Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist

Description

This painting depicts Salome as she receives the head of John the Baptist on a platter, the gruesome reward she chose for having pleased her stepfather, Herod, by performing a seductive dance. This episode from the New Testament had long been popular in Italian art, thanks to its combination of religiosity, violence, and eroticism. The most famous and successful Italian painter of his day, Guido Reni worked in Rome and then in Bologna, where his highly refined style and intensely spiritual subjects dominated. Despite its horrific subject matter, this unfinished work displays the graceful movement, delicate colors, and transparent paint application of Reni’s late style.

Provenance

Cardinal Girolamo Colonna (died 1666), Palazzo Colonna, Rome, by 1647 [Colonna collection inventory, 1647, no. 169; see Safarik 1996 for this and the following]; by descent in the Colonna family, until at least 1783 [Colonna collection inventory, 1783, no. 174]. Earl of Darnley, Cobham Hall, Kent, England, by 1812 [Graves 1912, no. 62]; by descent to Iva Francis Walter Bligh, 8th Earl of Darnley (died 1927); sold, Sotheby's, London, July 22-23, 1957, lot 318, to "Nash" for £100. George Wildenstein, London and New York, by March 1958 [record of phone conversation between Ay Wang Hsia, Wildenstein and Company, and Art Institute, April 4 and April 18, 1990, in curatorial object file.]; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1960.