Saint John the Baptist

Carlo Crivelli's Saint John the Baptist from 1476 belongs to the same polyptych programme as his Saint Stephen and Saint Jerome of the same year, and shows the forerunner of Christ in his standard desert prophet's guise — camel-hair garment, pointing gesture directed toward an absent Christ figure, a scroll inscribed with the Ecce Agnus Dei formula. John the Baptist was among the most frequently depicted saints in Italian altarpieces, his presence in a polyptych often indicating a church dedication or a patron's name-day connection. Crivelli's John is characteristically intense: the gaunt face and wild hair that the Baptist's ascetic life demanded are rendered with the same loving attention to surface detail as the more ornate figures in his altarpieces, but here the emotional register is one of concentrated prophetic urgency.

The camel-hair garment gives Crivelli an unusual textile problem — rendering rough animal hair rather than rich ecclesiastical brocade — which he solves through a system of short, directional brush strokes that build up the mat, fibrous quality of the material. The pointing finger is foreshortened toward the viewer with Crivelli's characteristic attention to spatial assertion. The scroll's lettering is precisely rendered in imitation of inscription.