St. Jerome

Description

March 28, 2009
This gaunt figure of St. Jerome may strike viewers today as too stridently ascetic for rendering in a material as refined as porcelain. With his right knee wedged in a stump, the saint’s torso contracts with an inner tension as he pounds his chest with stones in penitence. At his feet sits the lion that, according to legend, became Jerome’s companion after he had extracted a thorn from its paw.
Since the fifteenth century European elites had avidly collected and displayed porcelain imported from China and Japan. The closely guarded formula for making porcelain, however, eluded Europeans until 1709, when the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger under the patronage of Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, discovered the process. Augustus quickly established a porcelain factory in Meissen, close to Dresden, in order to sate his appetite for porcelain. Over the succeeding decades a number of other European rulers founded rival porcelain factories, including the factory at Ansbach near Nuremberg where this figure of St. Jerome was produced. Factories made various types of tableware as well as small figurines designed for display in cabinets or as table decoration. Many such figures were charming and even comic, while others, such as this austere saint, were didactic and moralizing.