ITALIAN, FLORENCE, CIRCA 1500 | SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST AT THE FOUNTAIN

St John the Baptist is the patron saint of Florence. This created a huge demand for Florentine Renaissance artists regularly to supply images of him. Many sculptors responded with inventive new iconography that covered the Baptist’s entire life. Particular to Florentine artists, for example, are the beautiful busts of the infant St John, in marble and terracotta, often paired with a bust of the infant Christ, by sculptors such as Mino da Fiesole, Desiderio da Settignano or Antonio Rossellino (Paolozzi Strozzi & Bormond, op. cit., pp. 119-127). These busts emphasise the purity of childhood and were used as a moral lesson to instruct young children to behave virtuously. By contrast, representations of the Baptist at the end of his life, clothed in his rough hair shirt, such as Donatello’s bronze in Siena Cathedral or Michelozzo’s terracotta in the Santissima Annunziata, Florence, are some of the most expressive images of the Renaissance.

The present terracotta depicts St John the Baptist as a youth. It is a fine example of a genre of small narratives terracottas that would have been created for private devotion. The relatively low cost of producing a terracotta (as opposed to a marble or bronze) would have allowed many well-to-do households in Tuscany to afford such works. These would have been originally painted, as indicated by remnants of polychromy on the present work. This colour would have dramatically added to the impact of the works to express the power of the narrative. The Blessed Giovanni Dominici explicitly referred to such images in his often quoted Regola del governo di cura familiare of 1419: ‘So let the child see himself mirrored in the Holy Baptist clothed in camel’s skin, a little child who enters the desert, plays with the birds, sucks the honeyed flowers and sleeps on the ground’. It is not difficult to imagine how the present relief would have been employed for a moral lesson, with the prominent, brightly coloured, animals used to keep a child’s attention on the more serious message. Our relief is unusual in showing St John the Baptist kneeling as he reaches down to fill his cup from a source in the rock. He looks heavenward as if at that moment he is receiving divine guidance. The scroll in his hand would originally have been painted with a motto, emphasizing the meaning of the narrative.

This kneeling youthful St John is related to a more commonly seen model of him seated in the wilderness (see Sotheby’s London, 9 July 2004, lot 31). These terracottas have previously been attributed to an unknown 16th-century Florentine master who was given the name of the Master of the St David and St John Statuettes following the discussion on the example in the Victoria & Albert Museum (inv. no. 7575.1861) by John Pope-Hennessy in 1964. Bruce Boucher more recently, however, has ascribed the original model to the young Jacopo Sansovino, based on its affinity with his marble Bacchus of 1511-12. It is certain that this general type was taken up by many Florentine sculptors, including the Della Robbia family which produced glazed versions (See Sotheby's, London, 5 December 2017, lot 57). Other versions exist in many museums, such as the Seattle Museum of Art (inv. no. 47.36), an unusual standing figure of the Baptist in the Cleveland Museum of Art (inv. no. 1942.781) and one in the Bode Museum, Berlin.

A slightly smaller (43.3cm wide) terracotta offered in Sotheby's London on 12 December 1985, lot 103, repeats the same composition of the kneeling saint, but does not have the animals that feature in the present example. An analogous composition of St Jerome and the lion (Sotheby's New York, 26 January 2017, lot 195), depicting St Jerome kneeling against a rocky background and, significantly, with an oversized lizard behind him, was attributed to the Florentine sculptor Baccio da Montelupo (1469-c.1523) and may indicate an intriguing alternative attribution for the present St John the Baptist.

RELATED LITERATURE

J. Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum Volume I: Text. Eighth to Fifteenth Century, London, 1964, pp. 192, 193; B. Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, New Haven and London, 1991, II, no. 2, pp. 313-314, figs. 11-12; P. Motture and A. Radcliffe, Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Victoria and Albert Museum, no. 24; B. Paolozzi Strozzi and M. Bormand, The Springtime of the Renaissance. Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400-60, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2013, Musee du Louvre, Paris 2014, pp. 119-127