he story tells us that S. Jerome was one day sitting with
the brethren listening to a holy lesson when a lion came hobbling
painfully into the monastery. The brethren fled, but S. Jerome, like
Androcles, approached the beast, and finding that it had a sore foot,
commanded the others to return and minister to it. This they did, and
the lion was ever attached to the monastery, one of its duties being to
take care of an ass. Carpaccio has not spared the monks: he makes their
terror utterly absurd in the presence of so puzzled and gentle a
man-eater. In the next picture, the death of the saint, we see the lion
again, asleep on the right, and the donkey quietly grazing at the back.
As an impressive picture of the death of a good man it can hardly be
called successful; but how could it be, coming immediately after the
comic Jerome whom we have just seen? Carpaccio's mischief was a little
too much for him--look at the pince-nez of the monk on the right reading
the service.

Then we have S. Jerome many years younger, busy at his desk. He is just
thinking of a word when (the camera, I almost said) when Carpaccio
caught him. His tiny dog gazes at him with fascination. Not bad
surroundings for a saint, are they? A comfortable study, with a more
private study leading from it; books; scientific instruments; music;
works of art (note the little pagan bronze on the shelf); and an
exceedingly amusing dog. I reproduce the picture opposite page 82.

Two pictures with scriptural subjects represent Christ in the garden of
Gethsemane, and Matthew (an Evangelist rarely painted in Venice, where
his colleague Mark has all the attention) being called from the receipt
of custom. And finally there is the delightful and vivid representation
of S. Tryphonius and the basilisk. This picture, of which I give a
reproduction opposite page 76, is both charming and funny. The basilisk
is surely in the highest rank of the comic beasts of art. It seems to be
singing, but that is improbable; what it is unmistakably not doing is
basilisking. The little saint stands by in an attitude of prayer, and
all about are comely courtiers of the king. In the distance are
delightful palaces in the Carpaccio style of architecture, cool marble
spaces, and crowded windows and stairs. The steps of the raised temple
in which the saint and the basilisk perform have a beautiful intarsia of
foliage similar to that on the Giants' Staircase at the Doges' Palace.
So much for the i