The Last Communion of Saint Jerome (Domenichino)
The Last Communion of St. Jerome is a 1614 oil-on-canvas painting by the Italian artist Domenichino. It was commissioned for the church of San Girolamo della Carità in Rome in 1612 and is now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. The composition is very similar to a painting of the same subject by Agostino Carracci. Domenichino's rival, Giovanni Lanfranco, accused Domenichino of plagiarism due to the similarities. Subject matter The main subject of this painting is St. Jerome, who is the thin central figure depicted kneeling with the red cloth. St. Jerome (c. 347–420) was a Christian Latin scholar, translator, and priest. He was considered a doctor of the church, a saint whose doctrinal writings had special authority. One of his accomplishments is translating the Bible into Latin. From 382 to 385, he was a secretary for Pope Damasus I in Rome. Domenichino's painting shares its subject with an earlier painting by Sandro Botticelli, in which Botticelli depicted a scene from the pseudepigraphical letter of Eusebius to Damasus. History Commission The Congregation of San Girolamo della Carità church in Rome had been undergoing renovations and was being refurbished between 1611 and 1615. Domenichino was commissioned to do a painting for the high altar of the church. He was paid 240 scudi for the commission of this painting of The Last Communion of St. Jerome. This was Domenichino's first public commission for an altarpiece. Domenichino had worked on this painting for two years before its completion in 1614. Plagiarism In 1620, Giovanni Lanfranco accused Domenichino of stealing ideas from Agostino Carracci's painting of the same subject matter. At the time of this accusation, both Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco had been competing for a commission in S. Andrea delle Valle. Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Nicolas Poussin both helped to defend Domenichino against this charge. Domenichino, along with Lanfranco and Francesco Albani, were well-known pupils who had trained under Annibale Carracci in the Carracci Academy. During this time Domenichino was more renowned and better established as an independent artist in comparison to his fellow pupils, Lanfranco and Albani. Annibale Carracci had died in 1609 and was also the brother of Agostino Carracci who had died in 1602. Agostino Carracci had been commissioned in 1592 by the Certosa in Bologna to paint the Last Communion of St. Jerome and finished it in late 1593. The Last Communion of St. Jerome was a subject painted rarely at this time, which added more leverage to Lanfranco's charge of theft. In Passeri's defense for Domenichino, he claimed that it was hard to avoid the example set by Carracci's painting of the central figures of Jerome receiving communion from the priest and that Agostino's central image of St. Jerome was so definitive that Domenichino had no alternative way of envisioning the scene without including the inspiration from Agostino's version. Passeri continued by stating that Domenichino did what he could to vary from Carracci's version, by changing the secondary figures, composition, and other details in his own interpretation. Domenichino himself also