Saint John the Baptist

Around 1609, when this was painted, Juan Bautista Maíno had just returned to Spain after roughly eight years in Rome. He came home carrying something few Spanish painters had seen first-hand: the manner of Caravaggio, its hard raking light and its heavy, sculptural bodies. That debt is so plain here that for a long time the picture hung under Caravaggio's name, not Maíno's. The half-turned pose of the young Baptist comes almost directly from Caravaggio's own paintings of the same saint, which Maíno had studied in those same years. The light rakes across the bare shoulder and leaves the rest in shadow, the daylight naturalism he had brought back with him from Italy.