Portrait of the boy Xaverio as Saint John the Baptist

This portrait of a boy named Xaverio, posed as Saint John the Baptist, resides in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and illustrates Overbeck's sustained practice of merging private portraiture with sacred typology — a tradition with deep roots in Italian Renaissance painting, where donor children appeared as holy figures in devotional panels. The year 1900 in the record likely reflects a catalogue date or acquisition rather than the work's creation, as Overbeck died in 1869; the painting itself belongs to his mature or late Roman output. John the Baptist as a child — shown with lamb, reed cross, and animal-skin garment — was a favourite Florentine Renaissance subject, and Overbeck's treatment would place him in conscious dialogue with Raphael's Alba Madonna and similar works. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum, with its encyclopedic collection of German art history, situates this painting within the broader national narrative of religious art.

Child portraiture combined with religious attribute painting required Overbeck to balance observed likeness with iconographic legibility. The lamb and reed cross serve as compositional anchors that identify the sacred type while the face retains individual specificity — a double task managed through careful underdrawing.