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.

[2] 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.

It is probably central to the allegory that the coat of arms of Strobel's home city, now Wrocław, Poland, which he would have known by its German name of Breslau, includes the image of the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

[5] One set, predicated on a date in the early 1640s for the work, is as follows: the figure holding a trumpet at the centre, looking out at the viewer, is the Dutch Admiral Tromp, whose victory at the Battle of the Downs in 1639 had decisively ended Spanish naval power.

The lady in the large turban in the row behind may be Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, wife of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, the Dutch stadtholder, who gave the Palatine family refuge in exile.

[3] Alternative identifications find a portrait of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, and identify the features of John the Baptist as those of Charles I of England, although he was not beheaded until 1649, which is probably well after Strobel painted the work.

[6] 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.

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".

[17] Suggested subjects for portraits in the work include Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, who from 1610 until he died of his wounds in 1632 was the Imperial and Catholic League field marshal before Wallenstein, and commander at the notorious Sack of Magdeburg in 1631.

The "richly attired man with a pointed beard" at the right hand side of the dining table above may be Gabor Bethlen, the Calvinist Prince of Transylvania and Protestant claimant to be King of Hungary, leader of the Hungarian anti-Habsburg forces in the war.

[18] Stroebel's Daniel and Cyrus before the Idol Bel (1636–1637) in the National Museum, Warsaw is a similar composition, with the figures in eclectic and extravagant costumes, and a feast seen in progress at a lower level in the background.