Title:
The Young St. John in the Wilderness
Creator/Contributor:
Giovanni Battista Caracciolo (artist)
Date:
circa 1615
Identifier:
1968.42
Format:
oil on canvas
Caracciolo worked in the tradition of Caravaggio (1571-1610), whose distinctive use of dramatic contrasts of shadow and light
(called chiaroscuro, light/dark), compressed space, and sensuous form constituted perhaps the greatest innovation in sixteenth-century
Italian painting.
Caracciolo's limited palette of deep red and dark earthen tones focuses our attention on the young St. John. The seductive
immediacy of the casually posed saint asserts his physical reality rather than his divinity. Such sensuality in a religious
figure would have been unthinkable a hundred years earlier.