Salome

Salome Dancing Elegantly Before King Herod

It's Hallowe'en, so let's have some sexy horror art!

The story of Salome combines all the things that Victorian/Edwardian artists and rich connoisseurs loved: an irreproachable Biblical provenance, a dramatic death, an irresistible femme fatale, and some serious sadomasochism (along with hints of quasi-incest and necrophilia). The barebones New Testament version goes:

"On Herod’s birthday the daughter of Herodias [Herod's wife] danced for the guests and pleased Herod so much that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.” The king was distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted and had John beheaded in the prison. His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl, who carried it to her mother."

 Prior to the 19th Century this story was treated mostly like any other Bible story in art, and in fact it could be difficult to tell whether the painting depicted bad-girl Salome or heroine Judith - like this:

Salome, or Judith, Sebastiano del Piombo (1510)

NOT sexy, right? But by Victorian times Salome stopped being a mere cipher pimped out by her mother to her step-father (Ew!) and accrued this enormous mythic status as the epitome of Feminine Lust, and the destructive power it could wreak on the most powerful of men. Who is mostly to blame for this? An artist, Gustave Moreau, and a writer, Oscar Wilde.

Moreau seems to have been obsessed with the Salome story and painted many many interpretations in the 1870s that focused on the dancer's sensual beauty and her guilt:

The Apparition of the Head of St John the Baptist

Oscar Wilde was introduced to these sensational paintings and wrote a play, Salome (published 1891 but banned in England until 1931!). It actually introduced the motif of the "dance of the seven veils" to the myth, which subsequently became a staple for erotic dancers. That play inspired an opera by Strauss, and suddenly there was full-blown Salomania in artistic circles.

Illustration for Wilde's Salome, by Aubrey Beardsley.

So here's some artistic Salomes, starting with the relatively innocent dancers...

Gaston Bussiere - La Danse de Salome (or The Golden Butterflies) 1923

Georges Rochegrosse - Salome Dancing before King Herod (detail) 1887

Rudolf Ernst (1854-1932) - The Dance of Salome

Gyula Tornai (1861-1928) - The Dance of Salomé

To the ominous just-a-gal-hanging-about-with-a-sword-and platter portraits:

Henri Regnault - Salomé (1870)

Francesc Masriera - Salome (1888)

Francis Luis Mora - Salome (1899)

From here on it gets pleasingly lurid, as Salome forms an attachment to her head and likes to hang out with it socially.

Bela Čikoš Sesija, - Salome (1919)

Franz Von Stuck - Salome II (1906)

Jean Benner - Salome (1899)

Eder Gyula - Salome with the head of John the Baptist (1907)

Pierre Bonnaud - Salome (c. 1900)

Adolf Frey-Mook - Salome and John the Baptist (1910)

Leopold Schmutzler - Salome (c.1910)

Leon Herbo - Salome (1889)

Leopold Schmutzler  - Salome (1907)

But honestly you can have too much of a good thing - even getting head...

Beardsley

Maurycy Gottlieb - Salome with the Head of St. John (1878)

Seriously?!

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer - Salome (1896)

And just in case you think that mum Herodias had a sensible motive in engineering John's death (he had publicly condemned Herod for marrying her, the ex-wife of Herod's brother) ... here she is totally getting her rocks off too:

Francesco del Cairo - Herodias and the head of St. John the Baptist

Same artist, same title ... take a cold shower Francesco

So you see, the problem is not horny kings making bad decisions: it's horny women. According to Art, anyway... 😉