A terracotta statuette depicts the Infant Saint John the Baptist standing as if moving forward, dressed in an animal skin with belt, from which hangs a cockle shell, a symbol of a pilgrim to the shrine of Saint James of Compostella in northern Spain. A cloak hangs across his left shoulder, running down back. In his left hand, he holds a banderole inscribed “ECCE OLI [E],” which seems to be broken off at end. There is a palm tree trunk support at back. The roughly triangular base is inscribed crudely with “1428” (the “8” horizontal and inverted). The terracotta is crude with rough surfaces. There is a hole in the back, at the neckline, perhaps for attaching a halo.

Saint John the Baptist has long been especially venerated in Florence, as the patron saint of the city, where he may be found portrayed in countless works of art. This small statuette depicts him as a small boy, although the subject of the sculpture refers to an episode from his life when he was a young man. The story, in which John the Baptist went out into the desert, as Christ would do after him, is recounted or alluded to in all four of the Gospels:

“In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.” (Matthew 3:1–4)

The sculpture shows the young Baptist making his way into the desert, indicated by the palm tree against which the figure is placed, dressed in animal skins and carrying a scroll. As well as biblical sources, numerous more recent iconographical sources for the young Baptist’s sojourn in the desert were available in Florence, in particular vernacular retellings which derived from a host of apocryphal writings from the Eastern Mediterranean world. One of the most important is the fourteenth-century Vita di San Giovanni Battista, in the past erroneously attributed to the thirteenth-century Dominican monk Fra Domenico Cavalca,¹ but there were many other such sources available in Florence, such as a poem by Lucrezia de’ Medici,² and a play by Feo Belcari (1410–1484), The Representation of How Saint John When a Boy Was Visited in the Desert by Jesus Christ.³

The statue is copied from a terracotta figure of the Baptist (Fig. 68.1), today in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, which is generally attributed to the Florentine architect and sculptor Michelozzo di Bartolomeo.⁴ The sculpture, dated to c. 1430–40, was formerly mounted on the portal of the palace of the Opera di San Giovanni in Florence, the former sacristy for the Florence Baptistry. Today it is replaced by a copy. In his Life of Michelozzo, Giorgio Vasari referred to a well-sculpted figure in the round of the infant Baptist in this location.⁵ Michelozzo’s sculpture, which was replaced in 1477 by a marble figure by Antonio Rossellino, today also in the Bargello,⁶ is the earliest freestanding sculptural representation of the infant saint as he made his way into the desert. The terracotta now in the Bargello came from the Opera di San Giovanni, so could well be the sculpture described by Vasari.

The Houston Saint John the Baptist was sold in 1923 with an attribution to a follower of Michelozzo, and was catalogued in 1945 as a work of Michelozzo’s school. Rather crudely modeled, it is most unlikely to date from the fifteenth century, but seems rather to be a late pastiche of the Bargello statuette. It carries the date 1428, the year when the authorities of the Cathedral of Prato commissioned a new pulpit from Michelozzo and his then business partner Donatello. It also depicts the Baptist as a pilgrim wearing the cockle shell symbol of the shrine at Compostella, adding an exotic element in the form of the palm tree support. By turning the Baptist into a pilgrim, the sculpture appears to misunderstand the iconographical significance of the original sculpture upon which it is based. It is an open question whether it was made as a forgery, which the application of the purported date might imply, or simply as a piece of debased religious sculpture.

—Jeremy Warren