San Giovanni Battista

Caravaggio strips this saint of almost everything that would name him. There is no camel-hair robe, no banner, barely a hint of the reed cross. A young man simply sits in the dark, half-turned, lost in his own thoughts. For centuries painters had shown John the Baptist as a public figure anyone could read at a glance, so making him this private and unexplained was a genuinely new idea. The one loaded clue is the animal beside him, a ram rather than the usual lamb, nosing at some vine leaves, a quiet nod to sacrifice. Caravaggio painted it in Rome around 1604, in the last stretch there before a killing forced him to flee the city in 1606.