St. Jerome was known for his writing. He translated the Hebrew Scriptures from Hebrew to Latin, which was unusual at the time since most people translated it from a controversial text called the Septuagint, also called The Greek Old Testament. He is the second most prolific writer of in ancient Latin Christianity. The first is Augustine of Hippo, who actually had no problem with the original Septuagint.

As a result, perhaps, he is the patron of translators, librarians, and encyclopedists as well as archaeologists, students, Biblical Scholars, and against anger, the latter of which I believe stems from his widely known bad temper.

As a student in Rome, he indulged his hedonistic side, but also attended the catacombs of Rome to visit the martyrs and Apostles there. There were early inscriptions and wall art that I imagine he studied, although he referred to the place as giving the feeling of the terrors of hell.

To put it simply, Jerome was a person of contradictions, some of which can be sourced as his being a student, a constant learner, and a voracious reader and writer. He had a group of women who surrounded him that read his scholarly works, and several were turned towards a life of consecrated virginity and the ascetic monastic life. This had a negative impact on these wealthy women’s donations, and he became at odds with the Roman clergy.

He is considered a saint in the Catholic Church (and a Doctor of the Church there), Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, and Anglican.

His iconography is often depicted in libraries and/or scriptoriums surrounded by books, parchment, vellum, and writing implements. He sits at a desk, holding a quill. He is also depicted with a lion having apocryphally removed a thorn from one’s paw.

In my sketch below, I have chosen to leave the lion and the saint outside the view as we look into his small cell of scholarly works.