Saint Jean-Baptiste se retirant au désert

Lorenzo di Credi learned to paint in the busy Florentine workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, at the same bench as a slightly older apprentice named Leonardo da Vinci. This small panel of the young Baptist walking out into the wilderness is a fragment from the bottom of a large altarpiece that Verrocchio had taken on around 1477 for a bishop's chapel, and that Lorenzo largely carried out. You can feel the workshop's careful drawing in the boy's stance and the crisp rocks behind him. The panel was separated from the altarpiece long ago and sold at auction back in 1868. The Louvre reunited it only recently with the Annunciation it once sat beneath.