Banquet of Herod

At Herod's birthday feast, his stepdaughter Salome danced so well that he swore to grant any wish; prompted by her mother, she asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter (Mark 6:21-28). Masolino spreads the story across a single sweeping stage: the banquet at the left, and at the right the severed head delivered to the appalled women. He sets it within a grand colonnade and a luminous mountain landscape built in the new Florentine perspective he had absorbed from his younger partner Masaccio - yet the slender figures keep the courtly elegance of the older International Gothic. The fresco decorates a baptistery dedicated to the Baptist at Castiglione Olona.