Saint John the Baptist

Bartolomé Bermejo's Saint John the Baptist from around 1470 is an early example of the Spanish master's application of Flemish oil technique to the Iberian altarpiece tradition, painted when Bermejo was working in Aragon before his later Catalonian period. John the Baptist was among the most important saints in Aragonese devotional culture — the order of the Hospital of Saint John was a major institutional presence in the region — and Bermejo gives the forerunner of Christ a psychological intensity that goes well beyond conventional altarpiece production. The camel-hair robe, the pointing gesture, and the scrolled text are standard attributes, but Bermejo renders them with a physical conviction and oil-glazed luminosity that no Spanish painter of the period could match.

Bermejo's Flemish oil technique is fully deployed in this early work: the skin tones of the Baptist's weathered face are built up through successive translucent glazes that achieve a depth of tone impossible in tempera. The camel-hair garment's rough texture is rendered through varied, slightly raised paint application. The landscape background, characteristically Flemish in its recession to distant blue hills, grounds the figure in a natural space.