Salomé avec la tête de saint Jean-Baptiste

Cranach was court painter to the electors of Saxony at Wittenberg, and when he took up the story of Salome around 1510 he dressed her not as an ancient Judean princess but as a fashionable German noblewoman of his own day, in a feathered hat, slashed sleeves and heavy gold chains. She holds out a platter bearing the severed head of John the Baptist, whom she had asked for as her reward for dancing at the feast of her stepfather Herod. Her face stays cool and blank above it. This was among the first of a whole run of such women Cranach painted, Judith, Delilah, Salome, calm and beautiful and lethal, set against plain black grounds that make the flesh and jewels glow.