Saint John the Baptist

According to the Gospels, Saint John the Baptist lived as a hermit in the desert, wearing clothes of camel hair and eating locusts and honey, and was the first to recognise Christ as the Messiah. When John baptised Christ in the river Jordan he saw the Holy Ghost come down upon him and proclaimed, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ (John 1: 29). Because of these words he is often shown with a lamb as his attribute, as here.This is the left wing of The Donne Triptych, painted by Hans Memling for the Welsh nobleman and diplomat Sir John Donne, probably in the late 1470s. The central panel shows Sir John, his wife and daughter with the Virgin and Christ Child. Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, who appears in the other wing, were Sir John’s patron saints.Memling ran a busy and efficient workshop and was renowned for reusing figures in different paintings. The figure of Saint John in this painting is almost identical to the one in Saint John the Baptist; only the setting has been substantially changed. Here, Saint John stands in a kind of loggia (an open-sided gallery or room) with a tiled floor, which looks out onto a landscape that runs across the whole triptych. Behind him a bystander peers round a column at the scene in the central panel. We don't know who this man is, although it is clearly a portrait. It has been suggested that it might be Memling himself.On the back of the panel, visible when the altarpiece was closed, Saint Christopher with the Christ Child on his shoulders is painted in grisaille (shades of black, white and grey) to look like a stone statue in a niche. Christopher was a very popular saint. As he had carried Christ across a river he was believed to provide protection for travellers – perhaps especially important to someone like Sir John, who travelled regularly to the continent. He was also a protector from sudden death; some believed that those who looked at an image of the saint would not die on that day.