The Head of Saint John the Baptist on a Platter: the Gaze of Death

The Johannesschüssel is an image type that sprang from both text and relic. It is also an image type that presents death. This death is not an ordinary death; it is the mother of all deaths: the decapitation of the last of the prophets and the forerunner of the martyrs. The frontal display of the pieces and the invitation to eye-contact show important analogies with the phenomenon of the Andachtsbild. During the fifteenth century, when the cult of the Johannesschüssel reaches its apogee, the subject begins to appear also in a pictorial form. Idol becomes icon; Johannesschüssel reaches vera icon. The growing reciprocity between the cults of John and Christ at the end of the Middle Ages is mirrored in the reciprocity of the media. This ultimate step – the exchange of medium – was the necessary ‘sacrifice’ for a complete in utroque. The Johannesschüssel would now become the flat re-presenting (and not plastically presenting) image of death. So, by the end of the medieval and early modern periods, the two men are fused into one single prototype, emphasizing the importance of masculinity sacrificed and salvation by blood in Christian salvation history.