Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist

Salome stands at the left and looks at the Baptist's head, held up by a powerful arm that breaks in from the right edge. Of the executioner, nothing else is shown. Andrea Solari returned to this subject several times, and the composition caught on in Milan. Bernardino Luini, a younger Milanese painter, probably took this very panel as the model for his own Salome, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and further versions and variants are known, some of them once given to Flemish or other northern painters.

Most scholars now accept Solari's name here, but whether he painted it with his own hand is still open, and the museum labels it attributed, adding the Lombard milieu as an alternative. Its date is argued too. The Milanese scholar Luisa Cogliati Arano placed it after 1510. The American art historian David Alan Brown fitted it between two dated pictures by Solari now in the Louvre, a Crucifixion of 1503 and an Annunciation of 1506, and that is the range the museum gives.