Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist

In the Gospel story, Herod's stepdaughter Salome dances at his birthday feast, and when he promises her anything she wants, she asks, at her mother's urging, for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Painters in Milan came back to that platter again and again in the early 1500s, and the Museum of Fine Arts points to one reason. A head laid on a dish could be read as the Host, the consecrated bread of the Mass, carried to the altar on its plate. Luini painted the subject more than once, and another of his versions hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. The museum dates this panel to between about 1515 and 1525. The faces are soft and lovely, their edges blurred by fine shadow, and nothing in them answers the cruelty of the moment. Three centuries later the panel belonged to the Marulli d'Ascoli family in Naples, who kept it from the 1840s until about 1917. It then passed through the hands of Elia Volpi, the Florentine dealer who had restored the medieval Palazzo Davanzati as a house museum, and in 1921 it came to Boston as a gift from Mrs. Walter Scott Fitz.