The Stomach Dance from A Portfolio of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings illustrating "Salome" by Oscar Wilde,

John Lane, London, 1906–12

This illustration exemplifies Beardsley’s fantastical reading of Oscar Wilde’s play. Rather than showing Salome engaged in the movements of her dance, Beardsley indicated the motion through the curved and swirling shapes that circulate her ambiguously gendered body. At lower left, the creature playing the music plucks a two-stringed instrument that is a mash-up of Eastern and Western sources—the Chinese erhu, the Indian sitar, and the Ottoman bağlama, as well as the European violin. Such hybridity characterizes Beardsley’s Salome designs, each of which explores connections between the creaturely and the queer.