Saint John the Baptist

In 1563 Philip the Second of Spain laid the first stone of the Escorial, a monastery, palace and royal burial place in the hills outside Madrid, and for years afterwards he filled it with paintings, many of them sent from Titian's studio in Venice. This Baptist belongs to that stream, dated to around 1565 to 1570, when Titian was in his late seventies. Decades earlier he had painted the saint for a Venetian church standing with one arm raised, pointing. Here the figure turns and lifts his eyes to the sky, a long scroll across his body reading Ecce Agnus Dei, behold the Lamb of God, and the lamb itself resting at his feet. The brushwork is quick and sparing, and the landscape behind him sits in a dusky, fading light. The canvas first appears in the Escorial's records in 1577, a year after Titian's death, in an entry that does not name him.