John the Baptist Being Carried to Zacharias (c. 1510): Art, History and Details

John the Baptist Being Carried to Zacharias (c. 1510) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Francesco Granacci (Italian, 1469–1543).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Did Michelangelo paint some of this work? This panel formed part of a series depicting the life of John the Baptist, with other panels located in New York City and Liverpool, England. Scholars believe that as many as five artists may have participated in creating the artworks and disagree about who painted this panel. Michelangelo Buonarotti, a lifelong friend of Francesco Granacci’s, may have contributed, perhaps in the drapery of the figure in white.

Object facts

• Title: John the Baptist Being Carried to Zacharias
• Date: c. 1510
• Creator attribution: Francesco Granacci (Italian, 1469–1543)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: tempera and oil with gold on wood
• Dimensions: Unframed: 76.2 x 33 cm (30 x 13 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1944.91

A detail from the museum

The artist used gold to paint fine details of embroidery and individual strands of hair.

Collection credit

The Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Marle, Raimond van, and Charlotte van Marle. The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting. The Hague, Netherlands: M. Nijhoff, 1923.
• Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works, with an Index of Places. Oxford, United Kingdom : The Clarendon Press, 1932.
• Catalogue of the Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection : Bequest of Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, 1944. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1944.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.