St. John the Baptist

Saint John the Baptist spent his life in the desert announcing the advent of the Messiah: he is here shown as a prophet, his body stunted, his face emaciated and his possessed gaze turned towards the tiny Crucifix crowning the stock that he holds in his hands. Such a detail is most implausible, as the use of the Crucifix only spread long after the death of Jesus Christ, who was John’s contemporary. But the painter did not pay attention to historic realism; rather, the landscape itself reinforces this timeless impression of a fantastic vision, worthy of the best modern science fiction movies: the sun has just set on a phantasmagorical landscape, made of strangely shaped rocks invaded by mist. On the left is a remarkably detailed harbour city, while on the right a promontory seems to have been once connected to the city by a now destroyed bridge. Everything in this landscape encourages us to meditate on two inseparable aspects: the tragic destiny of Christ and the perishable nature of the human world.
Even if this painting seems timeless, it is a characteristic work by Ercole de’ Roberti, a Ferrarese painter trained by Cosmè Tura in the second half of the 15th century. The expressionist character of Tura’s figures, and his draperies which look alike bronze sculptures are clearly visible here, even if the painter shows his originality into the landscape. In his altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria in Porto, near Ravenna (today in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan), Ercole had already decided to represent, in addition to the Virgin, the Christ Child and the Saints according to the traditional scheme known as the “holy conversation”, a far landscape view under the throne of the Virgin. Such a view is to be strictly compared to the present painting.
Landscape is understood here as a way to extend the contemplation of a painting and to deepen religious meditation. This way of appreciating paintings came from the North of the Alps, where it was named devotio moderna or “modern devotion”. The first great interpret of this type of conception of landscape in Northern Italy was the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini; his Resurrection, today in Berlin, is particularly characteristic in that sense. Ercole took also directly from Bellini the use of oil for binding pigments, which was a relative novelty in Northern Italy at the time, and especially in Ferrara. Until the end of the 19th century, however, the present work was attributed to Bellini’s brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna, whose enormous fame justified he was considered as the author of many works that had only in common the virtuosity of drawing (this was also the case of the Preparation of Christ’s Tomb by Vittore Carpaccio). Neville Rowley | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019