Focus on Saint Jerome in His Study (Dürer) and analyze the Jonah and the gourd vine.
Using a dried gourd hanging from the rafters, Dürer memorializes Jerome's courage, in the face of a long brewing philological controversy with St. Augustine in his preference for Greek over Latin nomenclature for the fast-growing plant known in Hebrew as קיקיון (qiyqayown) encountered only this once, in the Book of Jonah. The Old Testament text closes abruptly (Jonah 4) with an epistolary warning based on the emblematic trope of a fast-growing vine present in Persian narratives, and popularized widely in certain collections of Aesop's fables such as The Gourd and the Palm-tree. Jerome elected to use hedera (from the Greek, meaning ivy) over the more common Latin cucurbita from which the related English plant name cucumber is derived, perhaps to avoid confusion while making a more perfect analogy to the typology of Christ "I am the Vine, you are the branches". In fact Augustine's view had already prevailed by Dürer's time.
philological The Gourd and the Palm-tree Gourd Aesop's fables courage St. Augustine hedera cucurbita Jerome emblem gourd Old Testament Book of Jonah