St John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness

Author: Rhoda Eitel-Porter

Ventura Salimbeni has long been recognized as the author of this drawing, as indicated by the old inscription at the lower left of the composition, an attribution that is fully accepted by Marco Ciampolini, doyen of Sienese studies.^[1] The younger half-brother of Francesco Vanni (1563-1610), Salimbeni spent most of his career as a painter in Siena and Rome. Together with their compatriot Alessandro Casolani (1552-1606), Vanni and Salimbeni developed a distinctive Sienese idiom characterized by a sharp angularity of line and facetted planes of light wash, seen especially in the draperies of this drawing but extending also to the landscape.

This impressive composition captures a host of individualized characters with a variety of facial expressions, poses and dress, a detailed landscape as well as nuances of light and shadow. Considering there are no signs of hesitancy or reworkings, the drawing was probably either preceded by a series of preliminary sketches, or Salimbeni was following another artist’s finished composition in the form of a print, painting or drawing. A famous precedent for this subject is a fresco by Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) in the cloister of the Scalzo in Florence. The horizontal format of Salimbeni’s scene, the density of the crowd of listeners seated among hills and trees, and the dress and characterization of some of the onlookers, however, suggest the artist’s familiarity with Flemish models of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.^[2] Several compositions enjoyed great popularity beyond northern Europe, including a painting by Pieter Brueghel (deceased 1569) now in Budapest^[3] and an engraving by Cornelis Galle (1576-1650) after Stradanus (1523-1605) executed between circa 1595 and1612. The latter features a similar older man with a hat prominently seated in the foreground, albeit lacking the basket that Salimbeni’s figure cradles on his lap.^[4]

There is no known composition by Salimbeni related to the Rotterdam drawing, for which Marco Ciampolini suggests a late date within the artist’s oeuvre, noting stylistic similarities with the frescoes of 1610-11 in the apse of Siena Cathedral.^[5] It may have been conceived as a study for a print, yet it does not bear any signs of transfer and, judging by his six dated etchings, Salimbeni’s printmaking activity was limited to his early years in Rome, from 1589 to 1594.^[6] The artist did however work on several painted cycles illustrating the life of St John the Baptist during his career. The Sienese oratory of San Giovanni Battista belonging to the Compagnia della Morte once harboured such a cycle from the first decade of the seventeenth century. The frescoes were still visible in the early nineteenth century, and a series of drawings depicting the lunette-shaped compositions Annunciation of the Birth of St John the Baptist to Zacharias and Birth of St John the Baptist have been tentatively associated with them.^[7] Salimbeni is also known to have worked for the Compagnia di San Giovanni Battista, which commissioned an extensive series of paintings in their church San Giovannino della Staffa (also known as San Giovannino di Pantaneto) in Siena, painted between 1599 and 1649. Yet here too none of the paintings correspond with the Rotterdam drawing, whose purpose remains unknown.