This panel, in muted tones of gray, or grisaille, once formed the outside wings of a triptych, the centerpiece of which is Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (now in the Staatliche Museen, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin, 551A). Instead of representing the fictive sculptures in a niche, Gossaert executed a sequential narrative within a forbidding uninterrupted landscape across two panels. St. Jerome kneels in prayer before an image of the crucified Christ, nearby are his cardinal's hat and robe and his companion, the lion. In the middle ground are episodes from the account of the saint's life from The Golden Legend: the theft of the donkey and Jerome extracting a thorn from the lion's paw. The saint's figure and draperies are as sharply defined and sculpturally rendered as the flinty masses of rock. The thick paint is handled with remarkable versatility and deftness, with virtuoso passages of wet-in-wet brushwork, feathering the strokes to soften contours of forms and scratching to define textures. (http://www.metmuseum.org)