When Leonardo da Vinci died, among the few possessions that he left were three of his paintings—the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and St. Anne, and St. John the Baptist, which was his last work. St. John the Baptist is now housed at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, France. It is said that one Salai, his best friend, sat for the painting.
It is a curious work. John appears as a faun-like, curly-haired young man. On his body is a covering of animal skin and in his left hand a reed topped with a cross. His right hand points a finger towards heaven.
John’s smile gives one a sense of déjà vu. It’s practically the same smile that one finds in the Mona Lisa. Originally, except for the surrounding darkness, John might have been completely unclothed in this painting. As believed, another artist added the cross and the skins, perhaps to save the painting from a non-religious interpretation.
Whatever Leonardo’s intentions were, he was not out to give a realistic portrayal of John the Baptist as we know him in the Gospels.
Leonardo’s John is hardly the same person that John the Evangelist, for instance, writes about. The Evangelist mentions him, not as the light, but merely as a witness to the light. When interviewed by the priests and Levites from Jerusalem, this John denied that he was the Christ or the Prophet, and, pressed to give more details about his identity, he referred to himself, using the words of Isaiah, as “a voice that cries in the wilderness: Make a straight way for the Lord,” adding that coming after him was someone whose sandal-strap he was not even fit to untie.
This was a man who lived an austere life, who wore pelts and eschewed bread and wine, living only on locusts and honey. John was no delicate, sensitive young man. Matthew writes of an occasion when Jesus told the multitudes concerning John: “What did you go out to the desert to see? A reed swayed by the wind? Then what did you go out to see? Someone dressed in fine clothing? Those who wear fine clothing are in royal palaces.”
Jesus confirmed John’s status as his precursor—“This is the one about whom it is written: ‘Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you; he will prepare your way before you’”—and gave him the highest praise, “Amen, I say to you, among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist.”
If there is a painting that portrays a John the Baptist that comes close to the one described in the Gospels, it would be Andrea del Verrocchio’s “The Baptism of Christ.” There, although he wears ordinary clothes, John the Baptist comes across as a lean figure with intense eyes.
Incidentally, it is not John the Baptist, not even Jesus, that attracts the attention of art historians, but the leftmost of two angels to the left of Jesus and John, which the young Leonardo painted. He was then Verrocchio’s apprentice. This angel with his truly angelic face stands out, and suggests the latent genius of its painter.
It may be that Leonardo intended his St. John the Baptist more as a toast to his best friend than as homage to the precursor of Jesus, because in this painting the man inside the circle of darkness is too clean-cut and good-looking to stand for the threadbare, passionate young John who urged sharing and honesty and cautioned the unrepentant in the crowd, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce good fruits as evidence of your repentance.”