Salome with the Head of John the Baptist

The title names Salome, but as the museum points out, she is not the real subject. The Baptist's severed head is, and Solari set it squarely in the centre, so that a brutal story is pressed into a calm, symmetrical arrangement. The executioner holds the head out, and the figures and objects around it are painted with a studied, ideal beauty in delicate and even cheerful combinations of colour, which the museum reads as a kind of mockery of the cruel act. This is a late work, from around 1520 to 1524, the last years of Solari's life. The museum thinks it may once have belonged to Bartolomeo della Nave, a Venetian merchant whose pictures were bought for the Marquess of Hamilton in the late 1630s. After Hamilton's execution in 1649 his paintings went to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, and it is from the archduke's collection that this panel came to Vienna.