Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie (2(38).2013)

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Late Medieval and Early Modern Art

Representations of his relics are among the rarest references to the death of John the
Baptist. A nineteenth-century icon shows nothing but the saint’s head lying on a platter (fig. 10).
John’s eyes are closed, and his hair and beard flow over the sides of the platter. In the upper
left corner is the Lord of Hosts, turning towards John’s head with a gesture of blessing. In the
background is written ta as a ctatw npo. i wann a ripe a- It fits into conventional popular
nineteenth-century painting, “realistically” showing the saint’s head in clear contrast to the
background, which is ornamental and decorative. The icon draws on Apocryphal sources,
which recall that one of John’s disciples, Akholios, begged Herod for John’s head, “and when
he received it, he placed this precious head in a new urn, in which nothing had been placed
yet.” Six disciples took it to Emesa, and there “having found a certain cave, hid the urn in it
[...]. And those six disciples lived in it until the days of their deaths.”78
The source for the iconography of the head of John the Baptist are icons of him holding it as
a peculiar attribute,79 which can be linked to representations referring to John’s death, in which
his body and head are separated; for instance, in the kleyma (marginal scene) of the sixteenth-
century icon in the National Museum of Peremyshl Region we see the executioner as he holds
a sword with its tip up. Next to him stands John with his own severed head in his hands. Blood
squirts from his body, and his eyes are closed.80 In a seventeenth-century icon from Vereinen,
the executioner holds the head by the hair, also with its eyes closed.81 In all the paintings of this
type, the head has John’s characteristic facial features, but his eyes are closed, an allusion to the
fact that he is dead, and therefore the viewer-the faithful cannot make eye contact with the head.
Legends repeatedly remember the head of the Forerunner as a peculiar, separate, self-
contained being. According to John’s Life, Herodias threatened John: “You will certainly die
by my hand, and I will fill my pillow with the hair off your head, on which I will place my head
with Herod, and I will bury your head there, where I perform my ablutions after I relish pleas-
ures with the king,” and John responded: “The Lord will allow you to kill me, but you will not
see my head. I will leave it behind and it will announce your depravity and your shame to the
whole world.”82 The same source tells us that when John’s body had been buried in Sebaste
near the tomb of Prophet Elisha, his head continued to “float over [...] Jerusalem and for three
years to call out,” announcing Herod’s baseness, “and then departed to call out over the whole
world and to herald Herod’s horrific crime,” and only after fifteen years “stopped proclaiming”
and was buried in the city of Homs.83
Legends about the translation of the head recall the many difficulties of bringing this relic
to Constantinople. In the fourth century, it was carried near Chalcedon, where mules pull-
ing the cart stopped and “neither the application of the lash, nor any of the other means that
were devised, could induce them to advance further.” This was thought to be so unusual and
so significant that the head was left in the village of Cosilaos. It was only from there, despite
the protest of the guardian of the relic, the holy virgin who belonged to the Macedonian sect,
that Emperor Theodosius “placed it, with the box in which it was encased, in his purple robe,

78 Świadectwo..., op. cit., p. 587.
79 Weyl Carr, op. cit., p. 161.
80 Romuald Biskupski, Ikony w zbiorach polskich (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1991),
p. 36, fig. 42.
81 Ibid., p. 39, fig. 94; see also Dąb-Kalinowska, Ikony, op. cit., p. iii.
82 Żywot św. Jana Chrzciciela..., op. cit., p. 603.
83 Ibid., pp. 606-7.