Worlds of words

By Edwin HeathcotePublished: September 26 2009 00:30 | Last updated: September 26 2009 00:30

 
One of the most curious yet also most influential interiors in the history of art is the painting of “St Jerome in his Study” (circa 1475) by Antonello da Messina in the National Gallery in London. It is not the kind of room we would recognise as a study, in fact it is not really a study at all. Rather the painter depicts the saint on a dais, four steps above the level of the tiled floor. It is an intriguing construction that sits within a much larger space, a grand and complex set of volumes that suggest a church or a monastery. There is a vault on the right supported on a row of slender Renaissance columns, on the left a window with two simple window seats, each looking on to a classic northern Italian landscape of rolling hills punctuated with cypresses.

The whole is an extremely carefully constructed composition that sits within a trompe l’oeil frame within the picture frame. Perspective was still a relatively new device and the artist uses it to full effect to create a theatrical scene with the saint on his stage and the stone frame through which the picture is viewed as a proscenium arch. The perspective lines do not converge as you might expect on the saint himself but on the book in front of him. The brilliant white of its pages seems to seep off the surface through his pale hands and up into his face while the distance between him and his book is bridged by another volume leaning at a slanting angle on the shelf behind him.

There are a number of intriguing devices here that reveal much about the way a study is perceived, what this most cerebral of rooms means.

Its elevation is both practical and symbolic. The stone or tiled floors of unheated buildings would have allowed the cold to be drawn into the body so raising the study a few steps on a timber floor would have reduced the effects of the cold. Note that St Jerome has left his shoes at the bottom of the steps, in the way one might remove them to enter a temple (or if his feet were no longer cold). But this raising of the room also indicates that this is a place of elevation through learning, that the mind and the soul are symbolically lifted by the process of engagement with books.

It is interesting that the books on the shelves do not appear with their spines outwards as we might expect but are placed as if on exhibition, opened for us to see. Perhaps this is to illustrate that the value in books lies not in their appearance as status symbols on a shelf but in the words contained within them. This study might be on show to us but it is not a public space, rather a resolutely private one. The saint has constructed his own world within the bigger building and is surrounded by the objects that define his existence. The other items on the right of the shelf – pots, plates and jars – are to do with everyday existence. One vessel sits precariously atop the shelf, seemingly about to drop, a commonly used trope indicating the impermanence and uncertainty of life. There are animals: the cat on the left (which has found itself a spot on the warmer dais) and a lion in shadow on the right, the one from whose paw St Jerome famously pulled a thorn. The peacock symbolises the immortality of the saint and of the word of God that he translated.

Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of St Jerome shows a study curiously bereft of books (only a few appear, rather rigidly on the far left), instead dominated by a happy-looking lion and the gleaming pate and halo of the elderly saint. Here the signs of the vanity of objects and possessions are even clearer. The skull on the window sill and the huge hourglass hanging ominously behind the saint are the perfect memento mori. Here, too, it is clear that this is a privileged place: guarded by a lion and a dog; the precious light streaming in; the chairs, which were still a new and luxurious piece of furniture.

The study remains, even in our houses today, a privileged space, a luxury in the midst of the practicalities of everyday life, a place to escape domesticity into a world of words and writing. The idea of the home office has brought the study back into the house but, at the same time, the ubiquity of the laptop and wi-fi and the diminution of the role and value of books has led to a dissolving of the room’s role into the dwelling as a whole. The study is the space of wisdom and learning, to lose it would be to delegate knowledge, to collapse the real space of inherited meaning and symbolism into the ether of cyberspace.