Saint John the Baptist
Jacopo da Sellaio·c. 1480
Historical Context
Jacopo da Sellaio's Saint John the Baptist from around 1480 is a characteristic work by this Florentine painter who worked in the tradition of Filippino Lippi and Sandro Botticelli, his style reflecting the refined linearity and sweet grace of the Florentine late Quattrocento. John the Baptist was Florence's patron saint and among the most frequently depicted figures in the city's painting, his camel-hair garment and reed cross appearing in countless altarpieces, processional banners, and domestic devotional images. Sellaio's version has the elegant refinement typical of his manner: the saint's attenuated figure, his graceful pose, and the soft atmospheric landscape behind him reflect the late fifteenth-century Florentine preference for spiritual elegance over physical robustness. The painting would have served private devotion for a Florentine household with particular attachment to the city's patron.
Technical Analysis
The oil on poplar panel demonstrates Sellaio's precise linear technique derived from the Lippi workshop tradition. The figure is rendered with clear contours and careful modeling, set against a landscape background that shows the influence of Florentine naturalistic landscape painting.
Provenance
Marquis Pietro Francesco Rinuccini, Florence, by 1852; (his sale, Palazzo Rinuccini Fondacci di Santo Spirito, Florence, 1 May 1852, no. 128, as by Botticelli, possibly bought in); by inheritance to Marianna Rinuccini, who in 1855 married Marquis Giorgio Trivulzio [d. 1856], Milan;[1] Trivulzio family, Milan, until at least 1931.[2] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Florence); sold October 1937 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[3] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] Ellis Waterhouse (note of 22 July 1980 in NGA curatorial files) provided the reference to the sale catalogue and supplied further information about the marriage of Marianna Rinuccini and Giorgio Trivulzio. A letter of 8 September 1986 from the Getty Provenance Index (in NGA curatorial files) notes Waterhouse's identification of the NGA painting with a painting that Otto Mündler describes in the Trivulzio collection in 1856: "Botticelli: S. John the Baptist, as a youth of 12 or 14 years in a landscape, with Florence in the background" ("The Travel Diaries of Otto Mündler, 1855-1858," ed. Carol Togneri Dowd, _Walpole Society_ 51 [1985]: 92, 265). [2] The painting is cited as being in the Trivulzio collection by Raimond van Marle, _The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting_, 19 vols., The Hague, 1931: 12:387-390, fig. 256. The Contini Bonacossi bill of sale (see note 3) states that the painting was "Formerly in the Collection of Principe Trivulzio, Milan," and refers to van Marle's publication. [3] The bill of sale was for ten paintings (copy in NGA curatorial files). See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1857.
