Raphael's authorship in the 'Expulsion of Heliodorus.' - interpretation of court painter Raphael's mural

The character in Italian Renaissance painting who most essentially embodies these two acts is Saint John the Baptist [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED].(46) He addresses the viewer and points out Christ while implicitly saying the words, "Behold the lamb of God," or he holds a banderole that states those words. Because the message of this gesture is prophetic, the designator must possess sufficient holy status to assert divine foreknowledge of the events.(47)

During the Middle Ages, in scenes of religious subject matter it had been customary for a sacred figure, not uncommonly an angel, to be the designator of divinity. By the fourteenth and especially the fifteenth century, saints like John the Baptist increasingly assumed this role in Italian painting. During the fifteenth, more profane figures also began to perform in this capacity. Fra Filippo Lippi's Prato Cathedral mural scene of Saint Stephen's Disputation in the Synagogue from the 1450s displays hints of a new class of designator of religious subject matter [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED]. Two figures are separated from the religious figures by a parapet. One looks out at us, his face in three-quarter presentation with hand on his chin, recalling the self-portrait of Fra Filippo Lippi in the Coronation. Another figure in lost profile, also in contemporary garb, reaches over the parapet and, directly beneath the outward gaze of the painter Lippi, points into the religious scene.(48)

It was during the last quarter of the quattrocento that contemporary figures - but not yet painters - started to appear in pictures not merely as witnesses but as unequivocal designators of sacred events.(49) In the Sistine Chapel mural cycle of the early 1480s such contemporary figures unmistakably point out sacred incidences and personages. For example, in Perugino's Circumcision of the Son of Moses, the contemporary man in red cap and green cloak (second from left) stares out at us and with his fight hand, half hidden under his sleeve, gestures toward the historical event [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED]. Socially elite contemporaries not only mingle with the historical characters, they also assume a role once befitting the likes of angels and saints.(50)

The trend of including elite contemporary designators in religious paintings continued into the sixteenth century, as with the Baptism of Constantine in the Sala di Costantino from the early 1520s [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED]. Yet here the contemporary at left who looks out to the viewer apparently points to another portrait face.(51) Such designators appear in altarpieces as well. Although the kneeling patron (Canon Ferry Carondelet) in Fra Bartolomeo's Besancon Altarpiece from about 1511 does not gaze out with decided focus to the viewer, he points in the general direction of the cloud-borne Madonna and Child.(52)

On the whole, patrons and elite contemporaries were portrayed in Italian paintings as explicit designators of the religious subject matter some two decades before the painters themselves made such an appearance.(53) In the Prato Saint Stephen, the painter does not himself point but is linked to an anonymous contemporary who does. A stronger identification of the painter with the act of designation is in Domenico Ghirlandaio's altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi for the Spedale degli Innocenti from 1488 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED].(54) The Baptist, kneeling in the left foreground, looks out and points to a cup, perhaps one of the Magi gifts. Directly above the saint is a figure who looks out with the same facial aspect as the Baptist. This is the painter, Ghirlandaio, who in being so paralleled with the Baptist is implicated in the role of a subdesignator or designator-by-association.(55)