Title

Saint John the Baptist

Gonçal Peris Sarrià (?, ca. 1380 - ?, ca. 1451)

Generic classification

Object

Date

Century

Cultural context / style

Material

Technique

Iconography / Theme

Provenance

Current location

Inventory Number in Current Collection

Object history

In the XV century in the main altarpiece of the cathedral of El Burgo de Osma.

Before 1905 in Vitoria, Pedro Ruiz collection.

Purchased by the Louvre Museum in 1907 from Pedro Ruiz.

Description

The saint appears standing, turned to the left but with his face turned towards the viewer, wearing a knee-length tunic that simulates camel skin, as the Gospel indicates, and over it a green cloak with pink laps that hides much of his figure and falls to his feet in complex folds. With his left hand he holds a book with blue covers on which rests the Lamb of God with the labarum of the Resurrection, to which he points with the index finger of his right hand, thus making evident his role as Precursor.

His thinness, bushy beard and tousled hair show his retired life in the desert, so the context with which the painter accompanies the saint is not an interior, as in the other preserved figures, but a wild landscape perfectly suggested. The saint is located between two mountainous elevations with trees on their summits, but under this elevated area there are practically no plants growing, only some wild flowers can be seen in the cracks of the ground, treated in large patches of color with a tone between gray and pink to suggest a desert area. In order to explain the presence of the plants and the possibility of living in such a place, the artist has placed a small pond to the right of the saint, revealing the care with which he has thought of his compositions. This is despite the fact that the image is not original, but rather a model repeated on other occasions by the painter and his workshop, since the saint is virtually identical to the one that presides over the small altarpiece in the parish church of Ródenas (Teruel), a work probably contemporary to the Oxomense piece, in which only the color of the mantle changes, becoming ultramarine blue with golden details, thus giving more importance to the head of the altarpiece.

The panel was part of the primitive main altarpiece of the cathedral of El Burgo de Osma, replaced by the present one in the middle of the 16th century. According to the reconstruction hypothesis proposed by Francesc Ruiz i Quesada and José Gómez Frechina in 2014, Saint John the Baptist would occupy the upper right side, with the figures of Saint Ambrose (Paris, Musée du Louvre) and Saint Dominic of Guzmán (Cathedral of El Burgo de Osma) below.

Locations

• Unknown date

  cathedral

  El Burgo de Osma Cathedral, Burgo de Osma (Spain)

• pre. 1905 - 1907

  dealer/antiquarian

  Pedro Ruiz, Vitoria (Spain) *

• 1907 - present

  museum

  Louvre Museum, Paris (France)