An attribute that arrives after the saint

John the Baptist is normally identified by camel hair, a reed cross and a lamb. The subject this title names produces a different sign altogether — the dish. Wherever a charger appears in a scene of execution or is carried by a young woman, the tradition reads the Baptist, and the head becomes an attribute of the person holding it rather than of the man it belonged to. It is the one case in the system where the saint is named by an object that only exists because he no longer does.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the canvas to 1608 and gives St. Johns Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, as its location — a working church, and a building dedicated to the saint the picture names. The dimensions are 361 x 520 cm. Of the 19 works by this artist in this collection, that makes it the largest by recorded measurement, and by a wide margin. It is filed under group portraiture and Religion, with Baroque and Tenebrism as the styles and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

Tenebrism at five metres

A picture built out of darkness with light admitted narrowly behaves differently at this size. There is room for figures to be separated by empty wall rather than crowded, and the lit area becomes a small part of a very large surface. The record fixes the measurement; what a viewer does with that distance is what the format asks.