Landscape with the Preaching of Saint John the Baptist

Grimaldi had painted this subject before, and much larger. On the main floor of a Roman palace built for the Nunez family, today the Palazzo Nunez-Torlonia, he frescoed Saint John the Baptist preaching in a landscape, and this small copper follows the same composition. Both go back to a picture of the same theme by Annibale Carracci, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble. Grimaldi gave the figures more weight than Annibale had, and broke up the open sky with tall, upright trees. John sits at the right beneath a tree, one hand raised, with his staff and a white scroll at his feet, while the crowd listens on the grass. The subject has nothing to do with the other three coppers of the set, and the museum thinks the prince who paid for them picked it himself.