The young woman has a smile playing on her lips as she stands there in her splendid dress, holding up a decapitated head on a silver salver. The severed neck shines blood red while the eyes squint at the viewer. The motif is taken from the New Testament story of Salome, who avenged her mother’s honour by demanding John the Baptist’s head. It was a reward because she danced so seductively for her stepfather – and uncle – King Herod.
The story dates to the first century AD, but Salome is dressed in the height of fashion from the artist’s own time: a late Renaissance gown in red and black silk, heavy jewellery, and high forehead. Behind the draped black cloth of the background, we glimpse forest, mountains, a river, and in the distance a fortified city, probably a landscape from the German artist’s homeland. This way of moving a biblical story to new times and places was very common during the Renaissance.
There was a long moralizing and didactic tradition behind such dramatic depictions of biblical stories. Although this painting may have had such an underlying purpose, the most obvious allusions are to violence and death, all with an erotic undertone. Strong women who literally took revenge into their own hands were popular motifs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Judith, who according to the Apocrypha saved Israel by killing its chief enemy, Holofernes, is another example. The subject of Salome appears again in the nineteenth-century’s darker symbolism, as in the German artist Franz von Stuck’s dangerous, treacherous women, whose sexuality is at once enticing and intimidating, making them into veritable femmes fatales. The painting’s forcefulness bridges the nearly five centuries that separate it from our day.
Until the 1990s, Salome was attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder. He ran a large workshop where paintings were created by several different artists, including his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger. All works produced there were given a mark of authenticity, the winged dragon. This painting’s freer and more sketchy brushwork suggest that it was the son who was the author.
Philippa Nanfeldt from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
