Altar of San Girolamo

It is recorded as the work of Gasparo Cairano. Materials recorded for it are marble. It is associated with Italy. The record gives 1506 as its date of establishment or first appearance. It is recorded in the collection of Church of Saint Francis.

• Title — Altar of San Girolamo • Artist — Gasparo Cairano, Antonio Medaglia • Year — 1506 • Completion Date — 1510 • Medium — Marble • Movement — Italian renaissance • Height Metric — 780 • Width Metric — 450 • Length Metric — 80 • Metric Unit — cm • Imperial Unit — in • Museum — Church of St Francis • City — Brescia

The origin and the attribution of this sculptural complex is one of the tricky problems of Brescian renaissance art. As Antonio Morassi observed in 1939, the only useful element to date the work precisely is the effigy of Pope Julius II carved on the inside base of the left column: it is taken from the front of one of the medals by Caradosso and Gian Cristoforo Romano made in honour of that pope around or after 1506. Even the patron of the altar is unknown, as no documents have been found and because of the abrasion of emblems placed on the key of the arch. The first confirmed testimonies on the altar appear in the 1520s. In 1521, Simone Rovati stipulated a contract with Maffeo Olivieri for a wooden altarpiece to be placed on an unspecified altar within the church. In 1527, the church's provost, Alessandro Averoldi, in a private manuscript, granted a room for rent to the painter Callisto Piazza in exchange for (in addition to rental money) an altarpiece similar in quality to the painting he made for Simon de Roado situated in Saint Francis. This painting by Piazza was later identified as the Madonna and Child between the Saints John the Baptist and Jerome; it was recorded in Brescian guides in the early 17th century, after which it passed to the Lechi Collection in the first half of the 19th century, and was then purchased by the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan in 1829, where it is found to date. Records of the apostolic visit of San Carlo Borromeo in 1580 clarify that the first altar on the right side of the nave was indeed the one contracted by Simone Rovati, dedicated to St Mark, and that there was a further endowment, documented by Rovati's testament of 1522 (the date of which is obtained from the records of the apostolic visit). As no St Mark has been found in the specified location, it is clear that between 1520 and 1580, the dedication had changed. These documents, further, do not help in dating the sculpture itself as it obviously predated 1521 and Rovati's patronage, who almost certainly found it already in place. It is also not clear what the altar contained prior to the 1521 contract of the altarpiece to Maffeo Olivieri; there is reason to believe that commission was not completed, and by 1527, Piazza's painting was already there. Federico Odorici, in 1853, was the first to point out that the St Margaret of Antioch with Two Saints by Moretto, which was historically documented to be in the fifth chapel on the left side of the nave, was evidently moved to the chapel of St Jerome to fill the void left by Piazza's canvas. And finally, the fresco with the Visitation, dated to 1520 and placed in the upper lunette, is one of the few attributed to the catalogue of Francesco Prata of Caravaggio.

• Illustration — A fight among gods of the sea, detail on the left column. • Illustration — A fight among gods of the sea, detail on the right column.