摘要：In the early sixteenth century, Aertgen van Leyden (1498-1564) painted the studious Saint Jerome seated in a shadowed interior space, lit only by the feeble glow of a candle (fig. 1). The holy man directs his gaze toward a skull, which he holds in his left hand, as he presses his other hand against his head in the time-honored pose of melancholia. Jerome's shadowed face is composed in an expression of extreme dejection, his eyes half closed in sorrowful contemplation of death. He seems to inhabit an exclusive interior realm, from which he contemplates his great task and muses upon the vanity of human existence. Preferring solitude to the company of people, tested by God, and granted the gift of divine genius, Saint Jerome is a paragon of pious "enthusiasm," or religious melancholy.1 The circumstances of Jerome's life (321-420) contain most of the saturnine attributes that apply to the Renaissance melancholic persona.2 In his youth, Jerome was a devoted scholar, but a serious illness caused him to retire to the desert, where he did penance in solitude for several years and befriended the faithful lion, which would become his constant companion. Upon his return to the active world, the saint devoted his life to the service of the Church in the form of study, teaching, and writing, eventually becoming as famous for his scholarship as for his sanctity. Artists from both Italy and Northern Europe depicted Jerome traditionally in two ways - as a hermit alone in the desert surrounded by wild animals, sometimes battering himself with a stone, or as a pensive savant accompanied by the accouterments of scholarship. Beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, he appears as a solitary figure in what can be construed as a scholarly "study." In subsequent centuries, Jerome's extreme piety merged with the topos of the secular Aristotelian scholar. Both contexts - hermit and scholar - are consolidated in early modern botanical imagery, which enlarges and comments on these inherited traditions by means of empirical observation.
