Salomé with the Head of John the Baptist 1898

Jean-Joseph-Benjamin Constant painted this dark and dramatic scene of ‘Salomé with the Head of John the Baptist’ sometime in the late 19th century. The artist has chosen a key moment in the biblical story: Salomé gazes, seemingly dispassionately, at the severed head of John the Baptist, presented to her on a platter. This image and its cultural impact can be understood by tracing the long history of the biblical story and its visual representations. The artist clearly wants to shock us, but within the safe, institutional confines of the gallery. How else to explain the heavy debt to the history of painting? The artist here evokes a certain morbidity that was fashionable in the literature and visual art of the time. The woman as ‘femme fatale’ was a common trope of the period. By studying the artistic and literary sources of the period, including the institutional conditions in which art was produced, we can better understand the cultural dynamics that shaped the creation and reception of this disturbing image.