The Head of Saint John the Baptist Brought before Herod

Giovanni di Paolo · 1455–60

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

68.5 × 40.2 cm (27 × 15 13/16 in.); Framed: 79.4 × 52.1 × 8.9 cm (31 1/4 × 20 1/2 × 3 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Giovanni di Paolo's small but arresting panel captures the grim theatrical moment when the severed head of John the Baptist is carried into Herod's court, rendered with the unsettling stillness that defines the artist's best work. Di Paolo spent his long career in Siena, largely untouched by the Florentine Renaissance unfolding to the north, and this distance shaped everything about his style. His figures are elongated, almost otherworldly, and his palette runs to sharp, jewel-like contrasts that owe more to Gothic manuscript illumination than to the naturalism spreading through Italy at the time. That tension — between archaic devotional intensity and a genuinely personal visual imagination — gives his work a strange emotional directness that more polished contemporaries rarely achieved. The painting is part of a series di Paolo made depicting scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist, several panels of which are now held across major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, suggesting it was originally part of a larger devotional altarpiece or predella. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates di Paolo's precise, expressive linework and luminous colour into the richer medium of oil, preserving the original's solemn gravity while bringing its remarkable detail to life at a scale suited to your home.