The Last Communion of Saint Jerome

Botticelli painted this small panel in the early 1490s, toward the end of his career. It shows Saint Jerome receiving the Eucharist on his deathbed, an old man collapsed against a cushion, his arms too weak to hold himself upright. A priest leans over him with the host. Two assistants support Jerome's body. The scene is set in a shallow architectural space, a chapel with a coffered arch and a view of a distant landscape through an opening at the right. The painting is small, 13 by 10 inches, and it was made for private devotion. It was probably commissioned for a Florentine convent or a private chapel. The gold background is traditional, a holdover from medieval icon painting, but the figures are rendered with the psychological intensity that Botticelli brought to his late work. Jerome's face is gaunt, his eyes half closed, his mouth open. The painting is about the moment of death and the hope of salvation. Botticelli was in his late forties when he painted this. He had been the most sought-after painter in Florence in the 1480s, producing the Primavera and the Birth of Venus for the Medici circle. By the early 1490s, Savonarola was preaching in Florence against the vanities of art, and Botticelli's style was changing. His late paintings are more austere, more religious, less decorative than his earlier work. Vasari wrote that Botticelli was one of the painters who threw their works into Savonarola's bonfire of vanities in 1497, though this is probably apocryphal. Tempera and gold on wood, 34 by 25 centimeters. Botticelli used egg tempera, the traditional medium of Florentine panel painting, building up the flesh tones in thin layers of color. The gold background is gold leaf applied over a red bole ground, tooled with punches to create the halos and the architectural ornaments. The panel has been cleaned several times and the gold is well preserved. The small vertical format and devotional subject make this print work well in a hallway, bedroom, or prayer space. The gold background pairs with warm wood tones and cream walls. A gold frame continues the painting's gilding. The 11x14 or 12x16 size gives the figures enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting came to the Met through the Jules Bache Collection in 1949, one of the foundational collections of the museum's European paintings department. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.