Bartolomeo Passerotti for the “Strazzaroli”: «St. Jerome» of Dublin

Abstract

The St. Jerome (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland), coming from the Fesch collection and already attributed to Michelangelo, has long since been returned to Bartolomeo Passerotti, but is still little known in the artist’s catalog. This contribution intends to identify the St. Jerome with the lost altarpiece of the powerful “Compagnia degli Strazzaroli”, which the Bolognese sources of the seventeenth-eighteenth century (Masini, Malvasia and Oretti’s Notize) recall as executed by Bartolomeo Passerotti, and to propose a chronological placement of the Irish painting, inserting it within the production of the Bolognese painter.