Circle of Annibale Carracci, Saint John the Baptist seated in the Wilderness

A young man reclines in a rocky landscape, filling a bowl with water spouting from a rock. With his naked torso he looks more like a classical god than a biblical figure, but this is Saint John the Baptist: he has a fine gold halo, and holds a cross made of two reeds bound together. On the scroll around the cross is written: ‘Ecce Agnus Dei’ (‘Behold the Lamb of God’). These are the words with which John recognised Christ as the Messiah when he baptised him in the river Jordan.

The Gospels describe how John, a forerunner of Christ, lived as a hermit in the desert, preaching to and baptising the people of Judea and Jerusalem. He wore camel skin – the hair side directly on his flesh so that it was scratchy and uncomfortable – and foraged for food, eating locusts and wild honey. In this picture the spring and pool, which can be glimpsed behind the saint’s foot, allude to his role as a baptiser, while the dramatic rocky landscape is the wilderness in which he lived. Close observation reveals that his red robe, although not much like a camel skin, is indeed lined with hair.

This is clearly not first-century Palestine, however, and this is not a wild desert prophet. The saint’s nakedness, his recumbent pose and the cup he holds up all recall classical depictions of the god Bacchus rather than the ascetic figure in earlier Renaissance representations, such as Carlo Crivelli’s.

Although no longer attributed to Annibale Carracci, the picture was probably painted by someone quite close to him, maybe a direct pupil rather than just a follower. The artist was interested in showing the landscape, which is arguably better painted than the figure. Interestingly, when the painting was cleaned in the 1960s, another landscape was revealed underneath this one: the artist had reused a canvas on which a picture had already been painted.