At an unknown date after Leonardo's death, the panel was cut into five pieces before eventually being restored into its original form (minus a very small triangle).

The oil draft of an unfinished painting depicts Saint Jerome in advanced age during his retreat to the Syrian desert, where he lived the life of a hermit.

[4][5] According to Bent, Leonardo may be seen as experiencing remorse either for his ordeal or his transgression which allowed him to identify more closely with the suffering depicted in the Saint Jerome oil sketch.

Until recently accounts of its discovery were based on different variants of a popular legend, according to which the cardinal would have discovered the part of the panel with the saint's torso serving as a table top or box lid in a shop in Rome.

Not long afterwards the cardinal, visiting the premises of a Roman art dealer — probably the Corrazzetto antiques shop on Piazza Navona, which he is known to have frequented — found a panel painting in the same style, but with a hole in the place where the head should have been.

He rushed home to his residence at the Palazzo Falconieri, brought the head to the mentioned antiques shop, and to his delight discovered that the two pieces fitted together exactly.

It seems that after selling the head, the Camuccini brothers had glued the remaining pieces back together and disposed of them on the Roman art market, no doubt for a paltry price.

[9] The repaired panel was sold in the cardinal’s posthumous sale, eventually to be acquired by Pope Pius IX, who installed it in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, now part of the Vatican Museums.

[12] From June 10 to September 20, 2022 it was loaned to an exhibition at Clos-Lucé near Amboise, Leonardo’s residence during the last year of his life that he spent in France in the service of King Francis I.