The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

Caravaggio painted The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in 1608, his largest surviving painting and the one he signed — uniquely, in the blood flowing from John's severed head. Painted for the oratory of St. John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, the enormous canvas depicts the executioner completing his work while Salome holds the golden dish that will receive the head, and a jailer gestures instructions from behind a grate. The composition is organized across an emptied space with a simplicity and austerity unprecedented even in Caravaggio's work: the figures small within the vast stone floor, the darkness pressing in from all sides. The signature in blood was both a formal innovation and an act of personal identification with the martyr — Caravaggio, himself a man who had killed, signing in the saint's blood.

The enormous canvas uses a vast, dark prison wall to dwarf the figures, with the executioner bending to complete his work in a pool of blood while a horrified old woman covers her ears—all rendered in Caravaggio's darkest, most austere late manner.