Giovan Francesco Rustici, Preaching of the Baptist

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Author
Giovan Francesco Rustici
Date
1506-1511
Collocation
Sala del Paradiso
Original location
Baptistery of Saint John, exterior, above the north gate
Material
Bronze
Technique
Casting
Material
Bronze

Bronze group composed of three larger-than-life-sized statues, depicting Saint John the Baptist in the act of preaching to a Pharisee and a Levite. It was created between 1506 and 1511 by Giovan Francesco Rustici to stand on the upper part of the north door of the Baptistery, where it was part of the sixteenth-century sculptural cycle that adorned the three entrances of the temple and was placed here to replace the previous fourteenth-century marble group, of Tino di Camaino, by the same subject. Since 2006 it has been hospitalized in the Museum and since 2015 it has been reunited at the North Gate in the Room of Paradise. The moment represented is the dialogue, narrated in the Gospels, between John the Baptist and some priests and Levites who questioned him asking if he was the Messiah awaited by the people and to which John replied - raising his finger towards the sky in the statue - that he was only an announcer of Jesus Christ. The bases on which the figures rest bear elegant inscriptions in the Hebrew alphabet with the dialogue described in the Gospel passage which acts as an iconographic source. The monumental bronze figures, of extraordinary naturalism, express the different states of mind of this dialogue, investigated by Rustici with depth: the distrust of the Pharisee, on the left; the firmness of the Baptist, in the center; the Levite's doubt, on the left. The acute physical and psychological characterization of the characters is close to the studies of Leonardo da Vinci, present in Florence at that time, who was a great friend of Rustici and who, according to Giorgio Vasari, had helped him model these sculptures.

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Sala del Paradiso