The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

In Rome the Florentine brotherhood of San Giovanni Decollato, Saint John Beheaded, had a grim calling. Its members walked beside men condemned to death, comforted them through their last night and buried them afterwards. In 1551 the brotherhood asked Daniele da Volterra for an altarpiece for its oratory, and one proposal is that this panel is that altarpiece. The subject would have suited them exactly. The Baptist's body lies on the ground in front, in a pose the scholar Roberto Paolo Ciardi traced to a figure by the Florentine painter Rosso Fiorentino.

The link is not proven. Most scholars date the picture to about 1550 or 1551, while Ciardi and Benedetta Moreschini, in their 2004 monograph, move it to around 1555 or 1556. The attribution itself has hardly been questioned, apart from an early suggestion by the critic Roberto Longhi in favour of Lelio Orsi. In 1677 the panel was recorded in the Palazzo Niccolini in Florence, and it was bought in Florence for the royal gallery in Turin in 1840.