The Penitent Saint Jerome (Grenoble)

About the artwork

Grenoble’s canvas has a near-twin in Stockholm. Charles Sterling emphasized their close resemblance in the 1934 exhibition catalogue; the conspicuous difference is the cardinal’s hat on the wall in Stockholm, absent here. That red hat is itself a later convention: Jerome was never a cardinal.

The rope scourge belongs to the devotional image of Jerome as a desert penitent. It is not prescribed by the psalm paired with the painting. Keeping image and passage distinct matters here, because the painting gives repentance a bodily severity that the biblical speaker expresses through silence, confession and forgiveness.

Featured in: Georges de La Tour’s Bible Paintings: The Candle Painter Hidden Under Other Names

What does Psalm 32:3 mean?

Psalm 32:3 remembers the physical burden of keeping silent about wrongdoing. The psalm does not stop at brittle bones and groaning: verse 5 turns toward acknowledged sin and God’s forgiveness. The movement is from concealment toward confession.

Placed beside Jerome’s scourge, the psalm can redirect attention from the instrument of punishment to that movement toward honesty. The painting belongs to a later Christian penitential tradition; the passage supplies context in which pain is not the final word.

Psalm 32:3 gives language to the burden visible in the penitent Jerome, while the following verses turn that burden toward confession and forgiveness.

Sources

Image source and rights declaration.

Musée de Grenoble — Saint Jérôme pénitent. Exact owning-museum page supplements the legacy Navigart record.

Psalm 32 — Berean Standard Bible. The paired text read with its surrounding chapter.

Georges de La Tour’s Bible Paintings: The Candle Painter Hidden Under Other Names. Exact-work research, history and interpretive qualifications for this reading.

Les Peintres de la réalité en France au XVIIe siècle (1934). Historical catalogue, used with the owning institution’s current attribution and dating.