Salome

Salome (1874) at the Musee Gustave Moreau is the Salon version of the subject that Moreau would develop further in the 1876 Apparition, and represents his most sustained meditation on the femme fatale as a figure combining sacred and erotic transgression. The Salome story — the princess who demands the head of John the Baptist as reward for her dance — had been relatively neglected in European painting before Moreau made it his own, and after his versions it became one of the dominant iconographic obsessions of the Decadent movement. J.K. Huysmans's ecstatic description of Moreau's Salome in the novel A Rebours (1884) made the paintings famous beyond the art world and established Moreau as the pre-eminent painter of dangerous female beauty. The oil on canvas Salome shows the princess in her jeweled dance costume, in the act of performing before Herod.

The jeweled costume and elaborate headdress of Moreau's Salome create a figure of dense visual richness — layers of ornament, transparent fabric, precious stones — that occupied much of his technical energy. The flesh visible through transparent drapery required the delicate handling of translucent fabrics over skin tones.