Lovis Corinth, Salome and the head of Saint John the Baptist, 1899.

This painting caught my attention for a number of reasons.  At first I was drawn to the center of the painting because the gaze of those within the picture created a sort of hierarchy of focal points and led me there.  It's a natural reaction to look where everyone else is looking...  I was beginning to realize that something was off, no pun intended, about the man presenting the platter to a woman of obvious importance.  Halfway through that thought I noticed that she wasn't fully clothed and wondered if she meant to parade herself around like that or simply couldn't decide on which shirt to wear that day...  Halfway through that thought came the natural reaction to divert my attention and instead look at the woman's face.  I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but there was something different about her face.  The author then pointed out that Lovis Corinth depicted Salome with heavy eye makeup and lipstick to "represent the degeneracy of the artist's own times."  At about that time I could look back at the platter and bloody sword and see that it was a head on a platter being presented to a queen, of sorts.

Thought #1:
     Corinth introduced elements from his own time into a time period where they possibly didn't belong to help communicate more effectively to his audience.  During his time, heavy eye makeup and lipstick apparently represented degeneracy.  Corinth presents Salome with those same features, in my opinion, to portray her as degenerate.
     This idea of including modern culture in artistic depictions of a past time happens all the time in movies!  And though I can't think of a single example right now, we use dialog in movies set in ancient times that only exists in modern times!  I'll add specific examples (and hopefully YouTube clips) as I think of them...

Thought #2:
     Nudity throughout the ages has apparently been widely accepted when in the form of art.  It makes me wonder if nudity was culturally acceptable, or if it was strictly accepted in the form of art...  Today, if you raised a billboard with a nude model, it would be considered pornographic - and walking around naked is against the law...  The one painting that helps communicate my thought is Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, 1863, where two fully dressed men carry on a casual conversation in the presence of a completely nude woman...  Do these types of paintings represent the cultural views of that time?  Or are they the exploration of an artist into forbidden areas...