19th century, Salome

early nineteenth century

Salomè

Ivory, 26 cm high

The work is accompanied by the CITES certificate

A 19th-century ivory sculpture depicting a standing female figure, captured in a twisted pose with her right arm raised and her left hand holding a decorated circular plate. The robe, draped and held at the waist by a knotted sash with long tasseled fringes, features a richly worked surface with delicately engraved floral and plant motifs.

The iconographic attributes allow us to recognize this figure as Salome: the plate held in her left hand, also decorated with floral motifs, is the element that traditionally holds the severed head of John the Baptist, while the raised right arm, almost in a gesture of suspended dance, recalls the culminating moment of his story, immediately before or after the fateful request. The empty hand, stretched upward, suggests that it was intended to hold or indicate the saint's head, now absent or missing from the composition. According to the Gospel story, Salome, daughter of Herodias, danced for Herod Antipas and, incited by her mother, asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter as a reward. The theme became one of the most beloved subjects in Western art, capable of uniting formal beauty and narrative violence, seduction and death.

In the 19th century, ivory sculpture enjoyed extraordinary popularity, fueled by the Neoclassical and later Symbolist taste for historical, biblical, and mythological subjects. Workshops, active primarily in France, Germany, and Italy, produced small and medium-sized statuettes for bourgeois collectors. Working with ivory, a precious and ductile material, allowed for minute details and polished surfaces, capable of conveying the transparency of skin and the softness of fabrics, as demonstrated by the folds of drapery and the plant embroidery that adorn the robe of this refined interpretation of the myth of Salome.

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