Saint John the Baptist

The young Baptist

John the Baptist has two standard ages in Western painting. As an infant he appears alongside the Christ child, and as a grown man he appears in the wilderness; between them sits a third, popular in sixteenth-century Italy, in which he is shown as an adolescent alone, seated on rock, with the reed cross and the animal skin. The attributes are the same in all three: skin or camel hair, a slender cross of reed, sometimes a scroll, sometimes a lamb. Only the body changes.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1553 and gives the Borghese Gallery in Rome as its location. No dimensions are recorded in this entry. It is filed under male portraiture, Religion, Fantasy and mythological cultural heritage, with Mannerism Late Renaissance as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour families are ochre and yellow.

What the style label predicts

Mannerism describes the phase of Italian painting after the High Renaissance: elongated limbs, poses held in torsion, a polished and often cool surface, space compressed rather than opened. A single seated youth is one of the subjects that suits it best, because everything the style is interested in — the twist, the contour, the finish of skin — has to happen inside one body. The reed cross does the naming; the handling is doing something else entirely.