The Decollation of John the Baptist

The episode from the New Testament begins on the north side, where John the Baptist is dragged from his prison by his executioner and beheaded. The banquet of Herod takes place on the opposite side. King Herod and his wife sit at table, while Salome dances next to them. In the middle of the table lies the Baptist’s head, from which three trickles of blood flow. Herodias bathes her fingers in the pool of blood. Herod points with his index finger at the crouching figure at the end of the table, who seems to be making himself small, and who is pointing his finger in turn back at King Herod. A figure above him lifts his cloak over the crouching figure as if to protect him. The representation seems to be a very literal transposition of the biblical text (Mk 6:20) into the pictorial language of the capital: Herod heard John gladly and “kept him safe”, prior to the fatal banquet, just as the figure with the raised cloak does; he can be interpreted as a further representation of Herod. The complementary gestures of the hands of Herod and of the crouching figure point to a dialogue between them. John the Baptist, who prefigures the martyr’s death of Christ, says with reference to Jesus: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). He also regards himself as “the friend of the bride- groom”– in other words, the one who, in conformity with oriental tradition, risks everything to ensure that the bridegroom enters into a good marriage. So the crouching figure (who “decreases”) on the south side presumably represents John, baptizer and prophet, who denounces the bad, the adulterous marriage between Herod and Herodias, but at the same time heralds by his own sacrifice with reference to the Eucharist the good, future marriage, namely, that between the bridegroom Christ and his bride the Church: the good bridal couple.

decollation Herodias Herod Salome couple bridal Baptist John church