Beheading of St. John the Baptist and Herod's Banquet

Fra Angelico's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Herod's Banquet, painted around 1430 for the Louvre, combines two sequential scenes from the Baptist's story in a single panel. The continuous narrative format, with the execution and the presentation of the head at the feast, was common in predella panels where spatial economy was essential. Fra Angelico — born Guido di Pietro, known in religion as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole — was a Dominican friar whose painting practice was inseparable from his spiritual vocation. Working primarily for his own order and for Florentine civic and private patrons, he created some of the most luminous and spiritually powerful images in the history of European art.

The dual-scene composition uses architectural divisions to separate the execution from the banquet, rendered in Fra Angelico's luminous tempera technique with the clear spatial construction and precise figure drawing of his mature style.