Composition
The image depicts the execution of John the Baptist while nearby Salome stands with a golden platter to receive his head. Another woman, who has been identified as Herodias or simply a bystander who realizes that the execution is wrong, stands by in shock while a jailer issues instructions and the executioner draws his dagger to finish the beheading. The scene, popular with Italian artists in general and with Caravaggio himself, is not directly inspired by the Bible, but rather by the tale as related in Golden Legend.
It is the only work by Caravaggio to bear the artist's signature, which he has placed in red blood spilling from the Baptist's cut throat. There is considerable empty space in the image, but because the canvas is quite large the figures are approximately life-sized.
According to John Varriano in Caravaggio: the Art of Realism (2006), Caravaggio drew the background for his picture from the depiction of a prison in the Knights of Malta's penal code. Characteristically of his later paintings, the number of props and the detail in the props used is minimal.
Read more about this topic: The Beheading Of Saint John The Baptist (Caravaggio)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)