Saint John the Baptist Revealing Christ to the Disciples

The attribute is a gesture

John the Baptist's signs are a camel-hair garment, a reed cross and a lamb, but the subject named here depends on a fourth that is not an object at all: the pointing hand. The convention comes from the phrase the Gospels give him about the lamb of God, and it fixes the arm outstretched, the finger extended, the eyes elsewhere. It is one of the few identifications in this system that consists of a body doing something rather than a body holding something, and it works because the direction of the point is legible from any distance.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1655 and gives the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, UK as its location. No dimensions are recorded. The style is given as Baroque and the nationality as Italian; the measured colour family is brown.

Filed entirely as landscape

The subject categories on this entry contain no religious heading whatsoever. The index files it under Landscapes, Forest and Mountain, with Botanicals and Tree beneath them — a Baptist subject recorded as woodland. That is not a mistake so much as a description of proportion: in a picture of this type the figures are small and the country is most of the surface. The gesture still does the naming; the record is measuring the acreage around it.