Csornay Boldizsár - Hubai Péter szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 96. (Budapest, 2002)

VICTOR M. SCHMIDT: A Duccesque Painting Representing St John the Baptist Bearing Witness in the Museum of Fine Arts

26. Lintel on main portal, left part. Pisa, Baptistery water but with the Holy Spirit and fire. The Gospel of John continues to tell that the next day the Baptist saw Christ coming to him, and that he bore witness of him (John 1:29-34). In Byzantine art, various scenes were developed to reflect these various strands in the Gospels.

16 In practice, however, the compositions looked very much the same. The early fourteenth-century mosaics in the Kariye Camii in Istanbul, e.g., include a scene depicting John 1:19-28, followed by an almost similar scene depicting the next branch of the Gospel of John.

17 These mosaics, as well as similar frescoes in the church of the Protaton on Mount Athos, are not so much part of a Ministry cycle but rather belong to a cyclical iconography of the Baptism.

18 There is no evidence for the existence of such Baptism cycles in early Tuscan art. In contrast, the scene of the Baptist bearing witness was fully established as part of his vita by the second half of the thirteenth century. One of the oldest images is found on the lintel of the Baptistery of Pisa (fig. 26). On the left, three almost identical scenes are sculpted: the Baptist with a group of followers, the Baptist with a group of followers while he is pointing to the right, and the Baptist with a group of followers while he is pointing to Christ, who is actually present on the right. The scenes may follow a Byzantine illuminated manuscript, as Gabriel Millet has suggested.

19 The latter scene 16 Millet, G., Recherches sur l'iconographie de l'Evangile auxXIVe, XVe etXVIe siècles, Paris 1960, 186-204. 17 Underwood, PA, The Kariye Djami, II, pis. 214-215, 217; I, 110-114, nos. 114-115. 18 Underwood, P.A., 'Some problems in programs and iconography of ministry cycles', in Underwood, P.A. (ed.), The Kariye Djami, IV. Studies in the art of the Kariye Djami and its intellectual background, London 1975, 243-302, esp. 272-277. 19 Millet, op. cit., 190. See further Caleca, A., La dotta mano. II Battistero di Pisa, Bergamo 1991, 54-