The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

In 1514 the Knights of Saint John in Fribourg had a new commander, Peter von Englisberg, a local nobleman who was putting their house there back in order, its buildings and its finances alike. The order's patron was John the Baptist, so the altarpiece ordered from Fries that year told the Baptist's story, and this panel, the inner side of the left wing, shows his beheading. The matching wing, also here in Basel, gives the other Saint John, the Evangelist, in a vat of boiling oil.

By the summer of 1867 the panel was hanging in Basel's old museum, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, then writing The Idiot, stopped in the city. Early in the novel Prince Myshkin, a guest in a general's house, tells Adelaida, the daughter who paints, that he recently saw a picture like this in Basel and very much wants to tell her about it. She makes him promise to do it later. He never does. Instead he describes the face of a condemned man in the last minute before the guillotine falls, an execution the prince says he once watched in Lyon.