Maestro della Vita del Battista
Child John the Baptist Flees to the Wilderness

Circa 1340
Tempera and gold on wood
Pinacoteca Vaticana

This painting follows an episode in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Nicephorus Calistus (I, xiv). At some time after being taken into the mountains by his mother to escape the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem, John is led by an angel to an even more remote wilderness, where he will grow up eating shoots and wearing the skin of a camel.

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Photographed at the Pinacoteca Vaticana by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.