Pietro Annigoni (Milan 1910 - Florence 1988) ECSTASY OF ST. GEROME oil on canvas, 110x110 initialled lower right on the reverse: on the stretcher signed and initialled ECSTASY OF SAINT GIROLAMO oil on canvas, 110x110 cm initialled lower right back: on the stretcher signed and initialled The work, an early masterpiece that appeared in public for the first time in 2018 after decades, is published in the Maestro's monograph published by Gonnelli around 1945 c. with the title San Girolamo in the Mondadori Collection and the year 1936, although only Annigoni's usual initials "Cttt" in the bottom right-hand corner are indicated on the painting, a tempera grassa on canvas. The date is confirmed, however, by a preparatory charcoal sketch in a private collection, with the figure of the saint in the bottom centre. Annigoni is said to have reproposed a similar subject in 1949 for the chapel of Margherita Venerosi Pesciolini's Villa di Lama now in the Museo della Misericordia in Florence. The painting depicts Saint Jerome (sometimes mistaken for Saint Bruno) during his hermitic phase in the region of Chalkidiki, north-eastern Greece. He is depicted in the act of ecstatic prayer according to a composition that responds in part to traditional iconography. Annigoni develops his relationship with nature, an impervious and wild place, marked by disturbing presences such as the demonic figure barely sketched out at the base of the hill where the Saint has ascended to turn to the Lord and free himself from worldly temptations. The painter frames the theme of the salvific process through a period of individual and solitary purification. The mortification of the body in contact with a hostile environment acts as a counterpoint to human weaknesses that seem on the verge of being overwhelmed before the looming dark elements amplified by a steely nature. Inspired by the places around Dervio on Lake Como that he frequented as a boy on holiday with his parents, the bright landscape in the background contrasts with the gloomy atmosphere in the foreground, in a kind of escape and redemption for the penitent man who entrusts himself to the Most High. In this composition, so calligraphic and precise, inspired by the sensibility of the Flemish painters to whom Annigoni looked with extreme attention in those years, one can perceive that sense of vertigo that reflects the fragility of the human soul in the struggle between good and evil, as in The Tempest of 1939, which proposes similar atmospheric and psychological attitudes. Emanuele Barletti