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.