Master Art

Like most of G. B. Castello’s gouache miniatures, this fine Saint Jerome in Prayer, executed on vellum, was almost certainly produced as an autonomous work of art intended for private devotion. As the Castello scholar Elena De Laurentis has noted of the present sheet, ‘[it] is a work of considerable interest, both for its highly refined artistic quality and for its probable provenance from the Escorial, alluded to by the saint portrayed, who was the titular saint of the order of monks entrusted with the management of the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.’