The Feast of Herod

Rubens painted this enormous banquet in the mid-1630s, near the end of his life, when he was Europe's most sought-after painter and shipped work far beyond Antwerp. It was most likely ordered by Gaspar Roomer, a hugely rich Flemish merchant living in Naples who moved pictures between Italy and the Low Countries. The subject is a killing dressed as a party. Salome, in red at the centre, calmly lifts a cover to show the severed head of John the Baptist, and Herod recoils from the table. Just beside him his wife Herodias, who wanted the prophet dead, leans in and pricks the tongue that had condemned her marriage with a fork. Around this small act of malice the feast goes on in full colour, dogs and dishes and guests.