Lots of us are working at home at present.
We're trying to create moments of calm in busy households that have been turned
into offices and schools. I want to look with
you at a picture of someone working alone
at home, in a setting that makes me green with envy. Hello everybody, I'm Caroline
Campbell, Director of Collections and Research, and
usually when I see you, I'm standing in front of a painting
talking. But today, for reasons which need no
explanation, I'm sitting in the kitchen of my house
in South East London, and I'm sitting here because this is one
of the very few spaces where I feel I emerge from
chaos into solitude and solace. I'd like to take you into a painting
that for me encapsulates that feeling of comfort and consolation.
It's a picture that was made about five hundred
and forty years ago in Venice. It's called
'Saint Jerome in his Study' and it's by the great Sicilian painter
Antonello da Messina. It's a very small work indeed,
painted in oil on limewood panel. What I love about Antonello's painting
is that it's a painting that invites you into it,
and it's one where you can spend an increasing amount of time, really
wandering and thinking as you wish to. Antonello, as I said, is an artist who's
been really famed since the late 15th century,
and at the root of his fame was his technical prowess, and his ability
to convey tiny, exquisite detail. He's often been
said by art historians to have been the painter who introduced
painting in oil into Italy. And sadly, this story is completely untrue,
but it is his mastery of oil that's at the root,
the really deserved root, of his fame, and you can see these elements very very
clearly in 'Saint Jerome in his Study'. And I'd
like now to take you in with me to this fantastic
picture. It's a picture that really does invite
us to come in. You can see that round the edges of the
picture is a beautiful warm stone archway,
in fact it's a doorway, and you're asked to come
into the space, and walk along the majolica tiles,
and into the study where Jerome is working.
Now to get into the space, you've got to get past a couple of obstacles,
that's a peacock, and also a partridge, and a basin of water, but let's expect
they're not going to provide too much difficulty to us.
And soon we'll be walking towards Jerome, in the centre
of the picture. He's the figure who's dressed in red
and white, the red robes of a cardinal and a white undershirt. And he's sitting
in a chair which at the moment gives me
extraordinary envy. It's a wonderful round chair
called a cathedra. It's the sort of thing that I can imagine
I would just love to sink back into, lose myself into a book
in a moment of reverie, and that's exactly what Jerome
is doing in the painting. The other thing about his surroundings that gives me
incredible envy is the study itself. It's a bit of a
weird construction. It's rather like those sort of flat pack
extravaganzas that Ikea go in for. However, the great thing
about a painting is that unlike Ikea, you don't have to
worry about constructing it yourself. You just need to look, and in every
wonderful nook and cranny of this great study,
something is placed for us to look at. There are books open and closed,
there are manuscripts, there are ceramic vases
and bowls, there are wonderful burnished metal basins, and there are other
fantastic domestic details. I love the fact that Jerome
has taken off his shoes to enter this space to work,
you can see them just placed at the bottom of the platform
that he's climbed to come into the study. You can also see that he's not
completely alone, there are plants beside him,
again in very beautiful and very delicately rendered pots.
And perhaps my favourite detail of all, the cat
who is sitting at the far left hand side of his platform, apparently asleep, but in
that way that cats have, of seeming awake and lost in
contemplation at exactly the same time, enjoying
presumably also the shafts of sunlight which come into
this picture. Jerome is not alone, he's accompanied by
the cat, and also by, rather strangely, a lion. If you look at the right hand
side of the painting to the archway that takes you up to a
landscape, you'll see a lion is padding towards the
saint. If you know the story of Saint Jerome,
who was a fourth century figure, you'll know that he was supposed to have
taken the thorn out of the paw of a lion who he came
across in the wilderness, and from that moment the lion was his
adored servant and would do anything he wanted.
Jerome, of course, is a very significant figure
for the world of medieval Christianity, the world that Antonello da Messina,
and indeed his patron, inhabited. Knowledge
is really at the heart of this painting, human knowledge, divine knowledge, but
also natural knowledge, because as you move
further into this painting, you see that Jerome
is sitting in a really quite unusual, and I think fairly extraordinary space.
It's a vaulted space, a space that really feels like a great
gothic building, like of course a church, and in a sense
Jerome through his writings really was as I said
the bulwark of the medieval church. But it's not a place that is closed off to
itself. On the left hand side, if you pass the
lion, you'll see a green verdant landscape
that looks much more like medieval Europe, indeed
like Europe today, than the Holy Land where
Jerome spent much of his life. But I'd like to move you over to the landscape
on the right hand side, which again is really asking you to come
into the picture. Can you see the two seats that are on
either side of the window? Sometimes I like to think
myself sitting down there, if that's not too
whimsical, and looking out at what I see. This is a landscape which is not just
full of animals, but full of people. There are two men on
horseback. There are a couple of women walking
along the side of the river, and indeed there's also a couple in the
boat, but if I can pick out my favourite detail,
it's the flock of sheep that you see at the right hand corner
of the window, being driven somewhere by an imaginary,
or illusionary, shepherd. Much as I love this part of the
landscape, the part I love best in the painting
is that that you see when you look up, when you raise your eyes
above the vault, to the windows,
through there you see the beautiful light of the late
afternoon. The late afternoon of summer, with a turquoise blue sky, and with those
birds, that really are harbingers, for us
in the northern hemisphere, of summer. Swallows
who often fly around our houses in the late afternoon,
and early evenings, under one of the glories of the summer season
we're about, in Great Britain, to enter.
I've really enjoyed talking to you today about Antonello's painting,
a particular favourite of mine, and I hope you've
enjoyed it too. I hope also that you'll want to further explore pictures
in the National Gallery collection, and if you want to continue your journey
into them and not just into Antonello, please click
here and here for more information,
and please remember, with a painting, wherever you are, you can go anywhere
you want.