Saints Zeno and Jerome

Two fourth-century saints – Zeno, a bishop of Verona, and Jerome, one of the Fathers of the Church – stand in front of a palm and olive tree. Zeno wears a bishop’s mitre on his head and holds a crosier; Jerome has a book, standing for the Bible which he translated into Latin, and wears the red robes of a cardinal. As secretary to the pope, he was usually shown as a cardinal, although the office did not exist in his day.This oddly shaped fragment comes from a large pala (an altarpiece with a single, unified surface) painted for a church in Pistoia (Zeno was the patron of Pistoia cathedral). This altarpiece was begun by one artist, Francesco Pesellino, and completed after his death by another, Fra Filippo Lippi. Jerome doesn‘t have his usual companion lion, which is surprising – especially as Pesellino was very fond of showing lions, as in Saints Mamas and James and The Story of David and Goliath – but the lower part of these figures is a modern reconstruction.Although we know a lot about how the altarpiece was commissioned and executed from surviving documents, it was only partly complete when Pesellino died in 1457, and we are not completely sure which artist painted which bit. These figures are especially problematic.The whole composition was drawn in great detail before being painted, and in many places the underdrawing is visible – you can see it in Zeno’s and Jerome’s faces, hands and drapery. The drawing must have been done in the early stages, presumably by Pesellino: it seems to be the same as in the rest of the panel. But the way Zeno and Jerome were painted is different to Mamas and James, although it’s difficult to judge as the surface is quite worn. Technical analysis has shown that their flesh tones don’t have a layer of a green earth pigment underneath, as was used for Mamas and James. Different pigments were also used to build up the final flesh colour. These differences suggest a different artist; maybe these saints were not finished when Pesellino died and were completed in Lippi’s workshop.A drawing by Pesellino in the Uffizi, Florence, shows Zeno accompanied by Mamas (who here stands on the opposite side of the Cross). This is perhaps one of the preliminary designs Pesellino made for the confraternity in planning for the altarpiece. Like many artists of this era, Pesellino reused figures in different paintings, and the Saint Jerome we see here is very similar to one he painted on a small panel (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York).The four types of tree in the painting – the olive and palm behind Zeno and Jerome and the cypress and possible cedar behind Mamas and James – might represent the four woods which supposedly went into making Christ’s Cross.