Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness

This Saint John the Baptist first hung north of the Alps. It belonged to Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Paris-born general who led the Habsburg armies against the Ottomans and the French, and who filled his Vienna residences, the town palace and the Belvedere, with paintings, Bolognese pictures in Reni's classical manner among them.

Eugene died in 1736. His kinsman, King Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia, bought the paintings, and they came to Turin in the 1740s. The gallery counts this canvas among the masterpieces of Reni's late maturity and dates it to around 1635. John is shown in the wilderness, the prophet who lived on locusts and wild honey before he began to baptise at the Jordan.

From October 2025 to January 2026 the picture was part of the gallery's exhibition for the 450th anniversary of Reni's birth. It now hangs again on the first floor, in Sala 26.