St John the Baptist, Angel of the Desert

John the Baptist stands here with wings, like an angel. The image looks strange until you remember that the Greek word for angel simply means messenger, and John was the messenger who announced Christ. Eastern Christian painters had shown him this way since about the 13th century, in a camel-hair tunic, holding a scroll and a small basin with his own severed head inside, a reminder of how he died. The Western church never took up the winged type. What makes this panel unusual is its painter. Dionysius came from the village of Fourna in Greece and lived as a monk on Mount Athos, and he wrote the handbook that told Orthodox painters exactly how a figure like this should be made.