The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
Sizes
About this painting
This small panel was painted for teenagers. It sat in the predella of an altarpiece commissioned in October 1461 by the Company of the Purification of the Virgin in Florence — a confraternity of young men between thirteen and twenty-one who prayed, sang together and staged mystery plays. The contract bound Benozzo to follow Fra Angelico's high altarpiece at San Marco, and to paint the saints' stories with his own hand, each beneath its proper saint. Herbert Horne reckoned seven little panels. Four were still missing when he wrote in 1905.
Sources: National Gallery of Art, Washington, 'The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist', accession 1952.2.3, Samuel H. Kress Collection; tombstone and provenance from the NGA's own open-data record, objectid 41582, read 2026-08-27. · Lionel Cust and Herbert P. Horne, 'Notes on Pictures in the Royal Collections: Article VIII — The Story of Simon Magus, part of a Predella Painting by Benozzo Gozzoli', The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 7 (1905): 377-383.
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 14,914 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.