Antique & Vintage Postcards

One of the Renaissance's most psychologically compelling saint portraits stares back from this early color art reproduction card — Andrea del Sarto's San Giovanni Battista, painted c.1523 and housed in the Galleria Pitti in Florence, rendered here in warm heliotype by the Milanese fine-art printing house Eliotipia Roberto Hoesch. The young Baptist is depicted as an almost disturbingly beautiful adolescent, curly auburn hair haloed faintly, muscular torso wrapped in animal skin and billowing crimson drapery, holding the slender reed cross in one hand and a glass vessel in the other — the sacred and sensual intertwined as only the High Renaissance could manage. Andrea del Sarto, called "the faultless painter" by Vasari, produced this canvas during the height of his Florentine maturity, and it remains one of the Pitti's most visited works. The back indicates distribution through Pistone & Tarchetti of Milan, with Eliotipia Roberto Hoesch as printer — a quality art-reproduction publisher whose cards were sold in museum gift contexts before such things had a name.