Salomé

Titian painted this around 1550, in his sixties, at the height of his fame in Venice. Salome carries the severed head of John the Baptist on a platter, her bare arm brushing the prophet's hair, dressed and lit in the sensuous way Venetian painters liked to give the story. But look at the face of the head she carries. Several scholars believe it is Titian's own likeness, an aging master slipping his features onto the martyr. If they are right, he was among the first to paint himself as a decapitated head, an idea Caravaggio would take much further half a century later. Salome herself looks not at her trophy but straight out at us.