Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/John in the Wilderness

John in the Wilderness

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 27 Oct 2015 at 18:59:41 (UTC)

Original – St. John the Baptist (1604 or 1605), Caravaggio. The painting, purchased for just $67,000 in 1952 from the London showroom of Agnew's by an alert trustee of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,[1][2] has inspired envy and regret among numerous other prominent American museums (including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art) for their failure to acquire, at a bargain price, what is often regarded as the most significant Caravaggio on the open market in the post-World War II era.

Reason

At least seven of the 80 or so surviving paintings by Caravaggio (1571-1610) are of St. John the Baptist, and of that series, this brooding, "psychologically interiorized" portrait of the young adult saint, shown (except for the cross) without any of his usual symbolic attributes, is considered by scholars the most radical portrait of the series. Caravaggio's unusual practice of composing directly on the canvas without any underpainting, incising salient features with the blunt end of his brush handle (or perhaps with a knife, as dramatized by Derek Jarman in his 1986 film) is evident here particularly on John's left leg. The scoring is visible in the high resolution scan from Google Art.

Articles in which this image appears

John the Baptist (Caravaggio), Tenebrism, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Chronology of works by Caravaggio

FP category for this image

Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Artwork/Paintings

Creator

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

• Support as nominator – Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 18:59, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
• Support, fascinating art acquisition story !!! — Cirt (talk) 00:25, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
• Support – Jobas (talk) 12:05, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
• Support – SchroCat (talk) 10:20, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
• Support --PetarM (talk) 10:56, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
• Support --Tremonist (talk) 13:38, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
• Support - Godot13 (talk) 22:27, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
• Support – DreamSparrow ^Chat 18:57, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Promoted File:Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio - Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness - Google Art Project.jpg --Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 19:08, 27 October 2015 (UTC)