Giovannino Battista: the boy Baptist in quattrocento Italian art

Abstract

This thesis explores the imagery of the young John the Baptist in Renaissance art. The phenomenon of John’s juvenescence has been noted but insufficiently explored by previous scholarship. The present study reassesses the figure of the youthful Baptist by means of rigorous theological exegesis of biblical, apocryphal and late medieval textual sources and a thorough investigation of the visual corpus. Beginning with the mosaics of the Florentine Baptistery, a handful of narrative cycles locate the onset of John’s prophetic career in the desert at an ever-earlier point in his life. However, it was not until the mid-fifteenth century that the boy John was released from the confines of his own narrative to become an independent figure in devotional imagery. Innovative altarpieces by Filippo Lippi commissioned by the Medici family in the late 1450s and 60s are shown to be crucial in promoting and disseminating this new vision of Florence’s beloved patron saint. The thesis demonstrates the enormous popularity of the youthful Baptist in the following decades, first in Florence and subsequently elsewhere in Italy, and interrogates the significance of his presence as infant, boy and adolescent across a wide range of pictorial and sculptural representations. One of the most famous examples of the child John, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks”, is recontextualised within this existing pictorial current, to show that this masterpiece is at once more traditional and more innovative in its treatment of subject matter than has hitherto been recognised. Key narrative moments, such as a meeting between Christ and John, and new ways of visualising the intimate bond between the two children formulated towards the end of the fifteenth century, including physical embraces and shared exposure of vulnerable infant flesh, are also investigated. Through such investigations, the thesis aims to advance understanding of the multiple and intersecting roles played by the boy Baptist in Renaissance art and devotion.