Focus on Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (Leonardo) and discuss the Provenance.
The panel has been reduced in size and the remaining part was cut into five parts at some point in its history and was reassembled for the early 19th-century collector, Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular legend has it that the cardinal discovered the part of the panel with the saint's torso being offered as a table top or box lid in a shop in Rome. Five years later, he found another piece being used as a wedge for shoemaker's bench. Whatever the circumstances of Fesch's finding the parts, the repaired panel was sold by his descendants to Pope Pius IX, who installed it in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, now part of the Vatican Museums. The Saint Jerome was once believed to have been part of the collection of the painter Angelica Kauffman, but this theory too has been rejected by recent scholars.
Napoleon Vatican Museums Rome Angelica Kauffman Napoleon Bonaparte Cardinal Fesch Jerome Pope Pius IX