This depiction of St. Jerome is an innovative solution in the iconography and forms of pictorial representation of the patron saint of Christian humanists. The Doctor of the Church is represented here by the powerful, concentrated and synthetic image of an old sage, melancholically meditating on death and the contingency of the human condition and whose gaze reaches out to us and envelops us in this exercise in wisdom.

This masterpiece of the extremely gifted German Renaissance painter, created during his trip to the Low Countries in 1520-1521, was a gift from Dürer to Rui Fernandes de Almada, the secretary of the Portuguese factory house in Antwerp. At the Albertina Gallery (Vienna) and the Museen Dahlem (Berlin), there are four preparatory drawings for this composition.