In the centre foreground St John the Baptist, who is wearing his distinctive camel-hair tunic and leather belt, is baptising Christ on the bank of the river Jordan (Matthew 3:13-17; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21-22; John 1:32-34). The prominent tree behind Christ, a possible reference to the tree of life,8 separates the picture into two parts. On both sides of Christ people awaiting their baptism are getting undressed on the banks of the river. The dove of the Holy Ghost, revealing Christ’s divinity, is flying down towards him from an opening in the sky. Since its arrival in the Rijksmuseum this painting has been associated with the workshop of Jan van Scorel. Indeed, its composition has considerable similarities to Scorel’s Baptism of Christ of c. 1527-30, now in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem (fig. a). In the Haarlem painting, Scorel, inspired by Italian iconography, introduced certain pictorial innovations, replacing, for instance, the traditional angels present at the baptism with figures undressing similar to those in the Rijksmuseum painting.9 In the Amsterdam Baptism, however, the figure group of Christ and St John stands out much more than in Scorel’s composition, and is depicted in reverse order to the right of the tree. This connects it even more closely to Maarten van Heemskerck’s depictions of this biblical episode, especially to his 1563 Baptism in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig (fig. b). Heemskerck, who must have seen the Haarlem Baptism while working in Scorel’s workshop during the time of its execution, used Scorel’s composition as his main source of imagery for the Baptism throughout his career, starting with the 1531 Berlin Baptism,10 but modified it each time.11 Apart from the resemblance to the Braunschweig picture, small details of the Amsterdam painting are similar to other depictions of the Baptism by Heemskerck. For instance, St John’s bearded face is almost identical to the one in an undated Heemskerck drawing of The Baptism in the British Museum,12 which is undoubtedly connected to Philips Galle’s engraving of 1564.13 The crossed arms of Christ in the Amsterdam painting also appear in Heemskerck’s Warsaw Baptism,14 which is generally dated around 1565.15 The figures in the Amsterdam painting are rather awkward compared to what one would expect from Heemskerck, and the painting technique lacks his refinement. This would suggest that this is a workshop painting that was probably made around the same time as the 1563 Braunschweig Baptism. Even though Dirck van Bleyswijck did not mention this painting in his 1667 description of the Town Hall of Delft, it was auctioned in 1860 together with other paintings from the Town Hall, such as Maarten van Heemskerck’s Portrait of Johannes Colmannus (SK-C-507) and the wing with the Erythraean Sibyl (SK-A-1910). It can therefore be assumed that it was brought to the Town Hall from one of Delft’s religious institutions during or shortly after the 1566 iconoclasm. If this was indeed the case, and if it was executed around the mid-1560s, the painting did not hang in its original setting for long. (Ilona van Tuinen)