For broad comedy the picture of S. Jerome and the lion on the right wall is the best.  The story tells us that S. Jerome was one day sitting with the brethren listening to a holy lesson when a lion came hobbling painfully into the monastery.  The brethren fled, but S. Jerome, like Androcles, approached the beast, and finding that it had a sore foot, commanded the others to return and minister to it.  This they did, and the lion was ever attached to the monastery, one of its duties being to take care of an ass.  Carpaccio has not spared the monks:  he makes their terror utterly absurd in the presence of so puzzled and gentle a man-eater.  In the next picture, the death of the saint, we see the lion again, asleep on the right, and the donkey quietly grazing at the back.  As an impressive picture of the death of a good man it can hardly be called successful; but how could it be, coming immediately after the comic Jerome whom we have just seen?  Carpaccio’s mischief was a little too much for him—­look at the pince-nez of the monk on the right reading the service.

Then we have S. Jerome many years younger, busy at his desk.  He is just thinking of a word when (the camera, I almost said) when Carpaccio caught him.  His tiny dog gazes at him with fascination.  Not bad surroundings for a saint, are they?  A comfortable study, with a more private study leading from it; books; scientific instruments; music; works of art (note the little pagan bronze on the shelf); and an exceedingly amusing dog.  I reproduce the picture opposite page 82.

Two pictures with scriptural subjects represent Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, and Matthew (an Evangelist rarely painted in Venice, where his colleague Mark has all the attention) being called from the receipt of custom.  And finally there is the delightful and vivid representation of S. Tryphonius and the basilisk.  This picture, of which I give a reproduction opposite page 76, is both charming and funny.  The basilisk is surely in the highest rank of the comic beasts of art.  It seems to be singing, but that is improbable; what it is unmistakably not doing is basilisking.  The little saint stands by in an attitude of prayer, and all about are comely courtiers of the king.  In the distance are delightful palaces in the Carpaccio style of architecture, cool marble spaces, and crowded windows and stairs.  The steps of the raised temple in which the saint and the basilisk perform have a beautiful intarsia of foliage similar to that on the Giants’ Staircase at the Doges’ Palace.  So much for the ingredients of this bewitching picture; but as to what it is all about I have no knowledge, for I have looked in vain among books for any information.  I find a S. Tryphonius, but only as a grown man; not a word of his tender years and his grotesque attendant.  How amusing it would be to forget the halo and set the picture as a theme among a class of fanciful fantastic writers, to fit it with an appropriate fairy story!  For of course it is as absolute a fairy tale illustration as the dragon pictures on the other wall.