Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist

Bartolomeo di Giovanni · 1490/95

Medium

Tempera on panel (poplar)

Original size

74 × 150.4 cm (29 3/16 × 59 3/16 in.); Framed: 88 × 164 cm (34 5/8 × 64 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Painted with the intimate precision of a storyteller who trusted his audience to lean in close, this multi-scene panel compresses the entire arc of Saint John the Baptist's life into a single luminous composition. Bartolomeo di Giovanni was a Florentine painter working in the orbit of Ghirlandaio and Botticelli during the 1480s and 90s, a period when Florentine workshops were perfecting the art of narrative sequence — fitting complex sacred stories into small-format panels without sacrificing drama or detail. His figures have a compact solidity unusual for the period, and his landscape backgrounds move from warm ochre earth to cool architectural distance with quiet confidence. The tempera medium on poplar gives the original its characteristic chalky brightness, with colours that feel lit from within rather than illuminated from outside. This panel originally served as part of a predella — the horizontal base of an altarpiece — a format that practically demanded this kind of episodic visual storytelling told across a shallow register. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Bartolomeo's intricate figural groupings and layered landscape into a medium that suits life at a larger scale, preserving the warmth of the original palette while giving the composition the presence it deserves on a wall.