São Jerónimo, a cabaça, a hera e o rícino

Saint Jerome in His Study
Albrecht Dürer
1514

Daqui

    "Suspended above the threshold in the immediate foreground is a large, ripe gourd still retaining its leaves and vine as if freshly cut from the garden. The meticulous care with which this engraving is composed and our general knowledge of Dürer's use of plant symbolism indicate that so prominent a motif must have some particular significance. Specific identification of the plant itself poses no difficulty. It is a common variety of gourd classified in the Latin genus Cucurbita and known in German as Kürbis. A woodcut illustration taken from the German edition of a herbal published in 1485 provides an adequate though crudely schematized likeness.

    Dürer's inclusion of the gourd is indeed meaningful, for this very plant was the subject of a philological controversy which concerned Jerome for at least a decade. The debate to which it refers involves a biblical passage from the Book of Jonah (4:6): "And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd." In his edition of the Latin Vulgate Jerome translates the name of this plant as hedera, a type of ivy, rejecting the older Latin reading of cucurbita or gourd. As we learn from his commentary on the Book of Jonah written ca. 396, Jerome was attacked fiercely for this alteration. In the lengthy section of his commentary devoted to this verse Jerome argues with satirical vehemence against his critics

    Characteristically, Jerome concentrates on the Hebrew text as a basis for his interpolation. Jerome recognizes that the Hebrew term for the plant - ciceion or kikayon - refers to the castor oil plant which grew abundantly in Palestine. He notes that the botanical nature of this leafy vine which sprouts quickly and withers in the sunlight accords well with that described in the Bible. Since Jerome knows of no Latin or Greek word for the castor oil plant he selects hedera which he implies is physically closer than the cucurbita to the ciceion. Furthermore, he insists that the Greek term used in the Septuagint version of the Jonah passage is more correctly rendered hedera than cucurbita as earlier translators had maintained. The conflict over Jonah's bower flared up again later in Africa, provoking an important exchange of letters between Jerome and Augustine in the years 403-04."

Parshall, Peter W., "Albrecht Dürer's Saint Jerome in his Study: A Philological Reference" in The Art Bulletin, vol. 53, nº. 3 (Setembro 1971), pp. 303-305.