Meeting of Jesus and St. John the Baptist as Children

Abstract

This work, showing the meeting between Jesus and St. John the Baptist as children, may have been made to assist in the religious education of children, as period texts suggest that children should look at images of baby Jesus or well-mannered saints and model their behaviour on what they see. This encounter between the two boys does not occur in the Gospels. Rather, this story appears in lives of John the Baptist from the Trecento onward and was enacted in the religious plays of Tommaso Benci and Feo Belcari. The artist of this work, Benedetto Buglioni, opened a workshop in Florence and was thus in competition with the workshop of the Della Robbia. His works do not have the same intense, uniform glazes, as the Della Robbia recipes were a family secret. Instead, he uses complexly mixed and thinly applied glazes of different colors to create almost a watercolor effect in the landscape. The sculpture is of glazed terracotta and can be found today in the Museo Bandini in Fiesole. Photograph(s) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.