The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
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About this painting
Caravaggio was received as a Knight of Obedience on 14 July 1608. The barred window behind the killing, prisoners at its bars, quotes Thomassin's print for the Order's Statute XVIII, Prohibitions and Penalties, as David M. Stone showed. On 27 August he was locked in Fort St Angelo.
On 1 December the Order assembled in this oratory, in front of this painting, and expelled him in his absence — tamquam membrum putridum et foetidum, like a rotten and fetid limb.
It carries the only signature he is known to have painted, and he wrote it in the blood running from the Baptist's throat: f. Michelang.o — fra, brother, the Order's own title for a knight. He signed himself into the Order in the blood of the man being killed, and the Order stood in front of it and threw him out before the year was over. It has hung in the oratory it was painted for ever since, apart from conservation.
Sources: knighthood 14 July 1608, expulsion 1 December 1608, the oratory, dimensions · David M. Stone, "Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Poetics of Blood," The Art Bulletin 94:4 (2012), 572-593 · the brawl, the arrest, the escape, dated · David M. Stone, "The Context of Caravaggio's Beheading of St John in Malta", The Burlington Magazine (March 1997).
But sending an executioner, he commanded that his head should be brought in a dish.
Mark 6:27 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 18,632 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.