The Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John

An attribute given to a child

Two saints are named here and one of them is an infant. John the Baptist appears in Western painting at three ages, and the youngest is the strangest: a small child holding a reed cross, sometimes a scroll, placed beside another small child. The signs are exactly the adult signs, reduced. That is a real oddity of the system — the attribute does not grow with the person, because its job is recognition rather than description. Elizabeth, named alongside him, is given the plainest identifier of all: age, and proximity to him.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1506 and gives the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany as its location. The dimensions are 51.5 x 42 cm, an upright at domestic scale. It is filed under group portraiture, cultural heritage in both its religious and mythological headings, and Fantasy, with High Renaissance as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is ochre.

The most-named figure here

25 titles in this catalogue contain the words John the Baptist. The count is a consequence of how portable his signs are: skin, reed, lamb. They work on an infant, on an adolescent seated on rock, and on a bearded man in a desert, which means one saint can occupy three completely different kinds of picture without ever needing a caption.