Baptism of Christ

The Jordan at cabinet scale

The subject is the baptism of Christ by John, the episode with which the public ministry opens in all four gospels. Its fixed elements are the river, the pouring, the descending dove and the attending figures on the bank; the convention was settled long before the fifteenth century and painters inherited it rather than invented it.

Its place in the sequence

First scene of the ministry. Everything before belongs to the infancy — the Nativity, the Circumcision, the Presentation, the boy among the doctors — and everything after proceeds from the Jordan: the temptation in the wilderness, the calling of the disciples, the miracles in Galilee, the journey to Jerusalem.

The catalogue entry

The record names Pietro Perugino, dates the work to 1500, and places it in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The dimensions are 30 by 23 centimetres. That is very small for an episode usually given altar scale, and it is the kind of measurement a record returns for a panel meant to be held or set into a larger structure — though the entry says nothing about a larger structure, and none is claimed here. The style is entered as Early Renaissance and the artist as Italian. The measured palette reads as brown. Twenty-one titles in this catalogue name the baptism; this is among the smallest of them by recorded size.