The lion in the foreground is part of the traditional iconography of St. Jerome, and near it is a sleeping dog, an animal found frequently in Dürer's works, symbolizing loyalty.

Thomas Puttfarken suggests that while the scene is very close to the observer, Dürer did not intend the viewer to feel present: "the intimacy is not ours, but the saint's as he is engrossed in study and meditation" (94).

in Puttfarken, 94)Using a dried gourd hanging from the rafters, Dürer memorializes Jerome's courage, in the face of a long brewing philological controversy[1] with St. Augustine in his preference[2] for Greek over Latin nomenclature for the fast-growing plant known in Hebrew as קיקיון (qiyqayown) encountered only this once, in the Book of Jonah.

The Old Testament text closes abruptly (Jonah 4) with an epistolary warning[3] based on the emblematic trope of a fast-growing vine present in Persian narratives, and popularized widely in certain collections of Aesop's fables such as The Gourd and the Palm-tree.

Jerome elected to use hedera (from the Greek, meaning ivy) over the more common Latin cucurbita from which the related English plant name cucumber is derived, perhaps to avoid confusion while making a more perfect analogy to the typology of Christ "I am the Vine, you are the branches".