St John in the Desert by Domenico Veneziano is one of the most curious paintings of the patron saint of Florence I have ever seen – and sadly it is no longer in Florence but in the National Gallery of Art Washington, DC
The image shows the cousin of Christ – before he was sainted – preparing for his vigil of life in the desert , preaching and preparing the faithful for Baptism. He is exchanging his fashionable clothes for a goat skin – casually thrown over his shoulder like the wing of an angel – and his halo looks uncannily like a yellow frisbee with a red border.
Unusually, he is shown as a beardless young man as opposed to the wild and hairy creature portrayed in most paintings of the saint, but as he was actually only six months older than Christ, and had spent some years in the desert before his fatal run-in with Herodias this is probably a more accurate portrayal of John as he undergoes his transformation..
It also gives the artist the opportunity to show his awareness of ancient Roman Sculpture – Classical art being one of the key influences of the development of the Renaissance – as displayed so beautifully in the current Springtime of the Renaissance exhibition at the Strozzi Palace.
The other atmospheric element of this painting is the colouration – with so many white futuristic shapes it reminds me of Superman’s Ice Palace – but the delicate light affect was created by this fresco artist adding extra oil to his palette
There is some controversy about the artist Domenico Veneziano because his name suggests that he originated from Venice, but most of his paintings were done in Florence – and he is generally accepted as one of the founder members of the school of Florentine painting, – but the Venetians were much more interested in oil than the pre-Leonardo Florentines, so maybe that was a trick he brought with him from Venice?
This painting was completed between 1445 -50 as part of an altarpiece for the Church of Santa Lucia dei Magnoli in Florence and is in fact part of the predella of the huge painting by the same artist now hung in the Uffizi Gallery.
The painting depicts four saints:- St. John the Baptist in his traditional symbolic goats hair and staff gear, St. Zenobius (First Bishop and one of the original patron saints of Florence), St. Lucy with her eyes on a plate (who gave her name to the church where the painting was originally based) and St. Francis, who is reputed to have stayed in the church when he visited Florence in 1211. In the centre is the Virgin mary with the Christ Child.
This is a famous picture in which the artist showed off his ability by his painstaking use of geometrical perspective, an innovation introduced in Italian early Renaissance art to give substance and depth to paintings .
No Byzantine floor would ever have receded into the distance like this one!
Thanks, Penny. It is really quite a fascinating painting with the very placid look on St John’s face and the weird, surrealistic mountains in the background. I wonder how it made its way from Florence to National Gallery in the U.S.? Quite a shame, really.
Yes – he does seem quite resigned to this life change doesn’t he?
It seems to happen quite a lot that people didn’t value the predella -( whilst I love them because they tell you about the doings of the guys shown in the main painting – often in a very childlike or primitive way) – but when it was considered less important they seem to have often been broken up – other parts of the same predella are now in Berlin’s Staatliche Museen and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK. A similar painting of St Francis receiving his stigmata in a very similar mountainous background is also in Washington – in fact I visited LaVerna , where this miracle was supposed to have happened a few weeks ago ( it is in Casentino near where we had our writers retreat) I think I might write about that tomorrow…?