Feast of Herod with the Beheading of St John the Baptist

The Feast of Herod with the Beheading of St John the Baptist is an extremely large painting by the German-Silesian artist Bartholomeus Strobel the Younger (1591 – about 1650) which is now displayed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. In oils on canvas, it measures 2.80 x 9.52 metres, and is variously dated between about 1630 and 1643.

The painting shows two scenes from the biblical account of the death of John the Baptist. The main part of the painting, on the left, shows the banquet of Herod Antipas at which his daughter Salome produced the head of John the Baptist. The much smaller execution scene is shown on the right hand side, to the right of the column dividing the picture space. The Beheading of John the Baptist had often been combined with the Feast of Herod in this way, with the execution relegated to a different space at the side of the image, a pattern Strobel takes to an extreme.

The figures include many portraits of leading figures of the Thirty Years' War, and probably other less well known court figures, not all so far identified, or with agreed identifications. It has been interpreted as an allegorical "appeal to the Christian world to save [Strobel's] doomed home country" of Silesia, which had suffered greatly from the wars.

The painting includes many portraits of leading political and military figures from around Europe, relying on prints for the likenesses of those not known to Strobel. It is probably central to the allegory that the coat of arms of Strobel's home city, now Wrocław, Poland, which he would have known by its German name of Breslau, includes the image of the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Strobel was forced to leave Breslau by the Thirty Years' War in 1634, finally settling in Poland. Only Herod himself, dressed in oriental costume, reacts strongly to the head produced at the dining table; the other figures seem unconcerned, which may be the point of the allegory.

Identifications of the figures shown vary. One set, predicated on a date in the early 1640s for the work, is as follows: the figure holding a trumpet at the centre, looking out at the viewer, is the Dutch Admiral Tromp, whose victory at the Battle of the Downs in 1639 had decisively ended Spanish naval power. To his left Henry IV of France (who had died in 1610) pulls at a cloth over a table laid with fruit (so presenting "the fruits of victory"). The group of men standing in the foreground on the left are the Imperial generalissimo Wallenstein, with the long staff, with behind him his subordinate generals Count Vilém Kinský, Christian Freiherr von Ilow and Count Adam Erdmann Trcka von Lipa as well as one of their assassins in 1634, the Irish colonel of dragoons Walter Butler of Roscrea.

...
Wikipedia