"One of the most famous and best loved pictures by the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer is his engraving of 'St. Jerome in His [Study].' Jerome, the perfect example of the Christian scholar and thinker, is seated undisturbed at his desk in the peaceful seclusion of his well-ordered study. The scene idealizes the vita contemplativa, life in the service of God, and the learned tradition, for Jerome, who once dreamt that he heard a voice declare him more a Ciceronian than a Christian, has his books near at hand and is writing another. The room may very well have been the study room of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, Durer's closest friend, or the library room of the sanctuary which Conrad Mutian named his beata tranquillitas..."
Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1963), 1.
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