Salomè con la testa del Battista

When this panel reached Florence from the imperial collection in Vienna in 1773, it arrived under the name of Leonardo da Vinci, and the mistake is easy to understand. Luini had trained in Leonardo's Milan and never shook the influence, that smoky softening of every edge, the lowered eyes and parted lips. For the severed head of John the Baptist he seems to have looked straight at a Leonardo drawing, the tousled study known as La Scapigliata. There is no blood and no horror in the scene. Salome turns her face aside with the same serene, absorbed calm as the executioner beside her, so the most violent moment in the story plays almost as a reverie. Only later was the picture given back to Luini.