| Description |
Since the earliest years of Italian painting, artists have depicted John the Baptist as an emaciated, weathered, hermit-prophet, a portrayal that reflects his reclusive biblical experience in the wilderness. In the mid-fifteenth century, some Florentine patrons commissioned images of John the Baptist that were highly innovative and obvious deviations from his traditional depiction. This thesis analyzes these unconventional images and examines the culture and society of quattrocento Florence to shed light on why patrons would change the long-standing image of a revered Christian figure and patron saint of their city. Several experimental images of John the Baptist were radical, patron-specific inventions, other images reflected current Florentine thought and conditions that prompted the visual transformation of the saint's image from a gaunt, unkempt adult to an ideal, heroic figure that served as an exemplum of civic and religious virtue. In uattrocento Florence, John the Baptist was also portrayed, for the first time, as an infant, a child, and a youth, becoming a domestic devotional figure that appealed to the Florentine family as a whole. The transformation of Saint John's physique and the new images of him had a lasting effect on Italian religious art. Although there was change in the visual expression of John the Baptist, there was continuity in his religious role and purpose. |
