When leonardo, in the waning years of the plague, depicted another extremely popular male saint, the penitent Jerome in the wilderness (fig. 71), he employed what is sometimes called the “dark manner” of the Adoration of the Magi, where light forms emerge from a tenebrous background. His powerful painting of c. 1480–82, now in the Vatican, is probably contemporaneous with the Adoration and was left in a similarly unfinished state. The Saint Jerome may have been intended for the Benedictine church and religious complex of La Badia in Florence, another long-standing institutional client of Leonardo's father. Perhaps not coincidentally, Filippino Lippi supplied the monks there with a painting of the subject in the later 1480s; Lippi, it should be recalled, had earlier fulfilled Leonardo's abandoned commissions for the Palazzo della Signoria and S. Donato a Scopeto.

At a certain point, Leonardo may have begun to recommend Lippi for projects that he was unable to complete. As his works attest, the younger artist well understood and sought to emulate the older master's innovations. Lippi's compositional drawings show his desire to achieve the intricate, comprehensive unity of Leonardo's Adoration, and his Badia Saint Jerome is reminiscent of the Vatican work. Leonardo must have admired his abilities (and appreciated his imitation) and, perhaps, felt a special bond with an artist who was similarly defined by his illegitimate birth. Lippi, on at least one occasion, apparently tried to reciprocate Leonardo's goodwill and generosity, when, in 1500, he asked him to take over a commission for an altarpiece for the church of SS. Annunziata, a double-sided panel with a Deposition from the Cross on the front and an Assumption of the Virgin on the back. (Reverting to the usual pattern, Leonardo, for unknown reasons, aborted the project, and several years later, Lippi executed the Deposition and Perugino the Assunta.)