The Baptism of Christ

You have to look past the bodies to find the subject. Far back in the middle of the canvas, small beside a stretch of water, John the Baptist baptises Christ, and a white dove comes down toward them. The foreground belongs to the onlookers. A man reclines with his broad back to us, a woman in pink points the way, and a young man stands naked, gripping an orange cloak. Cornelis van Haarlem painted the Baptism of Christ about ten times over his career, and the Louvre calls this canvas of 1588 the earliest, the largest and the most mannerist of them. He dated it on the rock at the lower left. The gilded frame came later. It is a French neoclassical piece of the 18th century, carrying the monogram of a collector no one has identified.