Saint Jerome in the Wilderness

Jerome is an old hermit, his neck and shoulder muscles strained as he turns. The tendons of the neck and the hollow of the collarbone show that Leonardo was already looking hard at the structure under the skin, years before his great anatomical drawings.

The panel stayed in the underpainting stage. Its history is famous: in the nineteenth century Cardinal Joseph Fesch is said to have found one part being used as a box lid in a shop and the head years later at a shoemaker's. The two pieces were rejoined, and the seams of the cut are still visible.

The lion and the church at the upper right are only sketched in, but the saint's face, sunk with grief, is one of his most moving heads.