Master of the Female Half-Lengths, Saint John on Patmos

Saint John the Evangelist is seated on the island of Patmos – shrunk to a tiny size – writing the Book of Revelation. He seems to have reached the twelfth of his 22 chapters, given the appearance in heaven of the ‘woman clothed with the sun’, and the red dragon with seven heads. They are floating in the sky at the top right.

Saint John holds a quill pen, while the eagle that is his emblem grasps his inkwell and pen-case, tied together with red strings, in its beak. On the right, a small monster crouching on the shore of the island waves a stick at the eagle: in the Renaissance, pictures of the saint on Patmos often included a devil trying to disturb his writing. In the background men are fishing from boats; others stand talking on the shore of a mountainous landscape.

The artist may have known Saint John on Patmos by Hans Memling, the right wing of his triptych of Two Saint Johns (Memling Museum, Bruges). He was certainly following the same tradition. The figure of the saint is a free, reversed version of Memling’s saint, and the woman and dragon are much as Memling had imagined them. The tiny island, and the pen-case and inkwell held by the eagle are reminiscent of manuscript illumination.

The landscape, which is in the style of Joachim Patinir, is close to that in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, also by the Master of the Female Half-Lengths. Both this painting and The Rest on the Flight into Egypt may have been produced in about 1540.