Antoon van Dyck, a Flemish painter trained in the workshop of Pieter Paul Rubens, painted this canvas during his long stay in Italy, when he moved from Venice to Mantua to stay at the Gonzaga court. The lesson of the master Rubens is still present in this masterpiece, the work of a now mature and fully established artist, evident above all in the rendering of the figures and their complexions. The sober brushwork and the attention to the modulation of light effects, however, stand out as distinctive features of Van Dyck's language, influenced by Venetian painting and in particular by Titian.

The subject of the painting is easily recognisable: the sleeping child symbolizes childhood, while maturity and youth are represented by a vigorous armed man and a young woman who turns to him offering roses with a seductive gesture; the bent, white-haired man behind them is instead a symbol of old age.

The work is constructed according to an elliptical motion that from the whiteness of the child's body, abandoned in sleep, continues along the woman's arm up to her face. An intense and trembling gaze unites the two young people, while the man, with a confident gesture, touches his beloved's arm. The old man in the distance, pointing his finger downwards towards the child, seems to ideally close the path. This circular progression wants to express man's abandonment to the inexorable passage of time.

According to what was handed down by Giovanni Pietro Bellori, the painting was painted by the artist for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a refined and avid collector, known among his contemporaries for being one of the greatest admirers of the promising Lombard painter.

The painting represents Saint Jerome, doctor of the Church, intent on studying the Holy Scriptures which according to tradition were translated by him from Greek to Latin. The saint is in fact presented for his qualities as a man of studies, portrayed as an elderly humanist bent by the complex exegesis of the sacred text.

The compositional partition into two large fields of colour, characterized by warm tones - such as the saint's complexion and the purple cloak - and cold ones - the open book on which the skull stands out and the white cloth - seems to want to emphasize a symbolic dialogue between contents of opposite nature: life and death, past and present.