St John in the Wilderness

Andrea Previtali's Saint John in the Wilderness presents the Baptist in his desert retreat before his public ministry, the young man given over to ascetic preparation and prophetic calling. This devotional subject allowed painters to combine the nude or seminude figure study with spiritual content, the Baptist's wild honey and locusts, camel-skin garment, and solitary prayer providing attributes that identified the figure while the wilderness setting offered landscape opportunity. Previtali's Venetian training gives his Baptist the warm atmospheric quality and human tenderness that distinguished the Bellini tradition from the more dramatic treatments of other Italian schools.

The painting demonstrates the technical conventions and artistic vocabulary of the period, with attention to composition, color, and the rendering of form appropriate to the subject.