Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist

Art Institute of Chicago

Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist

Guido Reni (Italian, 1575–1642)LinkedCulture matchlcp-3722f4ea2f4a

Date
c. 1639–42
Medium
Oil on canvas
Culture
Italy
Department
Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Institution
Art Institute of Chicago
Object ID
11434

From the Art Institute of Chicago record

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.

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Provenance & credit

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Credit line
Louise B. and Frank H. Woods Purchase Fund
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.

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Object type
AAT300033618

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