Salomé: Seven Meditations on Beauty, Power & the Sacred Act of Seeing - Part V

Every Sunday I publish an essay from a 7-part series for my paid subscribers, today’s essay is Part V of the Salomé series which is a contemplative journey through art, myth and the stories that are handed down to us.

Together we are exploring Salomé from the Biblical story to the symbol, from the images we see to the presence we can offer. We are exploring what happens when we slow down, look again and practice the sacred art of truly seeing.

With each essay I’m sharing a Sacred Seeing Practice, this is a simple drawing invitation, with questions for contemplation and deeper connection to the themes of the week.

You can find the first essay of the series here.

Join me for the full Salome: The Sacred Act of Seeing Series:

Part I: The Girl Without a Name
Before Salomé became a symbol, she was a person.

Part II: When a Woman Becomes a Myth
The stories we tell often reveal as much about us as the person at their center.

Part III: The Art of Looking
Every gaze carries a story.

Part IV: The Body as Temple
When beauty becomes a language of the sacred.

Part V: The Woman Beneath the Myth
What changes when we stop interpreting and simply encounter?

Part VI: The Feminine We Fear
The shadow often guards what has not yet been understood.

Part VII: The Sacred Act of Seeing
When the story dissolves, what remains?

Last Sunday, we entered the jeweled world of Gustave Moreau, where Salomé seems to shimmer somewhere between woman and vision. Her body is layered with ornament, surrounded by symbols, and held within an atmosphere so rich that looking at her begins to feel almost ritualistic.

Across the exhibition at the Musée Jean-Jacques Henner, another Salomé waits.

Jean-Jacques Henner gives us a quieter encounter. His Salomé emerges from darkness with luminous skin, loose hair, and far less of the elaborate symbolism that surrounds Moreau’s women. The world around her seems to recede, leaving us with the body, the face, the gesture, the woman.

Placed beside one another, the contrast is extraordinary — this contrast is what inspired me to write this series. Moreau draws us toward mystery through abundance; Henner draws us closer through simplicity. One surrounds Salomé with a world of symbols, while the other allows much of that world to fall away.

And something changes in the looking.

Henner’s Salomé feels more intimate to me. There is a softness to her that lures us in in a completely different way. I would argue that this portrait-style feminine is the enchanting, alluring variety. The seductress, the dancer, the dangerous beauty, the bearer of the platter that Moreau paints begins to loosen its hold, and for a moment I can simply stand before the image of a young woman.

Of course, this Salomé is an interpretation too. Henner never knew the woman whose story began nearly two thousand years before he lifted his brush to paint her. His tenderness belongs to his imagination just as Moreau’s mystery belongs to his — this is what I love most about art and about the act of sacred seeing, as you know.

Yet I find that distinction fascinating because it brings us back to the question at the heart of this series: what happens in the space between what is there and what we bring to our seeing?

We do this with art constantly. We encounter a face and begin constructing a story. A lowered gaze becomes sadness. A bare shoulder becomes sensuality. Darkness becomes danger. Light becomes innocence. We gather tiny visual clues and arrange them into meaning, often without realizing how much of ourselves has entered the interpretation as a projection of our world, of who we are as the see-er.

We do the same thing with one another.

We meet people through layers of story: what we have heard about them, what they have done, the roles they occupy, the things we believe we understand. Sometimes those stories help us know one another. Sometimes they become so complete that there is little room left for mystery.

Standing in full presence in front of Henner’s Salomé, I began to think about how rare it is to encounter another person without immediately deciding who they are.

There is something sacred in leaving a little space around another human being.

A space in which they are allowed to remain partly unknown.
A space where curiosity can live beside what we think we understand.
A space where encounter can happen before interpretation closes the door.

This may be one of the deeper lessons of contemplative seeing. The longer we look, the less certain we sometimes become. Details begin to emerge, and contradictions begin to appear. The story we arrived with becomes porous enough for another possibility to enter.