What Is the Story of Salome?
Who was Salome, and why won’t she leave us alone? The full story—from a nameless dancing girl in the Gospels to the femme fatale of Wilde, Strauss, and the modern stage.
Salome Painting: From Mother’s Helper to Dangerous Seductress
The Salome painting has a strange four-hundred-year arc. For most of that time she is a supporting character in someone else’s crime—a girl carrying a platter, doing the bidding of her mother, Herodias. Then, in the space of a few decades around 1900, she becomes the most dangerous woman in European art. That change was…