Looks can be deceiving. Peer into the woman’s cool gray eyes and there’s no telling that for 400 years she held the severed head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. Her expression is equanimous, her skin flawless, and her crimson brocade woven with golden thread. It was for these graceful qualities that in 1937 a German gallery cut Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Salome at the midriff and rebranded her as a Saxon princess.

When Cranach painted his Biblical antihero in the 1530s, the story of the Jewish princess commanding Herod to execute John the Baptist was a popular reminder of the dangers of a tyrannical ruler. It echoed the oppressions of the Catholic church from which Cranach’s native Saxony was breaking following the efforts of his good friend Martin Luther. By the 20th century, the gory image was unpalatable to the modern collector and once Cologne’s Galerie Abels had extracted the fair-skinned woman, it sent St. John’s head back to the Ducal Museum in Gotha, central Germany 

Now, nearly 90 years on from being torn apart, the two halves of Cranach’s “Salome with the Head of the Baptist” (c. 1530) have been reunited. Last year, the museum purchased Salome for €144,000 ($168,000) at an auction in Paris and is exhibiting her alongside her grisly prize. Even so, portions of the painting remain missing, most likely forever.

a woman in a top painting and below a painting of a head on a plate

Exhibition view of Cranach’s painting now united. Photo: courtesy Friedenstein Foundation Gotha/Lutz Ebhardt

“This return is an extraordinary gain, for Gotha and for art historical research as a whole,” Timo Trümper, the director of collections at the Friedenstein Foundation Gotha, said in a statement. “The painting can be experienced again in its original form, just as it was conceived and created almost 500 years ago.”

Today, the Ducal Museum in Gotha, which is comprised of the holdings of the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha that were largely amassed from the 17th through the 19th centuries, boasts eight works by Cranach, including a charming three-quarter portrait of Luther. Prior to losses incurred during World War II, however, the museum had many more. And so, when facing financial hardship dealt by hyperinflation in the 1920s, the museum began employing a practice that is now generally taboo in the art world: deaccessioning.

old photo of a gallery with many paintings

The museum’s hall of old German masters around 1910 with Cranach’s painting on the top right. Photo: courtesy Carl Zink.

Despite the objections of the state authorities of Thuringia, the Cranach was sold to Galerie Buck in Mannheim in 1936. Buck evidently had difficulties shifting the painting, the reasons for which become clear in a letter written to him by Hermann Abels later that year. Abels noted “almost all parts of the background have been overpainted” that it is “cracked in two places” and that the bloody head “would be unbearable for refined people.” Abels’s proposal for risking such an “impossible” acquisition? A price of 2,500 to 3,000 Reichsmarks ($14,800 to $17,800).

The portrait of Salome disguised as an Ernestine princess was sold three times at Amsterdam galleries in the 20th century before arriving at Christie’s London in 2012. In the lag between its sale and reappearance at Artcurial, an auction house in Paris, the Ducal Museum restored the lower half of the painting and presented it to the public in 2021.

Renaissance painting depicting Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist on a platter, wearing elaborate clothing and jewelry.

A photograph of the still intact painting. Photo: courtesy Rose Heidl.

“The return of the fragment has art historical benefits,” Trümper said. “On the horizon are new insights into Cranach’s workshop practice.”

In a similar vein earlier this year, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, united paired panels of Adam and Eve by Cranach into a single frame. 

The Clever Boy trusts that the refined people who read his blog do not find the painting unbearable.

It is extraordinary that such an act of vandalism could have been carried out within the world of the Fine Art market so relatively recently as the mid-1930s.

It is good to see the two halves together again, and one must hope that the overpainting of the background to Salome will be removed.