The artist shows John the Baptist leaving the city for the wilderness, where he lived a simple life preaching about Jesus Christ. We see his dainty figure twice in this scene, which is unusual in Italian art. He appears first leaving the city gates with a small bundle of possessions, and then climbing a steep path into the craggy mountains beyond. By including the fertile valley of patchwork fields below, the artist has highlighted the civilised place John leaves behind.
The delicately painted roses on either side of this panel are in different stages of bloom. Giovanni di Paolo used this type of floral decoration throughout his career. He might have picked it up from the Florentine painter Gentile da Fabriano, who included decorative flowers in the frame of his magnificent altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence) which Giovanni di Paolo probably saw when he visited Florence in the late 1430s.
John the Baptist spent a long period of time in the desert, preaching about Christ. There he led a simple life: he ate only locusts and honey and clothed himself with camel skin. The Gospel of Luke tells us in just one line that John was in the wilderness (Luke 1: 80); Giovanni di Paolo created a narrative for the event.
This painting comes from a series of panels that tell the story of John’s life and once formed a predella. John appears stepping out of a city gateway carrying his possessions in a cloth bundle on a stick, and we see him again in the middle of the picture, climbing a steep, stony path. The Sienese painter Duccio sometimes also showed figures twice to help him tell a story in two parts.
John bypasses the fertile valley planted with a variety of crops – all different shades of green – and heads instead for the mountainous, craggy landscape beyond. This is an Italian Renaissance version of the desert or the wilderness of Israel. The two figures dominate the scene, oversized compared to the surroundings. This allowed the artist to show a vast landscape without losing sight of John within it.
There was a tradition in Siena of painting expansive landscapes. The Lorenzetti brothers' frescoes for the town hall (the Palazzo Pubblico) in Siena, painted in the 1340s, depict broad landscapes and cityscapes as though viewed from a distance. Giovanni di Paolo, a native of the city, would most certainly have been very familiar with those works. Infrared reflectography has revealed the care that he took to draw the architecture, particularly the gateway, accurately. Instead of drawing its outlines, he used a ruler and a pointed tool to score guidelines into the preparatory layer of gesso to ensure that the painted lines were straight. This technique was also used by Duccio in his predella panel of the healing of the man born blind.
The delicately painted roses on either side of this panel are in different stages of bloom. We can see the underside of the petals of each flower, as originally the viewer would have been looking up at the scene from below. Giovanni di Paolo used this type of floral decoration throughout his career. He might have picked it up from the painter Gentile da Fabriano, who included decorative flowers in the frame of his magnificent altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence), which Giovanni di Paolo probably saw when he visited Florence in the late 1430s.
It’s rare to see a scene of John entering the wilderness in Italian painting, but it is depicted in a sculpted bronze panel made by Andrea Pisano for the door of the Florence Baptistery in the 1330s. It also features in thirteenth-century mosaics inside the Baptistery.
