Saint John the Baptist

This panel is under 60 centimetres tall and only 17 wide, and it was made to swing shut. It was the left wing of a small triptych painted around 1480 for Benedetto Pagagnotti, a Florentine churchman who was both a bishop and an astrologer. The Virgin and Child that stood between the wings is now in the Uffizi, and the other wing, Saint Lawrence, hangs beside this one. The back of the panel carries the owner's own sign. Four cranes stand in a dark landscape as the sun comes up, and one of them grips a stone in its claw. A crane on watch was said to hold a pebble so that, if it dozed, the falling weight would wake it. That vigilant bird was Pagagnotti's emblem, and his coat of arms hangs on a tree behind them.