Salome with the head of John the Baptist

For a long time nobody knew whose hand this was. A Medici inventory of 1666 called it Herodias and credited Raphael's assistant Penni; by 1704 the name had changed to Pontormo, and in 1795 to Federico Barocci. Only in the 1950s did the historian Roberto Longhi recognize the Spaniard Alonso Berruguete, who had come to Florence and Rome as a young man to study Raphael and Michelangelo. Salome sits alone against the dark, the severed head of John the Baptist heavy on her dish. She had asked for it, pressed by her mother Herodias, yet Berruguete gives her an unsure grip and a downcast, almost sickened look, as though the thing in her hands is more than she bargained for. The head is outsized, its features pushed hard. He painted it around 1514, in the same years he was copying antique marbles in Rome.