Reflections of the Real

Abstract

In this paper, Caravaggio’s painting of The Beheading of St John the Baptist located in the Oratory of the Co-Cathedral of St John the Baptist, in Valletta, Malta, will serve as a backdrop to qualify and analyze the religious and aesthetic experiential value that such an artwork could generate within the beholder, by considering its eschatological and soteriological implications and context, as well as the notion of ‘image as mirror’ and its effect on the viewer’s consciousness. This will primarily be discussed across two binaries: early seventeenth-century Hospitaller spirituality and the precarious condition of the artist, himself a novice of the Hospitaller Order of St John the Baptist. Guided by the changing artistic, didactic, and functional uses of the Oratory, and the theological implications of the painting, the Beheading will thus be analyzed in its affordance for both transcendental and self-reflective revelation, and as a turning point for the aspiring novice, the artist and, ultimately, the contemporary beholder.