‘It isn't a Dance’

At the Salon of 1876, at a time when the subject of Salome was becoming fashionable, Gustave Moreau exhibited an oil painting, Salome (Fig. 1), and a large watercolour, The Apparition (Fig. 2), whose stylistic and iconographical originality astonished and fascinated the critics. Whereas Puvis de Chavannes had represented John the Baptist’s execution, observed by Salome, Henri Leopold Levy had shown Salome presenting the saint’s head to Herod, and Henri Regnault had depicted Salome sitting with the sword and the platter to be used for the beheading, Moreau chose to represent the much rarer subject of Salome dancing before Herod. It is Moreau’s interpretation of the dance that will be discussed here. The oil painting, Salome, also known as Salome Dancing Before Herod, shows the daughter of Herodias standing on the tips of her toes in a hieratic pose, holding a large lotus flower in one hand and extending the other hand in a rigid gesture. Her sumptuously bejewelled costume is in harmony with the extraordinarily ornate palace in which she is performing her dance, before the watchful eyes of an enthroned, withered Herod, an executioner, a musician and Herodias. In the watercolour, The Apparition, Salome’s dance has been interrupted by the vision, or apparition, of John the Baptist’s severed, gory head hovering above the dancer in a nimbus, a vision apparent only to the astonished Salome, whose mouth has fallen open and who recoils slightly, pointing at her reproachful victim. The other figures are absorbed in the spectacle of the dance. The numerous variants, mostly in oil, that Moreau made of the dancing Salome all conform, more or less, to the general iconography of one or other of the two prototypes, either showing the dancer standing in her rigid pose, or pointing and gazing aghast at the dripping head of the Baptist, while Herod and the other immobile figures watch the dance impassively. The fame of Gustave Moreau’s Salome and The Apparition is owed above all to their virtuoso descriptions in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Decadent novel A rebours (1884). Huysmans describes Salome’s dance as follows

Art · Art history · Dance · Literature · Painting · Salon · Visual arts · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis

• Three Gustave Moreau Pictures

  Open Access•Ekaterina A Sertakova, Natalia M Leshchinskaia et al.•Journal of Siberian Federal…•2019

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• Salome and the Dance of Writing

  Françoise Meltzer•Salome and the Dance of Writing•1987

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• Salome and the Dance of Writing

  Thomas C Daddesio, Françoise Meltzer•SubStance•1989

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