Караваджоның Иоанн Креститель суреттері

Subject of eight paintings by Caravaggio
John the Baptist (sometimes called John in the Wilderness) was the subject of at least eight paintings by the Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). The story of John the Baptist is told in the Gospels. John was the cousin of Jesus, and his calling was to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah. He lived in the wilderness of Judea between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, "his raiment of camel's hair, and a leather girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey." He baptised Jesus in the Jordan, and was eventually killed by Herod Antipas when he called upon the king to reform his evil ways. John was frequently shown in Christian art, identifiable by his bowl, reed cross, camel's skin and lamb. The most popular scene prior to the Counter Reformation was of John's baptism of Jesus, or else the infant Baptist together with the infant Jesus and Mary his mother, frequently supplemented by the Baptist's own mother St Elizabeth. John alone in the desert was less popular, but not unknown. For the young Caravaggio, John was invariably a boy or youth alone in the wilderness. This image was based on the statement in the Gospel of Luke that "the child grew and was strengthened in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his manifestation to Israel." These works allowed a religious treatment of the partly clothed youths he liked to paint at this period. Apart from these works showing John alone, mostly dated to his early years, Caravaggio painted three great narrative scenes of John's death: the great Execution in Malta, and two sombre Salomes with his head, one in Madrid, and one in London.

The ascription of this painting to Caravaggio is disputed – the alternative candidate is Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, an early follower. It is in the collection of the Museo Tesoro Catedralicio, Toledo (Spain), and John Gash speculates that it may have been one of the paintings done by Caravaggio for the prior of the Hospital of the Consolation, as Caravaggio's early biographer Mancini tells us. According to Mancini the prior "afterwards took them with him to his homeland"; unfortunately, one version of Mancini's manuscript says the prior's homeland was Seville, while another says Sicily. There was a Spanish prior of the hospital in 1593, and he may not have left until June 1595. Gash cites scholar A. E. Perez Sanchez's view that while the figure of the saint has certain affinities with Cavarozzi's style, the rest of the picture does not, "and the extremely high quality of certain passages, especially the beautifully depicted vine leaves is much more characteristic of Caravaggio." Gash also points to the gentle chiaroscuro and the delicate treatment of contours and features, and similar stylistic features in early works by Caravaggio such as The Musicians and Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy. If this and other paintings by Caravaggio were indeed in Seville at an early date they may have influenced Velázquez in his early works. However, the arguments in favour of Cavarozzi are strong, and he is known to have travelled to Spain about 1617–1619. on the Roman Corso. (The gallery also houses his Penitent Magdalene and Rest on the Flight into Egypt). The collectors ordering the copies would have been aware of a further level of irony: the pose adopted by the model is a clear imitation of that adopted by one of Michelangelo's famous ignudi on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (painted 1508 1512). The role of these gigantic male nudes in Michelango's depiction of the world before the Laws of Moses has always been unclear – some have supposed them to be angels, others that they represent the Neo Platonic ideal of human beauty – but for Caravaggio to pose his adolescent assistant as one of the Master's dignified witnesses to the Creation was clearly a kind of in joke for the cognoscenti. In 1601/02 Caravaggio was apparently living and painting in the palazzo of the Mattei family, inundated with commissions from wealthy private clients following the success of the Contarelli chapel where in 1600 he had displayed The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. It was one of the most productive periods in a productive career. Ciriaco Mattei's notebook records two payments to Caravaggio in July and December of that year, marking the beginning and completion of the original John the Baptist. The payment was a relatively modest 85 scudi, because John was a single figure. The copy may have been made at the same time or very soon after. In January of that year Caravaggio received a hundred and fifty scudi for Supper at Emmaus. For Vincenzo Giustiniani there was The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, and in January 1603 Ciriaco paid a hundred and twenty five scudi for The Taking of Christ. Each of these increased the immense popularity of Caravaggio among collectors – twenty copies survive of the Supper at Emmaus, more of the Taking of Christ. But for all this success, neither the Church itself, nor any of the religious Orders, had yet commissioned anything. The paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had been commissioned and paid for by private patrons, although the priests of San Luigi dei Francesi (which contains the chapel) had had to approve the result. Caravaggio's problem was that the Counter Reformation Church was extremely conservative – there had been a move to introduce an Index of Prohibited Images, and high ranking cardinals had published handbooks guiding artists, and more especially the priests who might commission artists or approve art, on what was and was not acceptable. And the playful crypto paganism of this private John the Baptist with its cross references to the out of favour Classicising humanism of Michelangelo and the High Renaissance, most certainly was not acceptable.</blockquote>

Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb has pointed out that the fourth Baptist seems like a psychic mirror image of the first, with all the signs reversed: the brilliant morning light which bathed the earlier painting has become harsh and almost lunar in its contrasts, and the vivid green foliage has turned to dry dead brown. There is almost nothing in the way of symbols to identify that this is indeed a religious image, no halo, no sheep, no leather girdle, nothing but the thin reed cross (a reference to Christ's description of John as "a reed shaken by the wind"). The painting demonstrates what Robb calls Caravaggio's "feeling for the drama of the human presence." This adolescent, almost adult, John seems locked in some private world known only to his creator. Caravaggio's conception of the saint as a seated, solitary figure, lacking almost any narrative identity (how do we know this is the Baptist? What is happening here?) was truly revolutionary. Artists from Giotto to Bellini and beyond had shown the Baptist as an approachable story, a symbol understandable to all; the very idea that a work should express a private world, rather than a common religious and social experience, was radically new.

This is one of two John the Baptists painted by Caravaggio in or around 1604 (possibly 1605). It is held in the Palazzo Corsini collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica. Like the John done for Ottavio Costa, the figure has been stripped of identifying symbols no belt, not even the "raiment of camel's hair", and the reed cross is only suggested. The background and surrounds have darkened even further, and again there is the sense of a story from which the viewer is excluded. Caravaggio was not the first artist to have treated the Baptist as a cryptic male nude there were prior examples from Leonardo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto and others – but he introduced a new note of realism and drama. His John has the roughened, sunburnt hands and neck of a labourer, his pale torso emerging with a contrast that reminds the viewer that this is a real boy who has gotten undressed for his modelling session – unlike Raphael's Baptist, who is as idealised and un individualised as one of his winged cherubs. Ask who this model actually is (or was), and the realism of the individual spills over as a record of Rome itself in the age of Caravaggio. Biographer Peter Robb cites Montaigne on Rome as a city of universal idleness, " the envied idleness of the higher clerics, and the frightening idleness of the destitute a city almost without trades or professions, in which the churchmen were playboys or bureaucrats, the laymen were condemned to be courtiers, all the pretty girls and boys seemed to be prostitutes, and all wealth was inherited old money or extorted new." It was not an age which welcomed an art that emphasised the real. John Gash treats it as by Caravaggio, pointing out the similarity in the treatment of the flesh to the Sleeping Cupid, recognised as by the artist and dating from his Malta period. The painting has been badly damaged, especially in the landscape. The work is known in two other variants, each slightly different. The theme of the young John drinking from a spring reflects the Gospel tradition that the Baptist drank only water during his period in the wilderness. The painting displays typically Caravaggist extreme chiaroscuro (use of light and shadow), and is also typical in taking a young John the Baptist as its subject, this time set in a dark landscape against an ominous patch of lighter sky. "The mechanics of drinking and the psychology of thirst are beautifully conveyed through the artful manipulation of limbs and the carefully constructed head".

This Reclining John the Baptist, is an oil painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, built in 1610 and is now kept in a private collection in Munich. This painting is one of the seven versions of the Lombard painter has dedicated to the theme of "Saint John", that John the Baptist as a child or as a teenager portrait. The canvas is identifiable with the painting that was at Palazzo Cellammare in Naples, at Costanza Colonna, Marchioness of Caravaggio, along with a work of the same subject (the San Giovanni Battista of the Borghese collection) and a Magdalene, as evidenced by the letter the Apostolic Nuncio in the Kingdom of Naples Deodato Gentile to Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli Borghese in Rome, on July 29, 1610 (Pacelli 1994, pp. 141–155). The three paintings were commissioned by its Borghese and were on the felucca that was supposed to bring their author from Naples to Rome, just before he died. Also from the letter of 29 July that, when Caravaggio was imprisoned in Palo, the paintings were shown to Naples from Costanza Colonna. Scipione Borghese was able to regain possession of one of the two St. John (the one currently on display at the Galleria Borghese ), while St. John's lying seized almost certainly Pedro Fernandez de Castro, VII Count of Lemos and viceroy of Naples from 1610 to 1616. Il painting He arrived in Spain in 1616, when the Count of Lemos, finished the vice regal office, left for Madrid Through the steps hereditary within the family went to Don Pedro Antonio, tenth Earl of Lemos, who was appointed viceroy of Peru in 1667 and was certainly responsible for the transfer of St. John lying in Latin America. After being in a private collection of El Salvador and then to Buenos Aires, the painting was brought in Bavaria following a lady of Argentina, just before the Second World War (Marini 2001, p. 574). The canvas was announced by Marini as autograph after the restoration carried out in Rome by Pico Cellini in 1977 78 and dated 1610 (Marini 1978, pp. 23–25, 41 42 illus. 3–5, figs. 15 25 ; Marini 1981, pp. 82 note 117, 45 fig. 10). The chronological position in the very last phase of life of the painter was confirmed not only by zeros (1998, pp. 28–45), in written communications from Stroughton (1987), Pico Cellini (1987), Pepper (1987), Spike ( 1988), Slatkes (1992) and Claudio Strinati (1997), but it should be noted also that Bologna (1992, p. 342) considered the work a copy of a lost original by the Neapolitan church of Sant'Anna dei Lombardi The hypothesis of the scholar (later ricredutosi Caroli in 1992 where he explicitly identified the painting of Monaco in San Giovanni that the Merisi was carrying on the felucca) is still unfounded, not knowing the original prototype of the Chapel Fenaroli, destroyed in ' old fire of the church, which were destroyed in the other two paintings by Caravaggio: The resurrection of Christ and St. Francis in the act of receiving the stigmata. This painting can not be confused with any other of St. John of Merisi, who have an origin and a commission documented; therefore its connection with the mentioned in the letters of Deodato Gentile to Scipione Borghese is certainly to be welcomed. In the languid pose of St. John are discernible Venetian memories: the reference is specifically to the Venuses and Danae of Giorgione and Titian, but also to the ancient representations of river gods and paintings of the same subject in the Neapolitan area. Writer (Pacelli 1994, pp. 150–151) has pointed out the similarities with the San Giovanni Borghese, the Adoration of Messina, the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula of Intesa Sanpaolo collection in Naples. I have also indicated a significant branch in a relaxed David (now preserved in a private collection in Naples) of unidentified artist, but certainly active in Naples in the first half of the seventeenth century, and in a St. John's Paul Finoglio private collection. At San Giovanni Battista lying was devoted to the recent exhibition at the Museum Het Rembranthuis of Amsterdam between 2010 and 2011: to report in this regard, the publication on exposure, interventions Strinati (2010 2011), Treffers (2010–2011), Pacelli (2010 2011), which traces back the historical and critical of the painting on the basis of the findings in 1994 (pp. 45–51), Marine (2010–11), and Giantomassi Zari (2010–11), which highlight, aspects of painting technique and to restoration.

End of the first decade of the 17th Century, oil on canvas, 78x122 cm.