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The painting offers us a bird's eye view of a vast imaginary landscape, dominated by a calm sky. At the centre, a gathering of people is listening attentively to John the Baptist, bending on a simple branch which is serving as a pulpit. To the left is a rocky mass, to the right a river winds its way into the horizon. The subtle succession of brown, green and blue planes creates the effect of an infinite perspective.
This delicate work is from the hand of Joachim Patenier, originally from the Namur region, but who settled in Antwerp, where he was registered as a master of the Guild of St Luke in 1515. The artist appears to have been first and foremost a landscape painter. It is as such that he was described during his lifetime by his colleague and friend Dürer, who came to Antwerp in 1520. Whilst Patenier was probably not the first specialist landscape painter, he certainly contributed decisively to reversing the formal relationship between landscapes and human figures. His composite panoramas, which appear to embrace the entire earth, have received the German name of Weltlandschaften (world landscapes). But we must not be mistaken: these are devotional images where both the landscape and the human figures - however small - play a vital role.
According to the biblical account, John the Baptist, after receiving the word of God in the desert, preached a gospel of repentance and the coming of the Messiah. Christian art was to locate this preaching in the woods, as here. The river probably represents the Jordan: on the left bank is depicted the baptism of Christ. The Saviour appears a second time, walking towards the sermon. Several natural elements clearly contain an allegorical dimension: the dying tree in the foreground, with a vine twined round it, probably symbolises the Tree of Knowledge which, according to the legend, withered after Adam and Eve's disobedience, but began to flower again once Christ had redeemed the world's sins. The vine is a motif of faithfulness and immortality, but in this context could refer to the tree of life, that is to Jesus himself.
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