Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
An attribute that arrives after the saint
John the Baptist is normally identified by camel hair, a reed cross and a lamb. The subject this title names produces a different sign altogether — the dish. Wherever a charger appears in a scene of execution or is carried by a young woman, the tradition reads the Baptist, and the head becomes an attribute of the person holding it rather than of the man it belonged to. It is the one case in the system where the saint is named by an object that only exists because he no longer does.
What the record holds
The catalogue dates the canvas to 1608 and gives St. Johns Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, as its location — a working church, and a building dedicated to the saint the picture names. The dimensions are 361 x 520 cm. Of the 19 works by this artist in this collection, that makes it the largest by recorded measurement, and by a wide margin. It is filed under group portraiture and Religion, with Baroque and Tenebrism as the styles and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.
Tenebrism at five metres
A picture built out of darkness with light admitted narrowly behaves differently at this size. There is room for figures to be separated by empty wall rather than crowded, and the lit area becomes a small part of a very large surface. The record fixes the measurement; what a viewer does with that distance is what the format asks.
Sources
7 references- Caravaggio, Gianni — Getty ULAN
Italian sculptor and installation artist, born 1968
- Caravaggio — Wikipedia
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (also Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi da Caravaggio; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), known mononymously as Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome for a significant portion of his artistic li
- Caravaggio, Cecco del — Getty ULAN
Italian painter, active ca. 1610-1620
- The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist — Wikidata
description: painting by Caravaggio; inception: 1608-01-01; dimensions: 361 × 520 cm; collection: St. John's Co-Cathedral
- stjohnscocathedral.com — record for "The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist"
Primary source record for this work (stjohnscocathedral.com).
- The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Caravaggio) — Wikipedia
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is an oil painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio. Measuring 3.7 m by 5.2 m, it depicts the execution of John the Baptist. It is located in the Oratory of St. John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta.
- Caravaggio Beheading of Saint John the Baptist — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
