Der jugendliche Johannes der Täufer mit Widder

Caravaggio painted this grinning naked boy and his ram in Rome in 1602 for Ciriaco Mattei, a nobleman in whose palace the painter was then living. The subject was a kind of family compliment. Mattei's son was named Giovanni Battista, John the Baptist, so the saint doubled as a nod to the boy. But little here is holy. Caravaggio used an ordinary street youth, twisted his pose after the muscular nudes Michelangelo had painted on the Sistine ceiling, and lit him hard against the dark, giving John the smile and the frank body of a real teenager rather than a desert prophet. Roman collectors of the moment loved exactly this closeness to life, and Caravaggio made a nearly identical second version the same year.