Scuola lombarda (XIX) - La predica di Giovanni Battista

Lombard School, 19th century
Sermon of St. John the Baptist
Oil on canvas, 41 x 29 cm – with frame, 54 x 42 cm

The scene depicts the preaching of St. John the Baptist in the desert, recognizable by the usual iconography: the austere figure wrapped in a red mantle, his nearly nude body marked by vigor almost Michelangelesque, the cross-torqued reed with the scroll bearing Ecce Agnus Dei, and the heterogeneous crowd of listeners arranged at his feet in a natural amphitheater of figures, among which women, children, and men in orientalist robes stand out beneath the dark silhouette of a palm that fills the background sky.
The compositional layout, with the Baptist set off-center on a slight rise of the ground and the right arm extended upward to mark the cadence of the proclamation, betrays a figurative culture deeply rooted in Lombard sacred painting of early 19th century, and in particular in the Bergamo milieu that had the Accademia Carrara as one of the most fertile centers of elaboration of the century. The rapid, synthetic brushwork, which builds the volumes for masses of warm color and dense shadows without lingering on detail, together with the modest dimensions of the support, suggest that the work should be read not as a finished painting intended for public enjoyment, but as a preparatory model, a first artistic thought conceived for a broader composition, perhaps an altarpiece or a cycle of frescoes for a religious building.
This practice of the sketch as an autonomous design stage, often preserved and appreciated independently of the completed work, finds precise correspondences in the production of Enrico Scuri, a key figure for the Bergamo academic milieu, recalled for the sketch and the related cartoon for the Burial of the Blessed Virgin destined for the parish church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin in Rudiano, in Brescia, today respectively in private collection and at the Civic Museum of Cremona, as well as the cartoon with the Condemnation to the whips of the saints Nazarius and Celsus, kept in a private Bergamasque collection, whose definitive version is housed in the parish church of Nazarius and Celsus in Urgnano.
The painting examined here, while remaining anonymous as to the hand executing it, coherently situates itself in this stylistic path, showing affinities with the painting language of Scuri and Giacomo Trecourt, both protagonists of a period in which the neoclassical lesson was reinterpreted through a more immediate naturalism and a warm chromatic sensibility, indebted to the great Lombard tradition of the Cinquecento and Seicento. The painter, presumably trained or at least active within the orbit of the Accademia Carrara, demonstrates mastery in the anatomical rendering of the Baptist’s figure and in managing the crowd, organized into groups that dialogue with one another through gestures and gazes, following a narrative principle typical of 19th-century sacred painting intended for popular devotion.

The frame is supplied as a gift, therefore it cannot be a ground for return or complaint.

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