All About St. John the Baptist in Meditation by Hieronymus Bosch

Title of Artwork: “St. John the Baptist in Meditation”

Artwork by Hieronymus Bosch

Year Created 1489 – 1499

Summary of St. John the Baptist in Meditation

The oil painting St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness is attributed to the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch. It was in 1913 when the Spanish collector Lázaro Galdiano purchased the picture. It can be seen in Madrid, Spain, in the Lázaro Galdiano Museum.

All About St. John the Baptist in Meditation

The painting is a companion piece to Berlin’s Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos. It wasn’t until the 1940s that art historians realised the two paintings looked like they could have been part of a larger altarpiece.

Since then, it has been theorised that the questioned altarpiece was in fact a piece originally commissioned for St. John’s Cathedral in’s-Hertogenbosch. Indeterminate time period for painting. While later dates have been postulated using alternative criteria, if the’s-Hertogenbosch hypothesis is right, the year would be somewhere around 1489.

The lamb is a common symbol of John the Baptist in art. As an innocent victim of the sins of humanity, the saint’s sacrifice is said to be represented by the animal, or the saint may be pointing to Jesus Christ, whose emblem is the pascal lamb (John 1:29–36). The fanciful objects that Bosch painstakingly paints set his picture of John the Baptist apart from others.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.