Scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist by B. Giovianni - Essay Example

 Bartolommeo Giovanni’s Scenes from the Life of St. John the Baptist displays many of the classical features inherent in Renaissance works of art. What makes this particular peace truly amazing, however, is the way it pushes the viewer way rather than drawing him or her in to the work of art, making sure that the viewer contemplates it as art, separate from life. Scenes from the Life of St. John the Baptist takes a new twist on the classical formula of Scenes, which would usually consist of several panels each depicting a particular point in the Saint’s life, strung together to form an illustrative narrative.

In this case, however, ‘scene’ is considered in a different context; Giovanni depicts a stage on which a life of St. John is being portrayed. He makes the artifice of the theatre painstakingly clear from the transition from an Italian tiled floor to a backdrop painting of grasslands, as well as the depiction of a character on the far left of the painting not standing in front of the backdrop. The illusion of reality is further simultaneously created and broken by the use of perspective in the painting.

The perspective used on the floor is inconsistent with the one used in the backdrop, giving the impression that the backdrop is flat and two dimensional while the stage is three dimensional with a great deal of depth, which is what one would experience viewing a stage with a painted backdrop. The characters on the left, however, all continue growing smaller in the distance at the same rate and on the same imagined plane, with the group of three and an infant in the foreground appearing realistically larger than the group of three with the kneeling woman in the mid-ground and the group of three with the animal and the infant on the backdrop.

This unity of character combines with the disunity of floor perspective to remind the viewer that they are looking at a piece of art of a piece of art, forcing their attention on the artifice of construction. All this works to remind the viewer to interpret all art as art, rather than connecting it overly with reality or other kinds of truth.