Salome
The gospel story of her dance at the birthday celebration of her stepfather, who had John the Baptist beheaded at her mother's request, inspired art, literature and music over an extended period of time.
Oscar Wilde's 1891 eponymous play and its 1905 operatic setting by Richard Strauss are among the literary and musical realisations which portrayed her.
The account in the Gospel of Mark reads:But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his nobles and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee.
However, the Latin Vulgate Bible translates the passage as it is above, and western Church Fathers therefore tended to refer to Salome as "Herodias's daughter" or just "the girl".
Because she is otherwise unnamed in the Bible, the idea that both mother and daughter were named Herodias gained some currency in early modern Europe.
[14] The story of her dance before Herod with the head of John the Baptist on a platter led medieval Christian artists to depict her as the personification of the lascivious woman, a temptress who lures men away from salvation.
Painters who have done notable representations of Salome include Masolino da Panicale, Filippo Lippi, Benozzo Gozzoli, Leonardo da Vinci followers Andrea Solario and Bernardino Luini, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Titian, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Fabritius, Henri Regnault, Georges Rochegrosse, Gustave Moreau, Lovis Corinth, Federico Beltran-Masses and Henry Ossawa Tanner.
Unlike Salome who goes nameless in the Christian bible, Judith is a Judeo-Christian mythical patriot whose story is perhaps less psychological and as she was a widow, may not be particularly girlish nor innocent in representations.
[20] In Moreau's version (illustration) the figure of Salome is emblematic of the femme fatale, a fashionable trope of fin-de-siecle decadence.
In his 1884 novel À rebours, Frenchman Joris-Karl Huysmans describes the depiction of Salome in Moreau's painting: No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, – a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.
[23] Playwright Doric Wilson created a modern retelling of the Salome story in Now She Dances!, first produced off-off-Broadway at the Caffe Cino in 1961.
[24] Salome's story was made the subject of a symbolist play by Oscar Wilde that was first banned in London in 1892 while rehearsals were underway and which subsequently premiered in Paris in 1896 under the French name Salomé.
[26] Wilde wrote the play originally in French and then published an English translation by his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (titled Salome).
[30] In 1907 Florent Schmitt received a commission from Jacques Rouché to compose a ballet, La tragédie de Salomé, for Loie Fuller to perform at the Théâtre des Arts.
Taking the jest seriously, the hopelessly infatuated Salome lets herself be beheaded, and her head is duly brought to the sophist, who however rejects it in disgust and turns back to studying the Dialogues of Plato.
[33] A descriptive piano piece by Mel Bonis entitled Salomé (1909) is part of her series, Femmes de Légende.
Among the numerous art references in Dario Argento's 1977 film, Suspiria, we can see four of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for Oscar Wilde's 1891 tragedy, Salome.
