The beheading of Saint John the Baptist

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Faber, who was born in Germany, travelled in Italy and then worked in Provence and the Rhône valley.  This work is influenced by the ideas of Caravaggio.  There is no idealisation; the subject, dramatic and violent (the torturer giving Salomé the saint’s decapitated head) is reproduced by the painting itself:  details of raw realism such as the martyr’s body painted in a foreshortened manner, with his dirty feet in the foreground; the staging featuring a violent opposition between shadow and light; a hieratic simplification of spaces; the angular depiction of forms accentuated by the metallic quality of the colours.  A reflection on the human condition is shown in Salomé who, her expression unreadable, is alone facing herself.