Of Saints in the Wilderness

a c. 1400 panel painting of saint jerome in a white tunic standing in the mouth of a dome-like cave of grey smooth stone, with an outcropping of rocks on one side, and a few trees on the other, all against a background of gold leaf, by lorenzo monaco
Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni), Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1398-1400, tempera and gold on poplar, 23 x 34 cm, put up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2005

In 1965, during its 50-year disappearance into a private collection beginning in 1929, this painting of Jerome in a stylized grotto-like cave was reattributed from Pietro Lorenzetti to Lorenzo Monaco, and proposed as one of five predella panels from an altarpiece/polyptych Lorenzo executed for a chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence between 1398 and 1400.

the digitally reconstructed altarpiece by lorenzo monaco for the church of santa maria del carmine in florence has a virgin and child at the center, with two prophets or probably evangelists on either side, all on gold ground with gothic gilded frame elements, and a row of tiny landscape paintings of other saints mostly outdoors, on the predella underneath.
Piero di Giovanni’s Carmine Polyptych as it would look if everyone lent their pieces to the Galleria dell’Accademia like they were asked. via wikipedia

It turned up at Sotheby’s in 1988, then again in 2005, and was to be part of the first reuniting of the polyptych in the 2006 Lorenzo retrospective at the Galleria dell’Accademia. It didn’t sell, and I don’t know that it was lent to the show, but the wilderness geology of the various predella panels would look great together.

a square painting of oil on gold leaf on panel by mark leckey which is centered on the unusual dome/hut-shaped cave from lorenzo monaco's st jerome, which is flanked by stone outcroppings on either side, and with three towers of a hilltop town or cirtadel small in the background. the square format gives much more room for a gold ground sky. from mark leckey's bandcamp
from Mark Leckey’s Carry me into the wilderness, 2022, via bandcamp

When Mark Leckey made a gold-ground painting for his 2022 audio work, Carry me into the wilderness, he gave a shout out to Lorenzo Monaco, where he got the cave, but he squared it up, and added a hilltop city or citadel. And the hermit saint who wasn’t there was Saint Anthony. While the possible theological nuances of Leckey’s saintswapping are lost on me, I find this image of the empty hermit’s cave resonates with the central sample of Carry me into the wilderness: a recording Leckey made of himself being overcome by an instant of natural beauty while in a park during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. The liberated hermit here, was him, and us.