13. The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
The Beheading of St John the Baptist was the largest painting ever produced by Caravaggio, and the only one he ever signed. It has since been lauded as his magnum opus, and one of the greatest paintings of all time. It commemorates the death of the Order’s patron saint, John the Baptist, who was beheaded after King Herod rashly promised a dancing girl, Salome, anything she desired, and was forced by honour to grant her cruel request for John’s head. Caravaggio depicts the decapitation taking place under the fearsome gaze of a Turkish janissary, one of the Order’s hated enemies.
Caravaggio focuses on the degrading, hurried circumstances of St John’s savage death, again affording no glorious elements to a profoundly human event. Herod had been mid-feast when he was compelled to order the beheading, and here the executioner has bungled the rushed first attempt, and is about to finish the job with a knife. Instead of taking place at a formal place of death, St John is simply beheaded outside the prison. The picture is enlivened by Caravaggio’s characteristic use of chiaroscuro, which makes the features of the contemporary Maltese building, in particular the window and doorway, appear three-dimensional.
It seems that Caravaggio knew that the painting would be a celebrated work. He has made his signature a fundamental part of the painting and event itself, by forming it from the blood spilling from the Baptist’s neck. That is, he is linking his own immortality to that of St John, whose martyrdom will bring him eternal life. Whether Caravaggio was thinking in secular (posthumous fame) or sacred (eternal life, as a result of the forgiveness of his sins after joining the order) immortality, is unclear. But God, like the Knights, was surely impressed by the 3.7 x 5.2-metre undertaking.