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 one strand of Salomania, the craze that swept Europe and America after 1900 and spilled out of the galleries into movie theatres, opera houses, and vaudeville dance stages.

I have been looking at these pictures for years, and what keeps me at it is how differently each one tells the same story of moral wickedness. Below is the Salome painting I would call the most famous—and then the ten I would put beside it, from a Florentine fresco of the 1450s to a Klimt of 1909.

What Is the Most Famous Salome Painting?

The Most Famous Salome Painting is Gustave Moreau’s The Apparition

When Moreau showed The Apparition at the Paris Salon of 1876, he gave Salome something no painter had given her before—the severed head, hanging in mid-air, staring back at her—and Paris could not stop talking about it. That one invention turned an obscure girl from antiquity into the femme fatale of the modern imagination.

Moreau painted and drew the subject obsessively but this watercolor is the version that turned Salome into a defining woman of modern art. We might call her Salome 2.0.

Gustave Moreau sent four works to the Paris Salon of 1876, and two of them were Salomes: a large oil called Salome Dancing Before Herod and The Apparition. Together they caused a sensation. Moreau became the most talked-about artist in Paris.

The oil shows the dance itself: Salome moving through a temple-like hall of impossible ornament while Herod broods on his throne. Moreau invented the scene. Salome stops mid-dance, raises her arm, and points at the severed head of John the Baptist, which hangs unsupported in the air in a burst of light, dripping blood, staring straight back at her. Nobody else in the room appears to see it.

Every earlier Salome painting had put the head on a platter, safely dead, an inanimate object. Moreau put it in the air at eye level and made the two of them look at each other. The picture is no longer about an execution. It’s about what passes between a woman and the man she destroyed, and the painting shows her at once triumphant and entranced.

How Huysmans Made Moreau’s Salome Famous

The writer Joris-Karl Huysmans made Moreau’s Salome famous a second time. In his 1884 novel À rebours, the decadent recluse Des Esseintes owns both pictures and stares at them for a long time. Of Salome he writes that she had become:

The goddess of immortal Hysteria . . . A true harlot, obedient to her passionate and cruel female temperament; here she came to life, more refined yet more savage, more hateful yet more exquisite than before; here she roused the sleeping senses of the male more powerfully, subjugated his will more surely with her charms—the charms of a great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hothouse of impiety.

This femme fatale reading stuck, influencing Oscar Wilde when he wrote the play Salome. Of the title character Wilde wrote: “Her lust must . . . be infinite, and her perversity without limits.”

My Personal Top 10 Salome Paintings

Ten is an arbitrary number for four hundred years of pictures, and any list like this is an argument rather than a fact. These are the ones I judge most influential, in the order they were made. Nine are paintings; the tenth is a drawing that cannot be ignored. Note that the Moreau sits above the list, not in it.

1. Filippo Lippi, Feast of Herod

Salome is dancing in the center of the work, and there is nothing especially sexual about it: a girl performing at a banquet.

Lippi tells the whole story at once, in the manner of his century: the dance, and to either side the head already on its platter. This is the Salome the next four centuries would build upon.

2. Andrea Solario, Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist

Solario invented the composition everyone else then copied: the beautiful princess, the platter pushed toward the viewer, the gruesome head, dripping blood.

Salome looks on impassively, as if being served dinner.

As the Met notes, the work includes only part of the executioner in the frame, “de-emphasizing his role in the gruesome scene and placing the blame (literally and figuratively) in Salome’s hands.”

3. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Salome with the Head of St John the Baptist

Cranach dresses her in the height of German court fashion, which makes what she is carrying far worse: a woman who went to a party and came home with a head.

The host museum discusses the “demonic women of fate that swarmed from Cranach’s studio,” and notes his “thrilling sensuality.” This Salome, as are the artist’s other “demonic women,” is “icy, sadistic and triumphant.”

The self-satisfied little smile and slightly glazed look is particularly disturbing. So is her apparent care to keep the gore off her fancy clothes.

4. Caravaggio, Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist

Caravaggio drains out the glamour with a bold, but sad, executioner, grieving servant, and a Salome who cannot quite bring herself to look.

Unlike the other two living figures, Salome looks both avoidant and strangely blank, as if in a trance. She has a dramatic ambivalence, head turned, with part of her body out of the frame while also holding the head near the center of the composition.

Her enigmatic face gets the most light, as if to emphasize a psychological detachment in the service of a brutal, immoral act.

5. Guido Reni, Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist

This oddly elegant painting is nearly the opposite of the Caravaggio. The servants appear dispassionate, and Salome is the one focused on the head. She is grabbing the hair as if preparing to lift it from the eagerly presented platter.

She is full-frontal, in the dead center of the action, her face bright and flushed with a horrific excitement.

This Salome has also arranged her clothes to avoid the blood that marks her act. Her look is pleased, almost bemused, with the hint of a self-congratulatory smirk.

6. Henri Regnault, Salomé

This princess is knowing, sensual, and armed, and she was the sensation of the 1870 Paris Salon; the painter was dead within a year, killed in the Franco-Prussian War at twenty-seven.

Hair ruffled, clothes in disarray, chest nearly bare and knees provocatively parted, she has just performed her dance and awaits her reward.

Unlike earlier paintings where she is merely the well-dressed recipient of the Baptist’s head, Salome is present here in all her lustful glory, instruments of the decapitation at the ready.

7. Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax

No shading, no color, no mercy: Salome rises through the air to kiss the mouth of the freshly severed head, dripping blood. This was among the drawings Beardsley supplied for the 1894 English publication of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome.

Wilde’s play was shocking, but the drawings were perhaps more so, given their graphically hypnotic nature. This drawing portrays Salome as a supernatural figure of female depravity with medusa-like power over men.

The plant growing from the pooled blood at the bottom is reminiscent of Huysmans’s “great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege.”

8. Lovis Corinth, Salome II

Salome stands self-confidently, breasts shamelessly exposed. Wrapped in noble fabrics and adorned with flowers and chains, she bends forward with an eerily calm, almost dissociated expression.

While the executioner and the woman on the right share a conspiratorial smile, the princess has opened one of the head’s eyes, into which she stares.

This is keyed to the end of Wilde’s play, where Salome speaks to the dead John: “But, wherefore dost thou not look at me Jokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Jokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me, Jokanaan, that thou wilt not look at me?”

9. Franz von Stuck, Salome

This is Salome at her most sensual and crazed. Stuck paints her in a fit of sensual ecstasy, dancing nearly nude, thrilled to have obtained her revenge on John. This Salome is truly wicked, as evidenced by the grotesquely grinning demon-helper crouching behind her.

The starry backdrop is a void, empty of grace or morality. The only glow comes from the saintly head of John.

The faintly Egyptian framing offers a portal to another world, one of ancient mystery that eludes rational understanding.

10. Gustav Klimt, Judith II (Salomè)

The subject here is Judith, the biblical hero who used her beauty to chop the head off an Assyrian general and save her people. But it was exhibited at a time when Salome was so culturally dominant that audiences assumed the scene depicted her. Despite the radical difference between the two women the painting is typically known by a title that includes both Judith and Salome, reflecting the extent to which they had merged in the public imagination.

Klimt himself may have had Salome in mind because the figure is less heroic than she is predatory; her hands are like the talons of a bird of prey clutching a kill. The face also has the cruel, trance-like look of Salome in earlier pictures.

The frame functions in some ways similarly to von Stuck’s, in that it places the scene outside everyday reality. It also reinforces the figure’s eroticism and lethality. The viewer becomes a voyeur, but one slightly fearful that the figure might return the gaze and step through the opening.

Conclusion: The Many Faces of Salome Art

Salome began her journey in painting as a young woman doing her mother’s evil bidding. While not overtly sexualized, she was morally compromised, the symbol of how youth and beauty could be manipulated for horrible, ungodly ends.

In studio art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Salome painting evolved into an icon of dangerous sexuality, lethal feminine power, and aesthetic provocation. From Orientalist fantasies to Symbolist nightmares, Salome paintings and drawings reflected both the fears and fascinations of a rapidly changing world.

She had been reborn as a myth for the modern age: at once sacred and profane, alluring and annihilating—a mirror held up to the era’s ambivalence about women, power, and desire.

My book Sex, Art, and Salome collects more than 130 photographs and images of that transformation, from the painters here to the dancers, singers, and film stars who took her onto the stage and the screen.