Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
When the attribute is a gesture
John the Baptist arrives in painting with a fixed kit: camel hair or a rough skin, a slender reed cross, sometimes a scroll, sometimes a lamb. This title names something else — a pointing hand. The gesture belongs to the words the Gospel of John puts in his mouth on seeing Christ, and it became an attribute in its own right, as stable and as legible as any object. A hand can identify a saint, provided the tradition has agreed on where it points. 25 titles in this collection name the Baptist, which makes him the most frequently named figure here after the Virgin.
What the record holds
The catalogue dates the work to 1655 and gives the Art Institute of Chicago as its location. The dimensions are 270.2 x 184.5 cm — a tall canvas, well above life size for a standing figure. It is filed under male portraiture, Religion, Fantasy, and religious and mythological cultural heritage, with Baroque as the style and Spanish as the nationality; the measured colour family is ochre.
Scale and the pointing arm
At this height the record is describing a picture built for a wall rather than a table, seen from below and from a distance. That matters for an attribute made of a gesture: an object in the hand has to be small enough to read close up, but an arm extended across a canvas nearly three metres tall stays legible from the far end of a room.
Sources
6 references- Murillo, Bartolomé Estebán — Getty ULAN
Spanish painter and draftsman, 1618-1682
- Bartolomé Esteban Murillo — Wikipedia
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo ( mure-IL-oh, m(y)uu-REE-oh, Spanish: [baɾtoloˈme esˈteβam muˈɾiʎo]; late December 1617, baptised 1 January 1618 – 3 April 1682) was a Spanish Baroque painter. Although he is best known for his religious works, Mur
- Saint John the Baptist Pointing to Christ — Wikidata
description: painting by Bartolomé Estéban Murillo; inception: 1655; dimensions: 270.2 × 184.5 cm; collection: Art Institute of Chicago
- artic.edu — record for "Saint John the Baptist Pointing to Christ"
Primary source record for this work (artic.edu).
- John the Baptist — Wikipedia
John the Baptist (c. 6 BC – c. AD 30) was a religious preacher active in the area of the Jordan River in the early first century AD. He is also known as Saint John the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodoxy, Eastern Catholicism, and Oriental Ortho
- Bartolomé Estéban Murillo - Saint John the Baptist Pointing to Christ - 1960.2 - Art Institute of Chicago — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
