Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness

Camel hair, reed, lamb

John the Baptist arrives with three signs and rarely needs a fourth: a garment of camel hair or animal skin, a slender cross made of reed, and a lamb. The name of the third is itself a quotation — the phrase about the lamb of God that the Gospels put in his mouth — so the animal beside him is doing the work of a caption. The word wilderness in a title of his is not scene-setting either; the desert is where the tradition places him, and it is part of the identification.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1625 and gives Private Collection as the location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under male portraiture, Religion, cultural heritage under its mythological heading, and Fantasy, with Baroque as the style and Flemish as the nationality; the measured colour families are brown and yellow.

The most repeated name here

25 titles in this catalogue contain the words John the Baptist, which makes him one of the most frequently named figures in it. That frequency is a consequence of the attribute set being unusually portable: the skin and the reed work at any age, in any format, alone or in a crowd, which is why the same figure can appear as an infant, an adolescent and a bearded man without ever becoming unrecognisable.