This month, I offer a lovely poem, the seventh in a series, by Adele Ne Jame, a first-generation Lebanese American who has lived in Hawai’i since 1969. She has written extensively about Hawai’i and Lebanon in her poetry collections, including Field Work, The South Wind, Poems, Land and Spirit, and in her new manuscript, First Night at the Beirut Commodore and Other Poems. She has taught poetry at the university level in Hawai’i since 1986, and she has served as the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has been published in journals such as the Georgetown Review, Ploughshares, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, the Denver Quarterly, Poetry Kanto, and the Notre Dame Review. Her many awards include a National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, a Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, a Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize and an Eliot Cades Award for Literature. Her poems have been exhibited as broadsides at the Sharjah/ Dubai International Biennial, UAE and at the Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, Michigan.
The speaker in the poem draws an analogy between the artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), High Renaissance Italian polymath, and the subject of his unfinished painting, Saint Jerome (c.347-420), early Christian priest, theologian and translator, describing them as “brothers in suffering.” Living as an ascetic for four to five years in the Syrian desert, later near Bethlehem for 34 years, Jerome was “beautiful in steadfastness.” Often troubled by bouts of melancholy, Leonardo was “moved by the hermetic life of the saint,” and “he re-worked for 36 years relentlessly” the unfinished painting of Jerome. While the speaker proclaims that the painting honors “the contemplative, living spirit of both men,” the same can be said of the poem itself.
One aspect of the “re-working” of the painting may be of particular interest to physicians and medical students. Leonardo began St. Jerome Praying in the Syrian Desert around 1480. It was one of his first anatomical paintings. He managed to get the neck muscle perfectly right. In a drawing he made of Judas around 1495 in preparation for the The Last Supper, he mistakenly showed the sternocleidomastoid, which goes from the collarbone up the side of the neck, as a single muscle, when in fact, it is a pair of muscles. But in his 1510 drawings, when he was dissecting bodies to study their anatomy, he would get it right. So, how did he get something right in 1480 when he only figured out what was right thirty years later? The answer lies in the poem in its reference to Leonardo’s “relentlessly” striving for perfection: he went back and corrected the original that he had done in 1480. According to Walter Isaacson in his bestselling biography, Leonardo da Vinci (2017), this theory, posited by Leonardo scholar Martin Clayton, “was supported by infrared analysis, which showed that the dual neck muscles were not part of the original underdrawing and that they were painted with a technique different from the other parts” (86).
Equally fascinating is the portion of a skull’s face visible in St. Jerome’s chest and abdomen projection, an image analyzed by G. Keshelava in his article “Skull anatomy in Saint Jerome in the Wilderness by Leonardo da Vinci,” published in World Neurosurgery 2023; 176: 82-84. The image shows the “orbit, the frontal bone, the nasal aperture and the zygomatic process.” In 1489, da Vinci obtained human skulls and began to study their internal structures. Keshelava notes that the timeline is “inconsistent with the date of the creation” of the painting. Again, the discrepancy is explained by da Vinci returning to the painting and using his knowledge of skull anatomy to “describe the skull with his usual originality.”
Another skull is hidden in an arc represented as the tail of the lion supposedly tamed by Saint Jerome. According to M.M. Valenca’s article, “A midline sagittal brain view depicted in da Vinci’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness,” the image “is of a hemicranium (midline sagittal view) showing the intracranial dura, including the falx and tentorium, and venous system with the sinuses and major deep veins.” While da Vinci was following the tradition of including skulls with an image of the saint to represent the transience of life, Valenca notes, “This may have been the first time when the intracranial bones and the major deep venous vessels were illustrated.”
The poem was first published in Mudfish 22 Poetry, Art and Fiction, ed. Jill Hoffman. New York: Box Turtle Press; 2021.
The editorial assistance of Cathy Chance Harvey, PhD, of Tylertown, in the preparation of this poem is gratefully acknowledged. Physicians are invited to submit poems for publication in the Journal either by email at drluciuslampton@gmail.com or regular mail to the Journal, attention: Dr. Lampton.—Ed.
After Leonardo da Vinci’s Unfinished Painting, St. Jerome Praying in the Syrian Desert
At the artist’s death, as he wished,
sixty beggars carried tapers
behind his casket lighting the way
to the Church of Saint Florentin—
so that in death as in life (when he
bought caged birds to release
into the open air) he gave gifts.
Despondent, though, at times,
he was moved by the hermetic life of
the saint suffering desert penitence for years.
They say Jerome had a weakness for women,
though a true friend, I’d like to believe,
he was beloved by them—and later
by the wild animal he tended, removing
a deeply embedded thorn in its paw pad.
The lion, they say, thereafter never left him
but lay at his feet while he worked
translating verse, day after day
Hebrew and Greek into Latin—
this for the rest of his life.
The artist knew, no matter the brilliance,
they were brothers in suffering,
gathering strength from distress
so that now we see in our hearts
as the artist did: Jerome powerful
in his agony, beautiful in steadfastness.
Finally, the unfinished painting
he re-worked for 36 years relentlessly
until he died— lost, cut in two pieces for
a shoemaker’s table, then recovered, restored,
revered and illuminated starkly
in an otherwise darkened gallery to honor
the contemplative, living spirit of both men.
Hearing the artist’s last words,
we welcome the sting and the gift of them:
I have offended God and mankind
for my work did not reach
the quality it should have.
I thought I was learning to live;
I was only learning to die.
We know that he began every canvas, though,
with a wash of black so that he could paint
the light for those who could bear to see it.
Note: the painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was on loan from the Vatican
—Adele Ne Jame