Salome with the Head of John the Baptist

This is early Titian, painted around 1515 when he was a young man in Venice absorbing everything Giorgione had done before dying in the plague. A richly dressed woman carries a platter with the severed head of a bearded man, usually read as Salome with the head of John the Baptist, though some have called her Judith instead, since both stories give a woman and a man's cut-off head. The tenderness is what unsettles. She does not gloat. She looks away, calm and almost sorrowful, while a small servant gazes up at the head. Erwin Panofsky, one of the great scholars of Renaissance imagery, suggested the head itself might be Titian's own likeness, a young painter putting his face on the platter of the woman he paints. The model for Salome recurs in other Venetian pictures of these years. Titian gives her the same golden hair and heavy sleeves he lavished on his Venuses, dressing an execution as a portrait of beauty.