São João Batista Menino

In 1523 plague swept through Florence, and Andrea del Sarto fled with his family to the hills of the Mugello, north of the city, to wait it out. Around this time he painted the young Baptist for a Florentine collector, Giovan Maria Benintendi, as the centrepiece of a decorated antechamber that also held panels by Pontormo and Franciabigio. John appears as a teenage boy alone in the wilderness, half-draped in a camel skin, holding the slender reed cross that marks him out. Del Sarto gives him a warm, almost sensual physical presence instead of the gaunt ascetic other painters preferred. Vasari, who trained briefly under him, called him the painter without errors for the flawless ease of his colour.