Saint John at Patmos

Named by where he is

Patmos functions here the way a wheel or a set of keys functions elsewhere: it identifies. John the Evangelist is placed on that island by tradition, seated, writing or looking up from a book, and the setting alone is enough to distinguish him from the other Johns of the calendar. His fixed attribute is the eagle; the second, softer sign is his age, since he is conventionally shown young and beardless where the other apostles are old.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates this canvas to 1619 and gives the National Gallery in London as its location. No dimensions are recorded in this entry. It is filed under male portraiture and Religion, with Baroque as the style and Spanish as the nationality; the measured colour family of the image is brown.

Two Patmos pictures in one collection

The record also holds a Patmos subject of the 1480s by a Northern painter, in a different museum and a different medium of handling. Nothing connects them but the subject, and nothing more is claimed. The comparison is useful only for what it shows about attributes: the same island, the same eagle, the same young man, across a century and a half and two schools, and still legible on sight in both.