03 — ARTWORK
St John the Baptist
- MEDIUM
- Oil on canvas, 94 x 131 cm
- TYPE
- Religious
PALETTE
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- FILE
- 1073 × 774 px · JPEG
COMMENTARY
UNDERLINED TERMS ARE DEFINED IN THE GLOSSARY.
In around 1605 Caravaggio dealt with St John the Baptist in two splendid compositions, one in the Kansas City Galleryan upper story, similar to a tribune, running along the side of a building and open on one side to the interior; in a church (basilica) above the side aisles, over the ambulatory (central-plan building) and also over the west end. The gallery was used to keep certain groups of worshippers apart (women, noblemen)., the other in the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica in Rome. The former is laid out vertically, the latter horizontally. Both lend themselves to a modernistic reading aimed at pointing out a certain air between contempt and arrogance. In effect what we are dealing with here are splendid exercises in modeling the body through the play of light and shadow.
In the version now in Kansas City, the figure is set before a dense curtain of plants; in that in Rome, there is only the trunk of a cypress tree, on the left. Both are admirable feats of painting, and it is understandable that collectors competed with each other for the artist's works. Caravaggio in turn knew how to make apparently uninteresting religious themes into paintings desirable even for his aristocratic patrons.
CITE THIS RECORD — BIBTEX
@online{wga-r9d4fbf402a1ce8,
author = {Krén, Emil and Marx, Daniel},
title = {St John the Baptist by CARAVAGGIO},
organization = {{Web Gallery of Art}},
date = {2026-09-09},
url = {https://beta.wga.hu/artists/caravaggio-r877ee03cc951f7/st-john-the-baptist-r9d4fbf402a1ce8},
urldate = {2026-09-09},
langid = {english}
}ACCESSED 2026-09-09. REPLACE THE AUTHOR FIELD WITH THE COMMENTARY AUTHOR WHERE ONE IS NAMED.
