The Beheading of St John the Baptist

Entry

The alabaster-carving industry in Mechelen originated with the arrival of a small group of artists, employed by Margaret of Austria, governess of the Netherlands at the onset of the sixteenth century. These artists worked primarily in the new antyckse renaissance style imported from Italy. Most important among them where the sculptors Conrat Meit (1485-1550/51) from Worms and Jean Mone (c. 1485-?1554) from Metz, whose presence in the city stimulated local sculptors to shift their efforts in the direction of the new formal idiom and simultaneously the material alabaster. Lipińska maintains that for those artists originally trained in wood, the move to the new, relatively soft stone type alabaster was minor.¹

As a result, a veritable industry in this kind of sculpture began to flourish in the sixteenth century, destined for a market that encompassed much of north-western Europe. Besides the Low Countries, Mechelen alabaster reliefs and altars were exported to places as far away as Poland, the Baltic States and Scandinavia.² The more luxurious versions of these house altars comprised both larger and smaller alabaster reliefs, mounted in ornately carved wooden frames decorated with pressed-gesso patterns. The Rijksmuseum possesses two such altars (BK-BR-515; BK-NM-2918). However, the majority of this so-called cleynstekerswerk centred on small carved tablets featuring mythological and biblical scenes in a virtually unlimited number of variations produced serially well into the first half of the seventeenth century. With dimensions up to 20 x 20 centimetres, these small alabaster reliefs were typically supplied with decorative frames edged with pressed papier-mâché. To enliven the scenes and the frames, polychromers added highlights in gold. Even today, many of these objects still bear the monograms and house marks left by their makers, conveying the competition among artists but also serving as a kind of quality guaranty.

The quality of the carving is what distinguishes the present relief from the majority of this production. Its maker, certainly one of the more prominent cleynstekers in Mechelen, has taken great trouble to render the scene within a decor of classical architecture, even achieving the round palace’s spatial complexity with reasonable success. The level of depth and shadow is exceptional, an effect achieved through the technique of undercutting several columns, the entry below, and the large, broken arch on the far left. In this manner, the scene resembles a stage decor, with each figure assigned his own designated plan. The relief’s composition was likely based on a graphic model, such a drawing or engraving has not yet been identified. Details such as the herm caryatids in the background, the thoughtfully decorated friezes and capitals, the coffered arch, and the palace trumpeters are unquestionably taken from one or more model engravings. As a result, the overall scene has a strong all’antica quality. Lipinska’s presumption³ that the figures in the relief, based on a supposed inferior quality, were rendered by another hand remains unconvincing: clearly conceived as part of a single, organic composition, their skilful rendering and attention to detail equals that of the architectural background.

Originally, the relief likely served as the principal scene of a house altar or small epitaph commissioned by someone whose patron saint was John the Baptist, such as a member of the Johanniter Order (cf. BK-BR-515). At the scene’s centre, the execution takes place. St John, who kneels before his executioner, clasps his saintly attribute: a shell. Several Roman soldiers look on, and Salome, who stands beneath the ruinous arch, holding a platter in her hand. It is on this charger that the saint’s head is to be presented to King Herod, as it was on his orders that John was beheaded (Mark 6:14-29) as remuneration for Salomé’s seductive dance and on the advice of his wife, Herodias. Both Herod and Herodias are present in the relief, standing on the first floor of the round palace. High up in the clouds above, a cherub appears holding a laurel wreath and palm branch, signs of John’s impending martyrdom.

The relief comes from the art collection of Arnoldus Andries des Tombe, known above all as the discoverer and owner of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which he acquired at a sale in 1881 and subsequently bequeathed to the Mauritshuis museum together with various other paintings.⁴ Among the painted works he bequeathed to the Rijksmuseum is Adriaen Coorte’s popular Still Life with Asparagus (SK-A-2099).

Frits Scholten, 2024