The statues of St. John at Siena, Berlin, and Venice[182] are closely analogous to the Magdalen.  St. John is the ascetic prophet who spent years in seclusion, returning from the desert to preach repentance.  These three figures have one curious feature in common—­a flavour of the Orient.  The St. John is some fakir, some Buddhist saint.  Asiatic as the Baptist was, it is seldom that Italian art gave him so Eastern a type; but the explanation is simply that Donatello evolved his own idea of what a self-centred and fasting mystic would resemble, and his conception happens to coincide with the outcome of similar conditions actually put into practice elsewhere.  The Berlin bronze is St. John as Baptist, the others show him with the scroll as Precursor.  He always wears the camel’s-hair tunic, which ends just below the knee; at Siena it is thick, like some woolly fleece; it conceals and broadens the frame, thus suggesting a stoutness which is not warranted by the size of the leg.  The modelling of legs and arms in these statues is noteworthy.  They are thin, according to Donatello’s idea of his subject; and though the thinness takes the natural form of slender circumference, one sees that the limb with its angular modelling and its flat surfaces has become thin:  the thinness is explained by the character.  The feet of the Siena bronze are exceptionally good; the wrist and forearm of the Venice figure are admirable.  The Siena Baptist is nearly life-sized, and was made in 1457.  He is the least introspective of the three, a mature strong man, and the oldest of the many Baptists Donatello made.  The Berlin figure is the flushed eccentric, holding up the cup he used in baptizing.  The figure is half the size of life, and was doubtless one of the numerous statuettes which crowned fonts.  It has been suggested that this bronze, which is defective in several places, was commissioned for the Cathedral of Orvieto in 1423.[183] But the type would appear more advanced than the busts on the Mandorla doorway or the Siena work made about this time.  Moreover, the contract specifies a St. John cum signo crucis et demonstratione ecce agnus Dei.  A Baptist was made at the same time for Ancona, and is now lost.  On first seeing the St. John in Venice one’s impression is to laugh.  But he is not really a wild man of the woods—­he is simply covered with and made grotesque by thick masses of oil paint.  A close examination of the figure shows that in some places the paint is over a quarter of an inch thick, and the last coating it has received is glutinous in quality, and has been laid on with such freedom that the position and shape of certain features are altered.  But if seen close at hand, the statue (which it is understood will shortly be cleaned) shows distinct merits.  The modelling of the extremities is good, and though it is clear that Donatello was never quite willing to treat St. John as on a par with the other Saints, we have a systematic and generic rendering of his