Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist

In December 1639 the Barberini were at the height of their power. Pope Urban VIII had reigned for 16 years, and that year Pietro da Cortona finished the enormous ceiling in the family's palace in Rome. On 13 December Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the pope's nephew, bought a Salome by Guido Reni, and the museum believes it is this canvas, painted in Bologna around 1638 or 1639.

Salome rises out of a grey, indistinct ground holding the platter with the head of John the Baptist, the prize her mother Herodias had told her to ask for. The museum points to the contrast Reni builds. The subject is gruesome, and her face is gentle and composed. She looks straight at us and keeps an icy, impersonal distance, while the turban and the rich clothes are laid in with long, loaded strokes of the brush.

About a century later a churchman, Monsignor Bardi, gave the picture to another pope, Clement XII, a Corsini, and the guidebooks of 18th- and 19th-century Rome kept singling it out.