Jacopo Tintoretto
The Birth of St. John the Baptist
Circa 1563
Oil on canvas
Church of San Zaccaria, Venice
The woman in the foreground holding the baby is very probably the Virgin Mary, who was present at the birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1:36, 1:56) and who according to the Golden Legend held the baby in her arms. She wears a blue mantle over a red gown, as the Virgin Mary does in countless portraits, and an undertunic of white, which corresponds to the white tunic Mary wears in
the Salimbenis' fresco of John's birth
and
Gherarducci's illumination.
Her only role pictured here is, as the Golden Legend puts it, "the office and service to receive St. John Baptist when he was born." The nursing of the child, which would be impossible for Mary anyway, is the job of the woman on her proper right, and the washing appears to have been done by the woman on her proper left. (The washing of the baby is a traditional element in paintings of both Mary and John, although in this case the artist has pushed it to the side as less significant than the Virgin and baby John.)
Furthermore, the woman who just gave birth is much more likely to be St. Elizabeth, John's mother, than St. Anne, the mother of Mary. In the 16th century Anne was usually pictured as a woman in middle age, in the twentieth year of her marriage according to the Golden Legend. Tintoretto himself gives her dark hair and a lively countenance in his 1540 Madonna and Child with Saints. But the woman in the bed in this painting is quite old, as John's mother Elizabeth is said to be at Luke 1:36. The husband pictured on the right also looks advanced in years, as John's father Zachariah describes himself in Luke 1:18. But according to the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Mary's father Joachim was 40 when she was born.
The Web Gallery of Art suggests that the burst of light in the upper left of the painting could be evidence that this is Mary's birth, apparently on the assumption that it is a more sublime event than John's. But bursts of light are common features of Tintoretto's work, for example:
Right: "St. Mark Saves a Saracen," from this page at Wikimedia Commons. Left: "St. Roch and the Plague Victims," from this page at Wikimedia Commons.
And who is most fully illuminated by this heavenly light? Clearly, it is the woman holding the baby, the favored subject of the composition – not the baby, who is enveloped in shadow, nor the mother, faintly limned in the background. Surely this favored subject is the Virgin Mary, and the child in her arms is John the Baptist.
