Artwork story
About Saint John the Evangelist holding a goblet with a snake emerging from it, from "Christ, the Virgin, and Thirteen Apostles"
The artist and artwork
An unidentified seventeenth-century printmaker etched this portrait of Saint John the Evangelist between 1600 and 1640 after a design by Guido Reni. The distinction matters: Reni supplied the model, but an anonymous hand translated it into lines bitten into a metal plate. The sheet also carries framing lines added in pen and brown ink. It belonged to Christ, the Virgin, and Thirteen Apostles, a set of fifteen bust-length figures enclosed in oval frames and printed together from a single plate before individual portraits were separated.
The world around it
Reni worked within the artistic transformation that made Bologna a major force in seventeenth-century European painting. Annibale Carracci had joined northern Italian attention to color, light, and nature with the idealized language of Roman art; Reni and the next Bolognese generation carried that synthesis into an emerging Baroque world. A printed series converted monumental sacred design into repeatable, portable images. Owners could encounter Christ, the Virgin, and the apostles as a coordinated group, while a single cut-out sheet could also function like a small devotional portrait. The surviving anonymous etching records how a famous painter’s invention traveled through another maker and another medium.
A detail to notice
John is identified less by setting than by the object in his raised hand. A snake curls upward from the goblet, referring to a legend in which the saint survived poisoned drink through divine protection. The youthful, beardless face, long hair, and direct gaze fill most of the oval; close hatching darkens one cheek, the neck, and the robe while the untouched paper becomes light. The snake is tiny but essential: without it, the figure might be only an idealized young man. Two oval outlines and the rectangular brown-ink frame preserve different stages of presentation, reminders that this intimate portrait began as one member of a much larger plate.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is print made in Etching; framing lines in pen and brown ink and held in the Drawings and Prints department.
Recorded dimensions include Sheet: 4 1/8 × 2 15/16 in. (10.4 × 7.5 cm).
Subject terms include Portraits, Snakes, Saint John the Evangelist, and Drinking Glasses. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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