Salome receives the Head of St. John the Baptist

Naples in these years was full of painters working in deep shadow and hard single light, and Battistello was among the most serious of them. In this Salome the grim story is told with almost no drama. The severed head of John the Baptist is carried in on a platter, and the figures lean toward it out of the dark. When the scholar Roberto Longhi looked closely at the picture in 1927, what struck him most was not the young Salome but the head of the old serving woman beside her, painted with a blunt truth that felt startlingly modern. The date is not fixed. The gallery places it around 1617, while others spread it across the years on either side.