St. Jerome (1460–1470): Art, History and Details

St. Jerome (1460–1470) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Produced in the second half of the 15th century in Germany and France, metal cuts created a distinctive decorative effect. The craftsman first engraved the plate with the outline of the subject. Then large, plain surface areas, which would print as an unrelieved black, were broken up using punches and stamps. There are only three impressions known of Saint Jerome, but this one is perhaps the most fascinating because it remains attached to the binding of William Durandus’s Rationale divinorum offciorum, into which it was glued near the end of the 1400s. Published in Basel before 1477, the book was the most authoritative medieval compendium of church and liturgical practice.

Object facts

• Title: St. Jerome
• Date: 1460–1470
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: engraving, hand-colored
• Dimensions: Sheet: 36.1 x 25.4 cm (14 3/16 x 10 in.); Book: 40.5 x 28.5 x 6.5 cm (15 15/16 x 11 1/4 x 2 9/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Engraving
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1952.13

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Dackerman, Susan. Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance & Baroque Engravings, Etchings & Woodcuts. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
• Richards, Louise. "Three Dotted Prints." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 41, no. 10 (December 1954): 213-215.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.