The Feast of Herod, with Herodias and Salome

These panels were still in their chapel in Florence in 1813. The next year they were taken out and sent to Paris, to the Louvre, at a time when French officials were choosing early Italian pictures for the museum, and they stayed there after the fall of Napoleon. This one tells the death of John the Baptist, who stood among the saints in the main panels above, and it reads from left to right like a strip. At the foot of the tower on the left, behind a grating, is the prison where John was held. A musician plays a fiddle beside the table. Herod sits under the loggia while the executioner brings in the head on a dish, and at the far right Salome kneels to hand it to her mother Herodias, who had told her to ask for it.