Saint John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos

On the Greek island of Patmos Saint John the Evangelist is having a vision, which he records in writing: he sees the Woman of the Apocalypse (Revelation 12: 1–4 and 14). He sits with an oversized book in his lap, his quill pen poised, and looks towards the tiny illuminated female figure hovering in the clouds above him.Alongside her we can see a dragon – the devil – ready, as Saint John writes, ‘to devour her child’ as soon as it is born. She is given ‘two wings of a great eagle’, faintly visible behind her, to help her escape. The eagle is one of Saint John’s attributes and one sits beside him.This woman is often understood to be the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ. The Virgin as Woman of the Apocalypse is linked to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the belief that Mary was herself conceived without sin. This painting is paired with The Immaculate Conception, which shows the Virgin standing on a moon and surrounded by stars, like in the vision we see here.As in all of Velázquez’s early works, the figures he paints in his religious scenes appear to be based on real people. Saint John’s angular face is unusually youthful – he is traditionally depicted in paintings as a grey-bearded old man. The background is dark but you can just make out a sea and mountains in the distance.There are haphazard brushstrokes in the sky, on the upper right: Velázquez had a habit of wiping excess paint from his brush in the background. They are now visible because the paint used to cover them up has become more transparent over time. The pinkish tone of John’s mantle would originally have been a more intense red colour.There are several paintings in the National Gallery that depict this subject. Saint John on Patmos by a Netherlandish artist, for example, shows the saint seated in similar surroundings having the same vision.