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Your gallerySalome with the Head of St. John the Baptist
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- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
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Follow the white strokes from the curling plumes down through her hair to the platter, and notice how the brown paper supplies all the middle tones.
Salome carries John the Baptist’s head on a platter, the reward she asked of Herod at her mother’s prompting. The Cleveland Museum of Art reads her towering feathered headdress, puffed sleeves and streaming hair as signs of pride. Altdorfer first darkened the paper with brown wash, then drew with a fine pen and picked out the light in white.
pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash and white gouache; framing lines in pen and black ink · Sheet: 19.1 x 12.6 cm · Cleveland Museum of Art · Northern Renaissance
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist
- Artist
- Albrecht Altdorfer (German, c. 1480–1538)
- Date
- c. 1517
- Medium
- pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash and white gouache; framing lines in pen and black ink
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 19.1 x 12.6 cm (7 1/2 x 4 15/16 in.); Secondary Support: 20 x 13 cm (7 7/8 x 5 1/8 in.)
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.