Landscape with Saint John the Baptist (c. 1540): Art, History and Details

Landscape with Saint John the Baptist (c. 1540) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Herri met de Bles (Flemish, 1510–1572).

The work and its context

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

This picture is an example of the so-called world landscape, a term coined by art historians to characterize a type of Northern landscape painting with a vast panorama and a narrative religious subject in the foreground. This type of landscape, popularized by the Flemish painter Joachim Patinir (about 1485-1524), was fashionable throughout the 16th century. Bles placed the group of exotically dressed figures on a piece of land overlooking a great panorama of mountains, coast, and sea. The view of the harbor city is purely imaginative, and the fanciful cliffs and mountain peaks that crowd the distance seem to disappear into a light mist. This manner of creating depth in the landscape, called the atmospheric or aerial perspective, was an invention of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Bles was acclaimed in Italy as the Master of the Owl (il Civetta), after the bird he often put into his works. In this scene, the owl is situated on the rock in the lower-right foreground.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with Saint John the Baptist
• Date: c. 1540
• Creator attribution: Herri met de Bles (Flemish, 1510–1572)
• Culture: Flanders
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 43.2 x 54.9 x 6.4 cm (17 x 21 5/8 x 2 1/2 in.); Unframed: 30.5 x 42.3 cm (12 x 16 5/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Netherlandish-Flemish
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1967.20

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Year in Review.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 10 (December 1967): 302–346.
• Gibson, Walter S. "Henri met de Bles: Landscape with St. John the Baptist Preaching." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art LV, no. 3 (March 1968): 78-87.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.

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.