Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness

Around 1604 Caravaggio painted this for Ottavio Costa, a banker in Rome who handled money for the pope and collected pictures. Costa was meant to send it to a small chapel on his country estate, but he liked it too much. He kept the original and shipped a copy in its place. Caravaggio has stripped the young Baptist of almost everything that usually marks him out: no halo, no lamb, no scroll reading "Behold the Lamb of God." Instead a half-grown boy sits slumped against the dark, and behind him an animal chews at a dry brown vine. Costa's contemporaries argued about exactly this kind of plainness, whether a saint should be allowed to look so much like a boy off the street.