painting represents the very moment in which Jerome, having gathered his companions from the monastery around him, is lying on a linen sheet and is asking one of his brothers to bring him the body of Christ….The epistle recalls that when Jerome saw the priest come closer, he asked his companions to help him get to his knees, while professing his faith in Christ whose body and blood are present in the wafer.” No ancient author is known to have described this scene. Testa connects the subject matter of Botticelli’s painting with the preaching of Girolamo Savonarola in

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

around the time of its execution. The pseudepigraphical epistle from which the scene derives had lately become popular in Italy, undergoing several reprints from 1471 to 1487, meanwhile the supporters of Savonarola found in it “a simplified compendium of what they believed to be the authentic message of the most ancient form of Christianity”. Botticelli was commissioned by Francesco del Pugliese, a noted follower of Savonarola, and Testa opines that del Pugliese, sensing an analogue between the figures of Jerome and Savonarola, may have been “thinking of the last moments of Savonarola’s life” when he commissioned this particular scene. The subject was also later depicted by the Baroque Bolognese painter

Agostino Carracci Agostino Carracci (or Caracci) (16 August 1557 – 22 March 1602) was an Italian painter, printmaker, tapestry designer, and art teacher. He was, together with his brother, Annibale Carracci, and cousin, Ludovico Carracci, one of the founders of ...

in his

painting Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ...

now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, and by the Baroque painter

Domenichino Domenico Zampieri (, ; October 21, 1581 – April 6, 1641), known by the diminutive Domenichino (, ) after his shortness, was an Italian Baroque painter of the Bolognese School of painters. Life Domenichino was born in Bologna, son of a shoem ...

in a

in the

Vatican Pinacoteca The Vatican Museums ( it, Musei Vaticani; la, Musea Vaticana) are the public museums of the Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection amassed by the Catholic Church and the papacy throughout the centuries, including several of ...

References

External links

Page at artonline.it

Metropolitan Museum Page
1490s paintings Paintings in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Paintings by Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi ( – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli (, ), was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century, when he was rediscovered ...

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References

Further reading

External links