1480
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Saint John the Baptist is a 1480 unspecified by Dieric Bouts, a Northern Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a man in a camel-hair robe holding a thin reed cross. His face is calm, almost ghostly gray. This painting was once the back of an altarpiece. Artists used gray paint to look like stone statues—called grisaille. It fooled people into thinking the flat panel was carved. If you like how light and shadow play here, look up the technique: grisaille.
This panel once formed part of an altarpiece painted for the Church of Saint Laurentius in Cologne. It originally comprised the reverse of the arrest of Christ, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Another grisaille panel representing Saint John the Evangelist, also in Munich, formed the exterior of the resurrection. The grisaille technique was a monochromatic method utilizing various shades of gray, often in imitation of sculpture, as is the case here. The illusionistic effect suggests a sculpture not set back in a niche, but clearly separated from it to enhance the three-dimensional…
Paintings like this one that are designed to trick the eye are known as trompe-l'œil.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Dieric Bouts (born c. 1415 – 6 May 1475) was an Early Netherlandish painter. Bouts may have studied under Rogier van der Weyden, and his work was influenced by van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. He worked in Leuven from…
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