The Infants Jesus Christ and Saint John the Baptist Embracing

The Christ Child and the infant John the Baptist embrace in a panel that gathers the devotion of Antwerp’s workshops around a subject of great tenderness. The meeting of the two children carries the old liturgical commentary on John’s rôle in the Gospel story — the forerunner who acknowledges the Saviour while both are yet infants — and painters of the Antwerp school returned to it again and again in the first decades of the sixteenth century, producing it in half-length panels for private prayer. Joos van Cleve stood at the head of that world: dean of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke, master of a large and productive workshop, and a painter whose smooth enamel finish and warm colour kept the older Netherlandish tradition alive while its subjects turned domestic. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.