The conservation of the altarpiece by Palma il Giovane has been generously funded by the Boston Chapter of Save Venice.

The conservation of the paintings by Andrea Micheli, called “il Vicentino,” has been generously funded by an anonymous donor in Memory of Mary & Albert Thibault.

The Saint Jerome Chapel is located to the right of the presbytery and is dedicated to the titular saint of the Hieronymite monks who founded the church of San Sebastiano in the late 15th century. The construction of a new, larger church began in 1506 and lasted until 1548. On 10 January 1531, the monks ceded the chapel space to Orsola Lando (widow of Francesco, the son of doge Pietro Lando), who spent 130 ducats for its construction.

Around the 1610s, the decoration of the chapel’s walls was entrusted to painter Andrea Michieli, known as il Vicentino after his native Vicenza, a city on the Venetian mainland. A pupil of Giovanni Battista Maganza, Vicentino arrived in Venice in the early 1570s and was soon hired by the Serenissima to paint a series of monumental historic canvases in the Palazzo Ducale, including the highly praised Entrance of King Henry III of France at San Nicolò al Lido (Sala del Maggior Consiglio), restored by Save Venice in 1978. By the time he was commissioned to decorate the Saint Jerome Chapel, Vicentino had become so famous that art critic Marco Boschini (1674) listed him among the most prominent painters of late Renaissance Venice, the so-called Sette Maniere artists.

Originally, Vicentino’s decoration consisted of four canvases. On the right wall hung Saint Jerome and the Lion, and next to it was a small portrait of two nuns by an anonymous artist. On the opposite wall, there were three more canvases by Vicentino: Saint Charles Borromeo Distributes Bread to the Poor, Saint Charles Borromeo Survives an Assassination Attempt, and Saint Charles Borromeo Saves Carlantonio Pestalozza. Presently, only Saint Jerome and the Lion and Saint Charles Borromeo Distributes Bread to the Poor are on their original site.

In designing his compositions, Vicentino drew on the Venetian tradition of narrative painting cycles, embodied by Vittore Carpaccio’s ability to incorporate chronologically distinct, but visually simultaneous, events within a single painting.

It is the case, for example, of Saint Jerome and the Lion, in which two different episodes unfold from left to right over a continuous frieze. The first scene is set in the Bethlehem monastery, where according to the Golden Legend—a collection of saints’ lives written in 1261—Jerome spent his final years reading the Holy Scriptures. In the painting, the reading has been interrupted by a lion whose arrival has caused the monks to flee in terror. Jerome, on the contrary, greets the beast with open arms, as he understands the animal is seeking assistance with a thorn in his paw. Once cured, the lion remained with Jerome and his monks, guarding their donkey who carried their firewood in from the forest. The Golden Legend continues by describing how, one day, the lion fell asleep and the donkey was stolen by some merchants. The monks accused the lion of having eaten the donkey and punished him to carry the wood on behalf of his companion—an unfair punishment that he nonetheless tamely accepted.

On the chapel’s left wall, Vicentino’s surviving canvas depicts a well-known episode from the life of Saint Charles Borromeo. As described in Giovanni Pietro Giussano’s Vita di San Carlo Borromeo (1610), the “deficient harvest” of 1569 threatened the “poor [of Milan] with starvation, as they were unable to purchase bread.” Borromeo “could not bear the sight of their misery,” thus he made a “large provision of bread” and distributed it to “as many as three thousand persons daily for several months.” In Vicentino’s rendition of the event, the haloed Borromeo is portrayed in the background, standing in front of his church and distributing bread to the poor. In the foreground, three bare-chested men have brought baskets of bread to Borromeo’s attendant, a young man dressed in black; opposite them, a group of two mothers holding their children may be interpreted as allegorical personifications of Charity—the “most excellent of the Virtues,” according to Thomas Aquinas. On the left-hand side, Vicentino depicted a horseman and his ride falling down from a cliff.  Vicentino also depicted the moment when Borromeo miraculously saved his train-bearer, Giulio Omato, who had fallen with his horse from a ridge.

The chapel’s altarpiece was painted by Jacopo Palma Giovane around 1620, in the later years of his career, and depicts the Madonna and Child in Glory with Saint Jerome and Saint Charles Borromeo. The dating of the painting is based upon the similarities with the altarpiece Palma made in circa 1618-1621 for the church of San Carlo Borromeo in Gargnano (Brescia), and currently in deposit at the church of San Marco, Milan. Indeed, it is worth stressing how the resemblance of the two portraits of Borromeo is very striking, mostly with regard to the way the head is turned to the left, and the eyes gaze fixedly upward in devout meditation. The dating is further confirmed by Palma’s portrait of Borromeo in his large altarpiece now in the church of Santi Graziano and Felino, Novara (c. early 1620s).

Each painting in the Saint Jerome Chapel was covered with a thick layer of surface dirt and grime, as well as oxidized varnish, obstructing the original details and colors. During conservation treatment, these non-original layers were carefully thinned and removed, together with any heavy overpainting from previous restoration attempts. Areas of small losses to the pictorial surface were integrated with removable conservation paints before a final layer of protective varnish was applied.

Jacopo Palma il Giovane (c. 1549 – 1628)
Madonna and Child in Glory with Saint Jerome and Saint Carlo Borromeo Altarpiece
c. 1620, oil on canvas
235 x 95 cm

Andrea Micheli, called “il Vicentino” (c. 1542–1618)
Saint Jerome and the Lion
c. 1610s, oil on canvas
268 x 110 cm

Andrea Micheli, called “il Vicentino”(c. 1542–1618)
Saint Charles Borromeo Distributes Bread to the Poor
c. 1610s, oil on canvas
268 x 110 cm

Cicogna, Emmanuele Antonio. Delle inscrizioni veneziane, vol. IV. Venice: Giuseppe Picotti Stampatore, 1834

Giussano, John Peter. The Life of St. Charles Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan. London & New York: Burns and Oates, 1884

Mason Rinaldi, Stefania. Palma il Giovane. L’opera completa. Milan: Alfieri/Electa, 1984

Moschini, Giannantonio. Guida per la città di Venezia all’amico delle belle arti. Venice: Tipografia di Alvisopoli, 1815

Piai, Andrea. Altri incontri con Andrea Vicentino. “Verona illustrata,” 28, 2015, pp. 97-114. Link to the article

Salomon, Xavier, Davide Gasparotto, Gabriele Matino, and Melissa Conn. The Church of San Sebastiano in Venice: A Guide, Venice: Marsilio, 2024

Tagliaferro, Giorgio. Michieli, Andrea. In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 74. Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 2010, pp. 332-336. Link to the article

de Voragine, Jacobus. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. William G. Ryan, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2 vols.