Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

This small oval on copper has spent most of its life under a question mark. It belonged to the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and in 1650 a guidebook to the family's villa listed it as a work by the Cavaliere Giuseppe. By 1693 the family inventory gave it to a painter called Martiniani. In the 20th century the critic Roberto Longhi thought it the work of a follower, while a 1959 catalogue gave it back to Cesari and placed it early in the 1600s. The museum now follows the German scholar Herwarth Röttgen, who accepts it as Cesari's own and dates it around 1630, late in the painter's career. The saint kneels at the centre. Two women watch from the left, perhaps Salome and her mother Herodias. On the right the executioner, stripped to the waist, is drawing his sword, with two soldiers close behind him.