Cini Foundation

Italian, founded 1977

Explore Selected Works

A woman with blond hair dances in the center of a room with a group of people clustered around a banqueting table to our right with a small, enclosed space occupied by a kneeling man and executioner to our left in this horizontal painting. All the people have pale skin. The ceiling is made up of blue squares encased in a gold grid that recedes to the back, stone wall of the room. The woman’s dress is made of fabric that looks vivid royal blue or butter yellow, depending on how the light hits it. Facing our right in profile as she dances, she steps forward onto her left foot, raises her right foot behind her, and holds her right arm aloft. Four men wearing crimson-red, pine-green, yellow, or bright blue robes or tunics and stockings stand behind the long table set along the wall to our right. A bearded man at the center of the table wears a red hat and fur-lined red robe. He touches his right hand to his chest and holds a knife on the table in his other hand as he looks at the dancing woman. Glasses, dishes, and bowls are arrayed along the table, which is draped with a white tablecloth. A trio of blond, curly-haired, cleanshaven men and a woman with her arms crossed across her chest stand at the far, narrow end of the table, on the other side of the room. Within an alcove at the back of the room, the dancer appears again, kneeling before a seated woman wearing a ruby-red dress. The dancer holds or gestures toward a silver plate holding the severed head of a bearded man with brown hair that rests in the seated woman’s lap. The left third of the painting is taken up with an enclosure, a tiny room set like a tall, stone box within the larger room. Through an arched opening, a haloed man wearing an ivory-white, fur garment kneels facing us, his head bowed over his hands in prayer. He is the same man as the one beheaded and presented on the plate in the background. A man wearing yellow and blue armor raises a sword over his head, preparing to behead the kneeling man.
Benozzo Gozzoli, The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 1461-1462, tempera on poplar panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.2.3

The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

Benozzo Gozzoli · 1461-1462 · tempera on poplar panel ·  Accession ID  1952.2.3

Shown from the chest up, a man with pale, yellow-tinged skin is angled to our right with downcast eyes in this vertical portrait painting. He is cleanshaven with chin-length black hair. There is a deep vertical crease in the center of his forehead between dark brows. His eyes are hazel brown, and he has a long, hooked nose over slightly parted, pale pink lips. He wears a high-necked, red tunic with deep pleats down his chest. The arm closer to us has a fawn-brown sleeve. He is shown behind a narrow ledge where a brown, dove-sized bird with an ivory-white belly sits on a twig in the lower left corner. A window opening behind the man has two wooden shutters. The shutter to the right is closed, and the one to the left is pushed open so a sliver of pale sky is visible.
Sandro Botticelli, Giuliano de' Medici, c. 1478/1480, tempera on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.56

Giuliano de' Medici

Sandro Botticelli · c. 1478/1480 · tempera on panel ·  Accession ID  1952.5.56