Kopf Johannes des Täufers

By 1646 Jusepe de Ribera had spent more than twenty years in Naples, a city run from Madrid, and he still signed his work 'espanol' in his own hand along the edge of the table. Here he sets the severed head of John the Baptist on a plain platter, the skin gone grey, and around it lays out the props of the story like objects in a pantry: a thin reed cross, the executioner's knife, a white cloth marked with blood. It reads almost as a still life, a table of things you could reach out and touch. He had painted this same head at least three times over the previous years, and this is the last and the most exact of them.