The Birth, Naming, and Circumcision of Saint John the Baptist

c. 1335

Giovanni Baronzio

Painter, Italian, active c. 1320 - 1350

About a dozen women, babies, and men gather in small groups across interior spaces with a bedroom to one side and a covered space to the other in this vertical panel painting. The women have nearly white-colored skin, and the men and children have pale skin, sometimes tinged with gray. The bed spans the left two-thirds of the composition. A woman lies under a vibrant red coverlet and white sheets pulled up to her chest. A white veil covers her head, forehead, and neck, and she wears a white, long-sleeved gown. Her shoulders rest up on pillows, and her head is surrounded by a shiny gold halo. A pale face by the woman’s feet looks through an opening at the base of the bed. Two women on the far side of the bed wear green or blue dresses and white head coverings. They both attend to a swaddled blond baby, who also has a gold halo. The wall behind the bed is patterned with an intricate geometric design in grass green and brown. The space above the bed is shiny gold punched with a leafy pattern. The wall is capped with an entablature held up with corbels. A balcony space rises to the left, and a structure with arched openings is to our right. A deep bench runs parallel to the bed along the bottom edge of the painting, closer to us. A balding man with a gray beard sits there and writes, brows deeply furrowed, on a scroll braced on one knee. If complete, writing on the scroll would read “NOMEN EST IOHANNES.” He wears a blue robe under a pale pink cloak, and he has a halo. A man standing just to our right of the seated man gestures toward the first with both hands. This second man has a brown beard and long hair and wears a marigold orange cloak over red robes. A bearded man with gray hair standing behind him wears leaf green and looks to our right. Four men and a haloed baby crowd in the covered space to our right. The man wearing green is shown again, now holding the nude baby. The man with brown hair now wears white vestments and cuts foreskin of the baby’s penis. Two other two men look on, and a sliver of an orange cap indicates that a fifth person is at the back of the crowd. The covered space is ivory-white and has a balcony above the taller, lower level. The whole panel is edged by gold patterned with a clover-like design.

Media Options

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This panel, along with The Baptism of Christ and Madonna and Child with Five Angels were once part of the same altarpiece devoted to Saint John the Baptist (see Reconstruction). Several more components have found their way to other collections. The altarpiece’s original location is not known, though it was probably featured in a church dedicated to the saint in what is today the northern Italian region Emilia-Romagna, close to Baronzio’s home in Rimini. No documents pertaining to the altarpiece have ever been found. It must have been dismantled by the mid-19th century, when pieces of it began to appear on the art market. The dispersed parts have been linked to each other through various clues: similar dimensions, related subject matter, the artist’s style, and particular details of technique and execution. One of those is the brocade pattern that has been incised into the gold background, which appears in all the panels. Another clue is the small punch used to impress a pattern in the gold of the halos.

Giovanni Baronzio seems to have delighted in filling his works with activity and a wealth of everyday details. Here, he crowds three episodes from the life of John the Baptist into one busy scene. They unfold in an elaborate architectural setting with loggias and a flower box sprouting vegetation. At the left, John’s mother, Elizabeth, rests while two women attend to the newborn baby. As was the custom in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the infant is immobilized in swaddling clothes. Another figure, almost hidden, peers in from the doorway. Below this group, John’s father, Zacharias, writes the baby’s name on a scroll. At that moment he miraculously regained the power of speech, which had been taken from him as punishment for doubting an angel’s announcement that he and Elizabeth, both elderly, would have a child. A witness to the naming looks to the right, leading our eyes to a third scene. There, the recalcitrant infant John stands above the circumciser’s knife, which has drawn blood—a sign of the covenant between God and the people of Israel.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 1

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    tempera on panel

  • Credit Line

    Samuel H. Kress Collection

  • Dimensions

    painted surface: 46.4 × 38.3 cm (18 1/4 × 15 1/16 in.)
    overall: 48.8 × 40.7 cm (19 3/16 × 16 in.)
    framed: 55.7 x 48.1 x 5.1 cm (21 15/16 x 18 15/16 x 2 in.)

  • Accession

    1952.5.68

Associated Artworks

A nude man, Jesus, stands with hands together in prayer, hip-deep in a stylized river with a bearded man wearing a fur-like garment on a rocky bank to one side and two winged angels on the other, all against a gleaming gold background in this vertical painting. Another bearded man wearing a white robe floats in a blue field at the top center of the panel. All the people have pale skin, brown hair, and gold halos encircle their heads. At the center of the painting, Jesus’s body is angled to our left, and he tips his head the same direction. Jesus has shoulder-length hair and a trimmed beard. Slate-blue water reaching his hips is painted with regular, white, curving lines to suggest flowing water. Standing on the flat top of a tan-colored rock to our left, the other man head has raggedy, darker brown hair and a fuller beard. His brow is furrowed, and he has dark eyes. He wears the brown, fur-like garment under a white robe. He steps forward on his left foot, farther from us, to touch Jesus’s head with his right hand, and he holds a staff in his other hand. To our right, the angels stand side-by-side facing Jesus. The angel farther from us wears indigo blue and the one closer to us wears a brick-red, patterned, long robe over bare feet. A swath of beige, geometrically patterned fabric drapes over that angel’s arm, whose hands are also held together in prayer. Their wings darken from cream-white at the top to golden yellow, then burnt orange at the bottom. Stylized trees, one to our left and two to our right, grow from the rocky hills beyond the people. In a half-circle at the top, a man smaller in scale hovers, chest down, over the scene. He lifts his right hand toward Jesus and holds a book with a crimson-red cover with his other hand. The semi-circle fades from deep teal at the center to pale aquamarine blue at the outer edge, and is painted with gold starbursts. The entire scene has a gold border with clover-like forms set within diamonds along the inner edge of the panel.

The Baptism of Christ

Giovanni Baronzio

1335

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: The Birth, Naming, and Circumcision of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1335

This horizontal painting is made up of three parts: in the center square panel, a woman reclines under a wooden shelter set into a rocky cave, which is surrounded by angels, and narrower wings to either side are each occupied by a standing man. All the people have pale skin, which is tinged with faint green. The three panels are joined with a gold frame, and the gold background behind the central scene and the men in the side panels are covered with a noticeable network of cracks. In the central panel, a cobalt-blue robe nearly envelopes the reclining woman’s body; this is Mary. It covers her head and falls open where she crosses her wrists over her chest to show a pink garment underneath. A flat gold halo encircles her head ,and her body is surrounded by a field of crimson red, almost like an aura. She rests under a wooden structure with a pitched roof, which is surrounded by craggy, barren rock. A swaddled infant lies in a rectangular, tray-like manger. The infant’s head is also surrounded by a gold halo. Fine gold rays emanate down into the structure from a star just above the peak of the roof. A bull and a donkey look down at the baby from the far side of the manger. The interior of the structure behind them is black. In a smaller scale, two women wash a haloed infant in a tub in front of the rocky cave near the lower left corner of this panel. A man with a white beard and hair sits to our left of Mary, holding a pink cloak at his throat and looking toward the infant. Above and around the rocks, seven winged and haloed angels cluster on each side. One angel to the right presents a scroll with black writing to two men accompanied by a dog and several sheep in the lower right. The man in the panel to the left, Isaiah, has a gray beard and long, wavy hair, and he wears a lilac-purple cloak draped over a coral-orange robe. In his right hand, on our left, he holds an unfurled scroll with large black lettering. His other hand is raised with one finger pointing upward. He looks to our left, away from the central scene. On the right, Ezekiel, echoes Isaiah's pose. Ezekiel holds an open scroll with his left hand, on our right, and his other hand is raised. He also wears a coral-colored robe, but his is overlaid with a blue cloak. His receding hair is short and brown, as is his beard. Like Isaiah, he takes up most of the height of the panel and gazes to our left, toward the central panel.

Scholarly Series:  Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Possibly commissioned as part of the high altarpiece of a church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist in Emilia Romagna or in the Marche, Italy. George Edmund Street [1824-1881], London, by 1880;[1] probably by inheritance to his son, Arthur Edmund Street [1855-1938], Bath. Harold Irving Pratt [1877-1939], New York, by 1917.[2] (Wildenstein & Co., Inc., London, New York and Paris); sold 1947 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation;[3] gift 1952 to NGA.
[1] The painting must have been acquired by Street, the English Gothic Revival architect, together with two other fragments from the same dismantled altarpiece: the Annunciation of the Baptist’s Birth and the Baptist Sending His Disciples to Christ. In addition to the Gallery’s painting, these two panels were also exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1880 (nos. 231 and 234). Both were presented anew at an exhibition in Bristol in 1937 as the property of Street’s son in Bath. But since then all trace of them has been lost: it is possible these two were destroyed in a bombardment that struck the Street family’s house during World War II; see Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. Sec. III, vol. V, The Fourteenth Century. Bernardo Daddi and his circle (Brattleboro, 1947), 2nd edition: Miklós Boskovits, assisted by Ada Labriola and Martina Ingedaay Rodio, Florence, 2001: 472, citing information provided by Federico Zeri. The date of Street’s acquisition of the panels is uncertain; perhaps it occurred between the dates of the first and second edition of his book Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages. Notes of a Tour in the North of Italy, London, 1855 (Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages. Notes of Tours in the North of Italy, London, 1874). In the first edition the author shows little interest in painting, but in the preface to the second he recalls his many visits to Italy and draws the reader’s attention to the publication of James Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century, London, 1864-1871.
[2] Exactly when the panel passed into the collection of Pratt, the American oil industrialist and philanthropist, is also uncertain. Reports of this collection are found from 1909 onward (see Edward Fowles, Memories of Duveen Brothers, London, 1976: 33). Pratt lent the painting to a 1917 exhibition at Kleinberger Galleries in New York, from whom he possibly acquired it. By the time of the 1947 exhibition of Italian paintings at Wildenstein's in New York, it was no longer in the Pratt collection: the catalogue lists the owner as Wildenstein.
[3] The bill of sale (copy in NGA curatorial files) from Wildenstein & Co. to the Kress Foundation for thirteen paintings and one tapestry room is dated 30 October 1947; payment was made in installments. The painting is described as by Giovanni Baronzio da Rimini. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1926.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1880

  • Exhibition of Works by the Old Masters, and by Deceased Masters of the British School. Winter Exhibition, Royal Academy, London, 1880, no. 228, as Birth of St. John the Baptist by an unknown artist.

1917

  • A Loan Exhibition of Italian Paintings, Kleinberger Galleries, New York, 1917, no. 70, repro., as by Giovanni Baronzio.

1947

  • Italian Paintings, Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York, 1947, no. 37, repro., as by Giovanni Baronzio.

1995

  • Il Trecento Riminese: Maestri e botteghe tra Romagna e Marche, Museo della Città, Rimini, Italy, 1995-1996, no. 51, repro.

Bibliography

1916

  • Sirén, Osvald. "Giuliano, Pietro and Giovanni da Rimini." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 29 (1916): 320, 321 pl. VI.

1917

  • Sirén, Osvald, and Maurice W. Brockwell. Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Italian Primitives. Exh. cat. F. Kleinberger Galleries. New York, 1917: 180 (repro.), 181.

1924

  • Offner, Richard. "A Remarkable Exhibition of Italian Paintings." The Arts 5 (1924): 245.

1925

  • McCormick, William B. "Otto H. Kahn Collection." International Studio 80 (1925): 282, 286.

1931

  • Venturi, Lionello. Pitture italiane in America. Milan, 1931: no. 94, repro.

1932

  • Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works with an Index of Places. Oxford, 1932: 44.

1933

  • Venturi, Lionello. Italian Paintings in America. Translated by Countess Vanden Heuvel and Charles Marriott. 3 vols. New York and Milan, 1933: 1:no. 116, repro.

1935

  • Salmi, Mario. "La scuola di Rimini, 3." Rivista del R. Istituto d'archeologia e storia dell’arte 5 (1935): 112, repro. 113.

1936

  • Berenson, Bernard. Pitture italiane del rinascimento: catalogo dei principali artisti e delle loro opere con un indice dei luoghi. Translated by Emilio Cecchi. Milan, 1936: 38.

  • Brandi, Cesare. "Conclusioni su alcuni discussi problemi della pittura riminese del Trecento." Critica d’arte 1 (1936): 231 n. 18, 236-237.

  • Salmi, Mario. "Review of Conclusioni su alcuni discussi problemi della pittura riminese del Trecento by Cesare Brandi." Rivista d’arte 18 (1936): 413.

1940

  • Falk, Ilse. "Studien zu Andrea Pisano." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Zurich, 1940: 128.

1941

  • Coletti, Luigi. I Primitivi. 3 vols. Novara, 1941-1947: 3(1947):xviii, lxix n. 34, pl. 34.

1947

  • Italian Paintings. Exh. cat. PaceWildenstein, New York, 1947: n.p., no. 37, repro.

  • Frankfurter, Alfred M. "How Modern the Renaissance." Art News 45 (1947): repro. 17.

1951

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection Acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation 1945-1951. Introduction by John Walker, text by William E. Suida. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1951: 36, no. 6, repro., as Birth, Naming and Circumcision of St. John the Baptist.

  • Toesca, Pietro. Il Trecento. Storia dell’arte italiana, 2. Turin, 1951: 730-731.

1954

  • Suida, Wilhelm. European Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. Seattle, 1954: 14.

1957

  • Exposition de la Collection Lehman de New York. Exh. cat. Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, 1957: 31-32.

1959

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 24, repro.

1965

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 86.

  • Volpe, Carlo. La pittura riminese del Trecento. Milan, 1965: 38-39, 80, fig. 182.

1966

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century. London, 1966: 68-69, fig. 183.

1967

  • Klesse, Brigitte. Seidenstoffe in der italienischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts. Bern, 1967: 64, 186-187, 281.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 75, repro.

  • Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools. 3 vols. London, 1968: 1:362.

1970

  • Seymour, Charles. Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven and London, 1970: 108.

1972

  • Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1972: 130, 416, 647.

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 222, repro.

  • Szabó, George. The Robert Lehman Collection: A Guide. New York, 1975: 25.

1978

  • Kaftal, George, and Fabio Bisogni. Saints in Italian Art. Vol. 3 (of 4), Iconography of the Saints in the Painting of North East Italy. Florence, 1978: 512, 514.

1979

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. National Gallery of Art. 2 vols. Washington, 1979: 1:317-318; 2:pl. 227.

  • Zuliani, Fulvio. "Tommaso da Modena." In Tomaso da Modena: catalogo. Edited by Luigi Menegazzi. Exh. cat. Convento di Santa Caterina, Capitolo dei Dominicani, Treviso, 1979: 105 n. 9.

1982

  • Christiansen, Keith. "Fourteenth-Century Italian Altarpieces." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 40 (1982): 42, repro. 44.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 255, repro.

1986

  • Castelnuovo, Enrico, ed. La Pittura in Italia. Il Duecento e il Trecento. Essays by Andrea Bacchi and Daniele Benati. 2 vols. Milan, 1986: 1:208; 2:611.

1987

  • Pope-Hennessy, John, and Laurence B. Kanter. The Robert Lehman Collection. Vol. 1, Italian Paintings. New York, 1987: 86, repro. 288.

1989

  • "Maestro della Vita del Battista." In Dizionario della pittura e dei pittori. Edited by Enrico Castelnuovo and Bruno Toscano. 6 vols. Turin, 1989-1994: 3(1992):430.

1990

  • Pasini, Pier Giorgio. La pittura riminese del Trecento. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), 1990: repro. 124.

1991

  • Freuler, Gaudenz, ed. Manifestatori delle cose miracolose: arte italiana del ’300 e ’400 da collezioni in Svizzera e nel Liechtenstein. Exh. cat. Villa Favorita, Fondazione Thyssen-Bornemisza, Lugano-Castagnola. Einsiedeln, 1991: 132.

  • Benati, Daniele. "Baronzio, Giovanni." In Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale. Edited by Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana. 12 vols. Rome, 1991-2002: 3(1992):121.

1992

  • Mancinelli, Fabrizio. "I dipinti della Pinacoteca dall’XI al XV secolo." In Pinacoteca Vaticana: nella pittura l’espressione del messaggio divino nella luce la radice della creazione pittorica. Edited by Umberto Baldini. Milan, 1992: 162-163.

1993

  • Boskovits, Miklós. "Per la storia della pittura tra la Romagna e le Marche ai primi del ’300." Arte cristiana 81 (1993): 168-169.

1994

  • Rossi, Francesco. Catalogo della Pinacoteca Vaticana, 3. Il Trecento: Umbria, Marche, Italia del Nord. Vatican City, 1994: 113-118, fig. 153.

1995

  • Baetjer, Katharine. European Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born before 1865. A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995: 110.

  • Benati, Daniele, ed. Il Trecento riminese: Maestri e botteghe tra Romagna e Marche. Essays by Daniele Benati and Alessandro Marchi. Exh. cat. Museo della città, Rimini. Milan, 1995: 47, 55, 56 n. 3, 116, 248, 260, 264, 266, repro. 267-268.

1996

  • Tambini, Anna. "In margine alla pittura riminese del Trecento." Studi romagnoli 47 (1996): 466.

2002

  • Ragionieri, Giovanna. "Baronzio, Giovanni." In La pittura in Europa. Il Dizionario dei pittori. Edited by Carlo Pirovano. 3 vols. Milan, 2002: 1:53.

2005

  • Laclotte, Michel, and Esther Moench. Peinture italienne: Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon. Paris, 2005: 63.

2006

  • Benati, Daniele. "Il Dossale Corvisieri nel percorso di Giovanni Baronzio." L’Arco 4 (2006): 27.

  • Morozzi, Luisa. "Da Lasinio a Sterbini: ‘primitivi’ in una raccolta romana di secondo Ottocento." In AEIMNEΣTOΣ. Miscellanea di studi per Mauro Cristofani. 2 vols. Edited by Benedetta Adembri. Florence, 2006: 2:912, 916 n. 50.

2008

  • Ferrara, Daniele, ed. Giovanni Baronzio e la pittura a Rimini nel Trecento. Exh. cat. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. Cinisello Balsamo (near Milan), 2008: repro. 29, 31, 106.

2016

  • Boskovits, Miklós. Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, 2016: 159-175, color repro.

Inscriptions

on the sheet on which Zacharias is writing: NOMEN / E[S]T IO / HA[NN]ES (The name is John)

Wikidata ID

Q20173104

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