Head of Saint John the Baptist

Marco Zoppo's Head of Saint John the Baptist, painted around 1465, is now in the Civic Museum of Palazzo Mosca, Pesaro. Zoppo, a pupil of Francesco Squarcione in Padua alongside Mantegna, brought the hard, linear Paduan style to his work in Bologna and the Marche. The grisly subject of the Baptist's severed head, placed on a dish after his execution by Herod, was a common devotional image type that allowed painters to demonstrate their skill in rendering the human face.

Zoppo's Paduan training is evident in the sharp, sculptural rendering of the head with precise anatomical detail, hard contours, and the metallic quality of surface modeling characteristic of Squarcione's workshop tradition.