09/07/2026
Orazio Gentileschi
(Pisa 1563-London 1639)
“The Penitent St Jerome”
1610
Oil on canvas, 127 x 112cm
A Saint Jerome painted in 1610 from a 72-year-old pilgrim posed as the 4th century Church Father—the best documented picture illustrating the process of painting “from life” and possibly one of the last from this period of Gentileschi’s career that is still available on the art market.
Seated in a barren, grotto-like setting, his upper torso bared, his gaze directed heavenwards, the great fourth-century translator of the Hebrew Bible into Latin is depicted as a penitent in the wilderness, reflecting on mortality and the vanity of worldly things. His vivid red cardinal’s robe hangs off his body in luxuriant folds, contrasting sharply with the exposed white flesh of his left shoulder and chest
Orazio Gentileschi was an ardent admirer and colleague of Caravaggio with whom he shared a close friendship and studio props, and he wholeheartedly embraced the great Lombard artist’s polemical practice of painting directly from a posed model. The objective of this was to achieve a compelling effect of physical immediacy and veracity, an approach that struck contemporaries as completely and astonishingly novel.
What makes the present picture so unique, as well as key to our understanding of what “dipingere dal naturale” (painting from life) entailed, is the fact that we can identify the person who posed for the picture and even hear his experience of doing so. He was a seventy-two-year-old pilgrim from Palermo named Giovanni Pietro Molli. Prior to August 1611, he had lived in Rome for a year and half, returning again on March 19, 1612, the same year in which he was called as a witness at the trial held at the Corte Savella in Rome in July and September-October of 1612 regarding the r**e of Orazio’s daughter Artemisia by a former colleague, Agostino Tassi, in March of the preceding year.
“Signor Orazio Gentileschi, the painter, made use of me to portray a similar head in some paintings he was undertaking, and in a full-length St Jerome; He had me undress from the waist up to paint a Saint Jerome similar to me, and for this purpose he kept me at his house during the whole of that Lent, because three or four days a week I always had to go to his house and on some days that I went I stayed there from morning to evening and ate and drank in his house and he paid me for my days but to sleep I returned to my house...”
From the testimony of Giovanni Pietro Molli - 27 July 1612
“In that house where the aforesaid Signor Orazio lived on Via Margutta, I saw for more than a month, as many times as I went to the house each week, an old man dressed as a pilgrim, a handsome man with a face that resembled that of a Saint Paul, bald, with a beautiful grey beard of great abundance, both on the cheeks and in the beard itself. This pilgrim, who Orazio kept there, was represented as a Saint Jerome in a painting that portrayed him in his entirety, and he often had him undress and also used him to make other works and heads, and for this purpose the aforesaid pilgrim came there. I have always found him painting and in particular in the Quadragesima of the year 1610, I have found the aforesaid Signor Orazio painting in his house many times and I do not think that he can have any memory than that of the Saint Jerome who the said pilgrim portrayed …”
From the testimony of Bernardino Franchi, 27th September 1612 regarding Giovanni Pietro Molli the 72-year-old Pilgrim whom Orazio used as a model
