The doorway is neither straightforwardly a framing device, nor a naturalistically depicted element in a realistic scene. The tonal contrast between the radiant umber stone and the shadowy interior of the 'study' is quite extreme at the top of the picture, but less so at the bottom, where soft shadows slant away from the door's corners and crawl up the side of Jerome's desk. By contrast with the depth and complexity of the interior, the articulation of the door is comically restrained- the capitals on either side of the arch are reduced to plain outlines, with the whole assemblage topped by a ludicrous miniature bauble. The distinction between the 'interior' and 'exterior' is profound and very noticeable but not total; the door appears to occupy an odd ambivalent point, neither fully part of, nor genuinely separate from, the rest of the painting. Its reflexive self-consciousness passes to us; we are aware of ourselves looking, of stepping inside the frame, because it literally shows the 'threshold' between our space and that shown inside the painting.
Sitting on the step of this threshold are an object and two creatures- a quail, a peacock, and a golden bowl. The hard-headed author of this site instructs us that "the peacock and partridge have no importance to the story of St. Jerome"- although, like many objects in Renaissance paintings they possess symbolic values. It is difficult to determine exactly what these are, however, and I don't want to try, because what is interesting is not so much what they mean as how they appear. The birds both strike the same pose: full profile, looking dignified, puffed-up and somewhat heraldic. In this, they almost could be mimicking Jerome- perhaps more so the pensive quail than the graceful peacock. But there is also something lifeless about their perfect stillness, which is is magnified by their positioning. The bowl and birds are all in a row, rather neatly lined up but positioned slightly incidentally, neither equally spaced nor symmetrical around the centre of the arch. Each looks 'placed', and clearly none is in motion. This isn't natural or random, but neither is it purely symbolic and rational. It is most reminiscent of the deliberate, well-groomed randomness of still-lives or the backgrounds of portrait interiors. In short, it is tempting to read a kind of equivalence across the three, to see all three as 'objects' after a fashion.
The question which this raises is, should this equivalence be read more generally across the painting? Is Jerome, sitting inert in his chair, also an object?
