São João Batista

São João Batista (St John the Baptist) was a canonical subject of Catholic devotional painting that Visconti approached in 1900, bringing his Post-Impressionist sensibility to a subject associated with the Renaissance and Baroque tradition. John the Baptist — the wild prophet who preceded Christ, dressed in camel hair and living in the desert — was a figure of striking physical presence in traditional painting, and Visconti's version would have drawn on his knowledge of European treatments of the subject accumulated during his Paris years. The painting reflects his continued engagement with religious subjects despite his primarily secular artistic orientation.

The treatment of a traditional religious subject through a Post-Impressionist lens required Visconti to navigate between the iconographic conventions of the Baptist's representation and his own analytical approach to figure painting. He likely employs a warm, sun-baked palette for the setting while rendering the figure with the colour-analytic approach he applied to all his figure work.