John the Baptist (sometimes called John in…

John the Baptist (sometimes called John in the Wilderness) is the subject of at least eight paintings by Caravaggio.

John the Baptist, currently at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome, is one of two John the Baptists painted by Caravaggio in or around 1604 (possibly 1605).

The figure has been stripped of identifying symbols: no belt, not even the "raiment of camel's hair", and the reed cross is only suggested.

The background and surrounds have darkened even further, and there is the sense of a story from which the viewer is excluded.

Caravaggio is not the first artist to have treated the Baptist as a cryptic male nude—there are prior examples from Leonardo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto and others—but he introduces a new note of realism and drama.

His John has the roughened, sun burnt hands and neck of a laborer, his pale torso emerging with a contrast that reminds the viewer that this is a real boy who has gotten undressed for his modeling session—unlike Raphael's Baptist, who is as idealized and un-individualized as one of his winged cherubs.

The realism of the individual spills over as a record of Rome itself in the age of Caravaggio.

Biographer Peter Robb cites Montaigne on Rome as a city of universal idleness, "...the envied idleness of the higher clerics, and the frightening idleness of the destitute...a city almost without trades or professions, in which the churchmen were playboys or bureaucrats, the laymen were condemned to be courtiers, all the pretty girls and boys seemed to be prostitutes, and all wealth was inherited old money or extorted new."

The age does not welcomes an art that emphasizes the real.