Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (c. 1622): Artwork and History

Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (c. 1622) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599–1660).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This painting depicts a young Saint John the Baptist living as a hermit in the wilderness. His cross of reeds, pointing gesture, and the nearby lamb refer to his role as a prophet foretelling the coming of Christ, the so-called “lamb of God,” in the New Testament. Previously attributed to an unknown Sevillian artist, this painting has recently been recognized as the work of a young Diego Velázquez. The treatment of the saint is more idealized than figures in Velázquez’s earliest work, suggesting that it may have been made after his brief visit in 1622 to Madrid, where Italian paintings in the royal collection exposed him to new ways of portraying the human figure.

Object facts

• Title: Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness
• Date: c. 1622
• Artist attribution: Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599–1660)
• Place of origin: Seville
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 175.3 × 152.5 cm (69 × 60 in.); Framed: 202.3 × 184.2 × 9.2 cm (79 5/8 × 72 1/2 × 3 5/8 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1957.563

Collection credit

Gift of Barbara Deering Danielson

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.