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The image of St Jerome, one of the four Fathers of the Church and a favourite subject of popular religious devotion, was also one of Ribera's favourite themes. In fact, according to the most recent historiography, he painted forty-four different versions of this subject.
In this painting the saint looks up from his writing, believing that he has heard the sound of the trumpet of doom. A scream seems to be issuing from his mouth and reaches us as if in a dream: there is no sound and yet it can be heard.
The date on the painting has been wrongly read as 1629 or 1639, whereas it is undoubtedly 1637 (the year in which René Descartes published his Discours de la méthode). This is the period in which the majority of his signed and dated works were produced and thus marks the peak of the career of this artist of Spanish origin, who was active chiefly in Naples and had close ties with the culture of that city. In that year the painter, aged forty-six, started to work for the monks of the Charterhouse of San Martino, for whom he produced his most remarkable works, including the Pietà located in the sacristy of that church.
The choice of humble models, the warm light, the thick and soft paint, the lively colours, the exaggerated chiaroscuro, and the crude and impassioned realism of his interpretation of dramatic events form the basis of his popularity. But above all it was through his unflinching immersion in the tragic reality of humanity that Ribera's art came, with Luca Giordano serving as an intermediary, to influence the esthetics of the Venetian tenebrosi.
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