Spanish school of the mid-17th century. "Saint Jerome penitent with Dominican donor". Oil on canvas. Relined. With inscription on the canvas indicating the collection it belonged to. Restored work. With repainting and patches. Measurements: 167 x 109,5 cm; 183,5 x 126,5 cm (frame). In this work the painter offers us an image charged with mystical emotion, very typical of Spanish Counter-Reformation art. The composition is clear and concise, with the saint full-length in the foreground, highlighted by the direct, tenebrist lighting against a background of dark tones. As was also common at this time in the Spanish school, Saint Jerome is shown writing and meditating next to a human skull. Alongside the saint can be seen other iconographic attributes that define the figure of Saint Jerome, firstly, the lion that has accompanied him since he removed the thorn from the silver, and also the scriptures that define him as the first translator of the Bible. In this scene he is listening to the trumpet blast that is to summon the dead on the Day of Judgement. On the lower right the artist has depicted the donor of the painting, a Dominican friar praying before the saint. One of the four great Doctors of the Latin Church, Saint Jerome was born near Aquileia (Italy) in 347. Trained in Rome, he was an accomplished rhetorician and polyglot. Baptised at the age of nineteen, between 375 and 378 he withdrew to the Syrian desert to lead an anchorite's life. He returned to Rome in 382 and became a collaborator of Pope Damasus. One of the most frequent representations of this saint is his penance in the desert. His attributes are the stone he uses to beat his chest and the skull on which he meditates. Also the cardinal's cape (or a red mantle), although he was never a cardinal, and the tamed lion. The latter comes from a story in the "Golden Legend", where it is narrated that one day, when he was explaining the Bible to the monks in his convent, he saw a lion limping towards him. He removed the thorn from its paw, and from then on kept it in his service, instructing it to look after his donkey while it grazed. Some merchants stole the donkey, and the lion recovered it, returning it to the saint without hurting the animal. Spanish Baroque painting is one of the most authentic and personal examples of art, because its conception and form of expression arose from the people and their deepest feelings. With the economy of the state in ruins, the nobility in decline and the high clergy heavily taxed, it was the monasteries, parishes and confraternities of clerics and laymen who promoted its development, with the works sometimes being financed by popular subscription. Sculpture was thus obliged to express the prevailing ideals in these environments, which were none other than religious ones, at a time when Counter-Reformation doctrine demanded a realistic language from art so that the faithful could understand and identify with what was represented, and an expression endowed with an intense emotional content in order to increase the fervour and devotion of the people. Religious themes were therefore the main subject matter of Spanish painting of this period, which in the early decades of the century focused on capturing the natural world and gradually intensified throughout the century on expressive values through movement and a variety of gestures, the use of light resources and the depiction of moods and feelings. Dimensions 167 x 109,5 cm; 183,5 x 126,5 cm (frame).