Quote of the day, 30 September: St. Teresa of Avila

Reading the Letters of St. Jerome so encouraged me that I decided to tell my father about my decision to take the habit, for I was so persistent in points of honor that I don’t think I would have turned back for anything once I told him.

Saint Teresa of Avila

The Book of Her Life, Chap. 3, no. 7

Teresa of Avila, St. 1985, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, translated from the Spanish by Kavanaugh, K; Rodriguez, O, ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: Saint Jerome by the famed Italian artist Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi, 1571–1610) was executed in oil on canvas and is found in the collections of Rome’s Galleria Borghese, which offers the following details about this stunning artwork:

The painting was probably executed for Scipione Borghese — perhaps to express gratitude for the latter’s help when the artist was in trouble with the law (1605) — and was the first work by Caravaggio to enter the Borghese collection. Jerome was one of the most venerated saints during the Counter-Reformation, partly because of his choice of exile from Rome to dedicate himself to translating the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin for the Vulgate. The figure is inserted in a composition dominated by parallel horizontal lines, and thus the saint’s head is placed on almost the same plane as the skull. The colours — essentially browns and whites, in addition to the extraordinary red of the cloak — are those used by the painter during his last years in Rome before his exile after he had killed a man.