Landscape with St John the Baptist

Zuccarelli painted this in 1765. The subject is religious: John the Baptist, the preacher who lived in the wilderness before he baptised Christ. The Gospels place him among rocks and rough open country, and that setting is really what the picture gives you. The canvas is tall rather than wide, so the land rises through it, trees and broken ground under a high reach of sky, with the saint set among it at a modest size. A landscape painter has taken a devotional theme and made it mostly a landscape, the holy figure almost a traveller you might pass on the path.