Beheading of St. John the Baptist and Herod's Banquet

This little panel, about 19 by 30 centimetres, was the bottom strip of an altarpiece, the predella, where a painter told the story in small scenes beneath the main image. On the left the Baptist is beheaded. On the right a soldier carries in the head on a dish while Herod's guests sit at table and Salome dances. Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar working in Florence in the second quarter of the 15th century, the years his order was rebuilding the convent of San Marco. The panel belonged to the English poet and banker Samuel Rogers, was sold in London in 1856, and was given to the Louvre in 1878 by the collector Horace His de La Salle.