Johannes der Täufer in der Wüste

Around 1640 Zurbaran painted John the Baptist alone in open country, one hand lifted toward the lamb at his feet. The gesture is the moment in the gospel where John points Christ out to his own followers. The lamb is thin and awkwardly put together, and writers on the picture take that for a deliberate echo of the years John spent fasting in the wilderness. At roughly a metre and a half square the canvas was made for a room rather than an altar, and it stayed in private hands for the better part of a century. It became church property only in the first half of the 1700s, when Pedro Curiel, a canon of Seville Cathedral, gave it to the chapter he served.