Description

The relief The Baptism of Christ is the only known version of the work featuring a gilded patina, originally created by Amerigo Tot in 1938. The warm patina envelops the surface in an iconic glow, accentuating the interplay of light and shadow and the harmony of the composition. The scene depicts Christ being baptized by Saint John the Baptist, rendered with classical serenity and spiritual depth. The softly undulating drapery and delicately modelled landscape highlight Tot’s refined compositional sensibility. The work clearly reflects the influence of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s (1378–1455) world-famous bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery, whose narrative richness and spatial clarity served as a major inspiration for the artist.

The original 1938 piece predates Tot’s relocation to Italy and represents a transitional phase between Hungarian sculptural traditions and Mediterranean formal aesthetics. Besides this gilded-patina version, only two institutional examples in plain bronze are known: one in the Vatican Collections and the other at the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs, Hungary. This relief is thus, to our current knowledge, the only surviving example in private ownership.

In this work, Tot unites the spiritual clarity of the Renaissance with the expressive power of twentieth-century sculpture. The gilded patina creates a sacred atmosphere with a Byzantine radiance, elevating the act of baptism to a timeless symbol of rebirth and purification. This relief stands among the most significant pieces of Tot’s religious oeuvre, evoking both tradition and modernity, Hungary and Rome, the unity of faith and form.

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