Читать книгу The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures - Bryant - Страница 4

Correggio loved to paint darling babies, lovely angels, beautiful women and splendid men. In this picture of "the Madonna and St. Jerome," I want you specially to see St. Jerome and his lion. St. Jerome, a very noted man who lived four centuries after Christ, was the first person to translate the New Testament into Latin. It was called "The Vulgate," because of its common use in the Latin Church.

When St. Jerome was thirty years old he went away from the city of Rome and became a hermit and lived in desert places in the East. One day, so the story goes, as he sat at the gate of the monastery a lion came up limping as though he had been hurt. The other hermits ran away but St. Jerome went to meet the lion. The lion lifted up his paw and St. Jerome found a thorn in his foot. He took out the thorn and bound up the poor paw, so the lion stayed with St. Jerome and kept guard over an ass that brought the wood from the forest.

One day when the lion was asleep a caravan of merchants came along and stole the ass. The poor ashamed lion hung his head before the saint, and Jerome thought he had killed and eaten the ass. To punish him St. Jerome had him do the work of the ass and bring the wood from the forest. One day some time afterward the lion saw the ass coming down the road leading a caravan of camels. The Arabs often have an ass lead the camels. The lion knew that it was the stolen ass, so he led the caravan into the convent grounds. The merchant found that he was caught. St. Jerome was very glad to find that his lion was honest and true. Whenever you see a picture of a saint with a lion you must remember that it is St. Jerome, the great Latin scholar.