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So his work became, as Kaplan stresses, a curious synthesis of extravagant, imaginative decor with an almost pedantic spirit of academic research. Of this synthesis, Salome Dancing Before Herod is the masterpiece. Perhaps it is not, in formal terms, a great painting. But it is quite unforgettable, suffused by apprehension. Salome is less a dancing girl than a priestess, absorbed in her solipsistic gesture, gliding on point across the inlaid floor. In the brooding Herod, the standing executioner, the vista of Moorish arches and sifting gloom, one sees the apex of the kind of sensibility that in the hands of a Cecil B. DeMille would be coarsened to death. Every inch of the surface glitters with an enameled vitality, rigid and sparkling. Moreau's favorite theme, that of fatality and evil incarnate in women, was also one of the pathological obsessions of the 19th century; but it never received a more final expression than here. ·Robert Hughes