Feast of Herod with the Beheading of St John the Baptist

The Feast of Herod with the Beheading of St John the Baptist is a large painting by the Silesian artist Bartholomeus Strobel the Younger (1591 - about 1650) which is now displayed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. In oil on canvas, it measures 2.80 by 9.52 metres (9 ft 2 in × 31 ft 3 in), and is variously dated between about 1630 and 1643.

The painting shows two scenes from the biblical account of the death of John the Baptist. The main part of the painting, on the left, shows the banquet of Herod Antipas at which his daughter Salome produced the head of John the Baptist. The much smaller execution scene is shown on the right hand side, to the right of the column dividing the picture space. The Beheading of John the Baptist had often been combined with the Feast of Herod in this way, with the execution relegated to a different space at the side of the image, a pattern Strobel takes to an extreme.

The figures include many portraits of leading figures of the Thirty Years' War, and probably other less well known court figures, not all so far identified, or with agreed identifications. It has been interpreted as an allegorical "appeal to the Christian world to save [Strobel's] doomed home country" of Silesia, which had suffered greatly from the wars.

Style The style of the figures in the Prado painting varies between realistic portraiture, generalized and idealized faces, especially among the females, and expressive caricature, with the three types often mixed in a single group. The costumes of many figures are painted in great detail and with precision, but the fashions shown vary from French styles of the 1630s to those of Poland, with some purely fanciful elements. The two boys with candles in front of the left end of the table wear Polish styles, from the distinctive szkofia three-plumed hat badge of the right-hand one (held at his waist) to the boots of the one at left, who looks to be a portrait. He also wears a curved Polish or Hungarian type of szabla (sabre). Behind the two boys is a figure of uncertain gender wearing the modified Roman military uniform typically worn by goddesses and allegorical figures in Northern Mannerism; there is a similar figure at the front of the Munich Feast.

This mixture, both as to the depiction of faces and of clothing, is reminiscent of many northern religious paintings of the 15th and 16th centuries, especially those showing the Passion of Jesus. There are reminiscences of the fantastical style of the printmaker Jacques Bellange, another artist whose homeland of Lorraine was to be ravaged by the war. One critic finds the "blurred edges, eclecticism, mixed registers and parodic deflation of late Renaissance literature are mirrored in Mannerist painting, from Jacques Bellange to Bartholomeus Strobel". Despite its late date, Strobel's work remains rooted in the Rudolfine Northern Mannerism of Prague which he had absorbed in his youth.