Giovanni Baglione (1566-1643) was one of the fundamental Roman painters of Roman painting in the early 17th century when the pontifical city, under Pope Borghese Paul V, confirmed itself as the artistic center of the whole of Europe. Despite the bad reputation created for him in a famous process that opposed him to Caravaggio and the Caravagescians, in 1603, Baglione accumulated great orders, fame and honors such as those of Prince of the Academy of S. Lucas and Knight of Christ, and he was important not only for his painting but for the writings on art he published in 1639 and 1642. He worked on the decorations of the Vatican Library, the Lateran Palace, the Charterhouse of Naples and for the great churches of Rome, in an intense production of multiple influences.
This Saint John the Baptist in the desert, signed and dated 1610, takes up one of Baglione's most cherished themes, who treated it repeatedly, almost always in a young model, exploring the human figure with a sculptural character of great monumentality.