PLATE IX — 'THE FEAST OF HEROD'
This fresco in the Peruzzi Chapel in the Church of Santa Croce, Florence, is one of the most celebrated of Giotto's works. Herod and his guests are represented at table under a portico suggestive in its classic decorations of the later Renaissance. Salome, a lyre in her hand, has been dancing to the music of a violin played by a youth in a striped tunic—a figure which has been the subject of enthusiastic praise from Mr. Ruskin and other writers. The girl pauses in her dance as a soldier in a Roman helmet brings the head of John the Baptist into the hall and presents it to Herod. Through an open door Salome is seen again, kneeling before her mother and bearing the charger upon which rests the head of St. John. In the distance, at the other side of the picture, we see the barred window of the tower where the Baptist has been imprisoned.
"Although little more than its outlines are left," writes Kugler, "this work unites with all Giotto's grander qualities of arrangement, grouping, and action, a closer imitation of nature than he had before attained. Seldom, even in later times, have fitter action and features been rendered that those which characterize the viol-player as he plies his art and watches the dancing Salome."