Scripture · Revelation 2:10
1 Peter 1:24-25
Saint Jerome Writing
For, “All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.” And this is the word that was proclaimed to you.
Jerome reaches his pen across a table toward an open book and a skull, his living head lit at the opposite end.
About the artwork
The skull and Jerome’s living head sit at opposite ends of the table, joined by the long reach of his writing arm. On one side are warm skin and red cloth; on the other, the pale book, white drapery, and bone. The Borghese collection reads these warm and cool areas as a conversation between life and death. The composition lets the scholar work across that boundary every time his pen moves.
Jerome’s fame rests on years of biblical study and translation. Caravaggio makes that intellectual labor physical: the head bends, the arm stretches, and an aging body keeps attending to the page. A skull can be a general reminder of death, but beside this working scholar it raises a more particular question about what a finite life can help pass on.
Featured in: Caravaggio’s Bible Paintings: The Painter Who Killed a Man and Kept Painting Grace
What does 1 Peter 1:24-25 mean?
1 Peter 1:24–25 quotes Isaiah’s comparison of human life to withering grass and contrasts it with the enduring word of the Lord. The surrounding passage speaks of new birth through that living word and calls its recipients to sincere love. Endurance here belongs to the message that has been proclaimed to them, not to human achievement.
The skull and the aging writer give bodily form to the first side of that contrast; the books and sustained labor of reading suggest the second. Jerome is a later Christian scholar, not a figure in the letter. The pairing invites the painting to be considered through mortality and the word’s endurance without claiming this verse was its documented program.
The skull, books, and aging scholar offer a thematic reading of 1 Peter 1:24–25: human life passes, while God’s word endures.
Sources
Caravaggio’s Bible Paintings: The Painter Who Killed a Man and Kept Painting Grace. Artwork reading adapted from this guide.
1 Peter 1 — Berean Standard Bible. Context for 1 Peter 1:24-25.
Also from 1 Peter:Christ Crucified
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