Saint John the Baptist
Saint John the Baptist
- Artist
- Jacopo del Sellaio
- Artist Dates
- 1441/1442-1493
- Artist Nationality
- Italian
- Title
- Saint John the Baptist
- Date
- c. 1480
- Medium
- oil on poplar panel
- Dimensions
- 52 x 32.8 cm (20 1/2 x 12 15/16 in)
- K Number
- K501
- Repository
- National Gallery of Art
- Accession Number
- 1939.1.283
- Notes
Provenance
Marquis Pietro Francesco Rinuccini, Florence, by 1852; (his sale, Palazzo Rinuccini Fondacci di Santo Spirito, Florence, 1 May 1852, no. 128, as by Botticelli, possibly bought in); by inheritance to Marianna Rinuccini, who in 1855 married Marquis Giorgio Trivulzio [d. 1856], Milan; [1] Trivulzio family, Milan, until at least 1931. [2] (Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi, Florence); sold October 1937 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York; [3] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] Ellis Waterhouse (note of 22 July 1980 in NGA curatorial files) provided the reference to the sale catalogue and supplied further information about the marriage of Marianna Rinuccini and Giorgio Trivulzio. A letter of 8 September 1986 from the Getty Provenance Index (in NGA curatorial files) notes Waterhouse's identification of the NGA painting with a painting that Otto Mündler describes in the Trivulzio collection in 1856: "Botticelli: S. John the Baptist, as a youth of 12 or 14 years in a landscape, with Florence in the background" ("The Travel Diaries of Otto Mündler, 1855-1858," ed. Carol Togneri Dowd, _Walpole Society_ 51 [1985]: 92, 265). [2] The painting is cited as being in the Trivulzio collection by Raimond van Marle, _The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting_, 19 vols., The Hague, 1931: 12:387-390, fig. 256. The Contini-Bonacossi bill of sale (see note 3) states that the painting was "Formerly in the Collection of Principe Trivulzio, Milan," and refers to van Marle's publication. [3] The bill of sale was for ten paintings (copy in NGA curatorial files).