Caravaggio (1571-1610)
Salomè con la testa del Battista (Salome with the Head of John the Baptist)
c.1607
Oil on canvas, 116 x 140 cm
Palacio Real, Madrid
The painting is in good condition after being restored by Patrimonio Nacional in 2015. It is now possible to clearly establish the position of the sword wielded by the executioner positioned with his back to the viewer. Besides the usual shades of brown that make up the dark background, Caravaggio decided to add a very dark green that is now particularly visible, especially in the shadowy area on the left.
As for the earliest mention of the canvas, it is no longer possible to accept its identification as the work Caravaggio sent to Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Order of Malta, after returning to Naples in 1609. There are two known versions of the subject (the one examined here and the one now in the National Gallery, London), and the history of the Madrid work seems to rule out the possibility it ever passed through Malta.
The canvas can most likely be related to a mention in the inventory of the possessions of García de Avellaneda y Haro, Count of Castrillo and Viceroy of Naples from 1653 to 1658. At the beginning of 1657, the viceroy owned a hundred and eighty-three paintings, including one described as: ‘A picture of the beheading of Saint John with the woman receiving the saint’s head, the executioner and an old woman beside her, measuring six palms with a black pearwood frame, it is an original by Caravacho.’ In this respect, it should be noted that the inventory uses the local unit of measurement (one Neapolitan palm = 26.367 cm), giving a height (including the frame) of 158.202 cm, which is fully compatible with that of the painting in the Royal Palace in Madrid. The history of the viceroy’s collection and subsequent inventory references support this identification.
García de Avellaneda y Haro, Count of Castrillo (1588?−1670), was a figure of some prominence in the field of artistic patronage in the mid-seventeenth century. In fact, we know that in 1656 Philip IV instructed Diego Velázquez to arrange for forty paintings to be transferred to El Escorial, including some of those ‘which Don García de Avellaneda y Haro, Count of Castrillo, gave to His Majesty’. If these instructions were indeed carried out in 1656, the present canvas cannot have been among this consignment.
Returning now to the provenance of Salome, the canvas is first listed among the possessions of Spanish kings in 1666, when it appears as item number 242 in the first inventory of the Alcázar palace compiled after Castrillo returned to Spain: ‘Another [painting] by Caravaggio of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist, a vara and a half long and a vara and a cuarta high [valued] at 100 silver ducats.’
Twenty years after the 1666 reference, the painting is mentioned again in the same location and with the same estimated value and attribution. It is likewise found in a later inventory of possessions compiled in connection with Charles II’s will, on 26 September 1700. After the Alcázar was ravaged by fire in 1734, a list was drawn up of the paintings that had not been destroyed, in which the Patrimonio Nacional canvas fortunately appears as number 876.
The work should also be related to an entry in the 1794 inventory of the Royal Palace, which lists an anonymous Herodias as item 354. The fact that the number coincides with that of a later inventory indicates that this is undoubtedly the painting of Salome, which was still in Madrid at the time. Indeed, the painting remained there in 1814 as the inventory of royal possessions compiled that year lists under number 354 a Herodias ‘with the head of the Baptist, her mother and the tyrant’, with no attribution.
The painting is first mentioned in the Casita del Príncipe at El Escorial by José Quevedo, who refers to it as hanging in the Sala del Barquillo in 1849. Eight years later, it appears again in Poleró’s meticulous inventory as item number 702.
The number 354 indicates that the work was among the group of paintings that were inventoried and renumbered from 1787 onwards, during the reign of Charles IV, and totalled 418 pieces at the time. The canvas may have enjoyed renewed fame between the late 1700s and the early decades of the 1800s, when two copies of it were drawn: the earlier one, executed by Pau Montaña between 1795 and 1798, is in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid; the second was made by Miguel Berdejo in 1798 and is now in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
The painting was shown in the Milan exhibition of 1951 and was fully accepted by Caravaggio scholars until the Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London, appeared on the scene and complicated matters.
Both Salomes have a very close relationship with Naples, as borne out by stylistic and other evidence. However, there is a notable stylistic and iconographic difference between the two paintings: the London version is based on the Leonardesque – and therefore much more widespread Lombardian – model of the executioner placing the Baptist’s head on the salver held by Salome, with her arm outstretched. In contrast, in the Madrid painting the scene is framed, as the tray containing the gruesome prize is positioned in the centre of the group of figures while the executioner sheathes his sword: the atmosphere is calm; the intention here is not to show the horror but to convey awareness of it. It is precisely this second approach to the scene that left an indelible mark on Neapolitan painting of the first decades of the 1600s.
The numerous versions of the painting indicate that it remained in Naples for a time and it is therefore extremely unlikely that it can be identified as the one sent to Malta. Critics have pointed out in great detail the similarities between the figures in this picture and some of the protagonists of the works executed after the artist’s years in Rome. Aside from morphological details, I believe that the main objections to dating the painting to his second stay in Naples are the thicker, more textured paint film and the palette, still richly nuanced here but much darker in works such as the Saint Ursula in the Intesa Sanpaolo collection or the Borghese Saint John the Baptist, which are characterised by a subtle range of browns.
Source: Maria Cristina Terzaghi. Translated by Jenny Dodman. (Palacio Real)
Compare:
Caravaggio (1571-1610)
Salomè con la testa del Battista
c.1609–1610
National Gallery, London
See also:
• Wignacourt, Alof de (1547-1622)