Of the green worlds that Lorenzo Lotto explored in the early decades of his long and peripatetic career, none is as rich in animated trees as the 1509 St. Jerome. (Plate 4) The panel, which the Venetian painter likely produced during his sojourn in Rome between 1508 and 1509, pictures the Church Father in a rocky outcropping far from civilization, ‘that great desert and waste wilderness […] burnt by the sun’, as the saint described his hermitage to the Roman noblewoman Eustochium, whose letters purportedly informed Jacopo de Voragine's thirteenth-century Golden Legend, as well as a multitude of other hagiographies and spiritual manuals that expanded on the penitential and scholarly deeds of Jerome. Just as Early Modern accounts of Jerome variously embellished the widely popular story of the Church Father, Renaissance painters elaborated on the theme of Jerome, taking particular delight in the wild character of Jerome's wilderness.

In Lotto's version, we find Jerome half sitting and half reclining beside the remains of a monumental tree trunk, whose rippling contours are no less vigorous than the saint's muscular torso, his tronco.