Head of Saint John the Baptist

This is early Bellini, painted around 1465 when he was still a young man in the Venetian orbit, well before the great altarpieces that made his name. The subject is the severed head of John the Baptist, shown alone on its plate. Images like this had a specific use. A worshipper would set one up and pray before it, meditating on the Baptist's beheading much as one might before a crucifix, since the head in a dish was a familiar object of private devotion in this period. Bellini leans into that by making the panel itself round, roughly the size of a real charger, so the wooden disc you are looking at stands in for the platter Salome was said to have carried the head away on.