(Art, Literature and Music in Symbolism, Its Origins and Its) Nezhinskaia, Rozina-Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences-Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2010)

Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences
Edited by
Rosina Neginsky
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences,
Edited by Rosina Neginsky
This book first published 2010
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2010 by Rosina Neginsky and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-2392-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2392-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Rosina Neginsky
Part I: Origins of the Symbolist Movement
Art
Chapter One............................................................................................... 16
Toward Symbolism: Gustave Moreau and the Masters of the Past,
and his Contemporaries
Geneviève Lacambre
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 33

Lovely Lines or: What Dutch Symbolists learned from Egypt
Liesbeth Maria Grotenhuis
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 58

Armand Point’s Eternal Chimera: The Florentine Quattrocento
and Symbolist Currents in Britain, France, and Italy
Cassandra Sciortino
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 94

Aby Warburg, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Botticelli
Deborah Cibelli
Part II: Symbolist Movement
Austria
Architecture
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 116

Symbolism and Crime: Architecture of the Vienna Secession
Larry Shiner
vi Table of Contents
Belgium
Art
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 129

Jean Delville and the Belgian Avant-garde: Art in Search of the Absolute
Brendan Cole
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 147

Symbolism and ‘Social Art’: The Utility of Beauty in Fernand Khnopff’s
Après Flaubert
Leah C. Boston
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 159

Something Incomprehensible: Symbolism and the Real in the Landscapes
of Fernand Khnopff
Andrew Marvick
Literature
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 169

The Belgian Symbolist Novel and its Specific Features in the Context
of French-speaking Literature
Jana Náprstková-Dratvová
England
Chapter Ten.............................................................................................. 178

Literary and Critical Receptions of the Pre-Raphaelite Painters
in the fin de siècle Era
Mireille Dottin-Orsini
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 189

The Symbolist Imagery of Burne-Jones: Behind Closed Eyes
Kathryn Moore Heleniak
France
Art
Chapter Twelve........................................................................................ 203

The Influence of Symbolism on the Formal Evolution of Sculptural
Relief between 1900 and 1914
Claire Barbillon
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences vii
Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 209

From Appearance to Apparition and Reflection: Symbolist Constructions
of Salome, John the Baptist, and the Spectator's Severed Head
Leslie Curtis
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 251

Woman, Symbolist Painting and Psychoanalysis
Joelle Joffe
Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 272

Gauguin's Watery Women: A Multivalent Symbolist Reading
Erika Schneider
Literature
Novel
Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 291

Fabricated Visions: From the Opium-Eater to des Esseintes
Alina Clej
Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 309

Space, Time, Mimesis: Idealist Origins of French Literary Symbolism
Mary Traester
Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 328

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Pater, and the Hard, Gemlike Flame
Warren Johnson
Poetry
Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 336

Mallarmé and Self-Portrait in Disguise
Rosina Neginsky
Chapter Twenty........................................................................................ 360

Symbolism and Esoterism: The Case of Mallarmé’s 'Mardis'.
Patrick Thériault
viii Table of Contents
Theater
Chapter Twenty One ................................................................................ 367

Nabis and Writers à l’Oeuvre: Artists and Dramatists for a Symbolist
Theater
Clément Dessy
Greece
Art
Chapter Twenty Two................................................................................ 383

The Greek Symbolism: Correspondences and Differences
via the Angel’s Image
Maria Aivalioti
Literature
Chapter Twenty Three ............................................................................. 409

The Radiance of the French Symbolism in Greece
Christos Nikou
Italy
Art
Chapter Twenty Four ............................................................................... 426

Giovanni Segantini's Nirvana Series: Symbols of Luxuria and Vanitas
Liana De Girolami Cheney
Chapter Twenty Five................................................................................ 455

European Symbolist Graphics through the Pages of the Italian Art Critic
Vittorio Pica
Davide Lacagnina
Chapter Twenty Six ................................................................................. 481

Angelo Conti as the Ruskin and Pater of Italy: Promoter and Elucidator
of Symbolism
Anna Mazzanti
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences ix
Russia
Literature
Chapter Twenty Seven ............................................................................. 531

A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance of Leonardo
as Life-Writing
Julia Friedman
Chapter Twenty Eight .............................................................................. 548

Paranoiac Discourse of the Symbolism and the Delusion of Persecution:
F. Sologub, A. Belyj
Olga Skonechnaia
Turkey
Chapter Twenty Nine............................................................................... 556

Symbolist Movement in Turkish Literature and its Effects
and Consequences on Turkish Language and Literature
Hüseyin Altındiú
Part III: Consequences of the Symbolist Movement
Art
Chapter Thirty.......................................................................................... 572

Paul Klee, the Femme Fatale, and Symbolism
Jonathan Perkins
Chapter Thirty One .................................................................................. 583

Sensation: The Symbolist Contribution to Matisse’s Decorative Aesthetic
John Klein
Chapter Thirty Two.................................................................................. 594

Symbolist Aesthetics and Mallarméan Themes in the Work of Robert
Motherwell
William M. Perthes
Literature
Chapter Thirty Three ............................................................................... 608

William Faulkner and the Symbolist Movement: Absalom, Absalom!
as a Reflection of Stéphane Mallarmé's “L'Après-midi d’un faune”
Brent Judd
x Table of Contents
Chapter Thirty Four ................................................................................. 617

The Music of Poetry as Symbolic Testament
Ethan Lewis
Chapter Thirty Five ................................................................................. 629

Speed and Slowness between the Symbolist and the Futurist Generations:
A Few Texts, A Few Reflections
Alain Faudemay
Contributors............................................................................................. 639
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Chapter One
Fig. 1-1. Emile Bin, L’affut. Héraklès Teraphonios, Salon de 1872. Photo
documentation du musée d’Orsay.
Fig. 1-2. Gustave Moreau, Hercule et l’hydre de Lerne, Paris, musée Gustave
Moreau , Cat. 34. Photo RMN (cliché 85-002151),
www.dessins-musee-moreau.fr/outils/peintures_h.php.
Fig. 1-3. Gustave Moreau, Galatée, Salon de 1880, Paris, musée d’Orsay, RF
1997-16. Photo RMN (cliché 97-022129),
www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=1&FP=14375990&E=2K
1KTS2LVS9RG&SID=2K1KTS2LVS9RG&New=T&Pic=1&SubE=2C6NU0
GJR5MZ.
Fig. 1-4. James Bertrand, Galatée et son amant surpris par le cyclope Polyphème,
Salon de 1879 , Saint-Etienne, musée d’art moderne. Photo du musée.
Fig. 1-5 Gustave Moreau, Etudes pour Polyphème , Paris, musée Gustave Moreau ,
Des. 12469. Photo RMN (cliché 01-002494),
www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=1&FP=14375990&E=2K
1KTS2LVS9RG&SID=2K1KTS2LVS9RG&New=T&Pic=1&SubE=2C6NU0
GJR5MZ
Fig. 1- 6. Gustave Moreau, Galatée, Paris, musée Gustave Moreau , Cat. 100.
Photo RMN (cliché 94-002324),
www.dessins-musee-moreau.fr/outils/peintures_g.php.
Chapter Two
Fig. 2-1. Jan Toorop, The Sphinx, 1892-97, black and colored chalk and pencil on
canvas, 126 x 135 cm. inv. no. T1-X-1931. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
Fig. 2-2. Maya and Merit, about 1300 B.C. limestone, height 158 cm., inv. no. AST 1-
3. National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden. Photo by the author.
Fig. 2-3. Postcard CAIRO–Sphinx and Pyramids, The Cairo postcard Trust, Cairo,
series 629, 14.1 x 9.1cm. photo: between 1890 and 1900, Private collection.
Fig. 2-4. Jan Toorop, Lioba, plaster, lost. Published in “Die Kunst für Alle”
reproduced in Marian Bizans-Prakken, Toorop/Klimt. Exhibition Catalogue
(Gemeentemuseum) (The Hague: Waanders 2006), 174.
Fig. 2-5. Horemachbit in adoration, (detail) spell 125 from the Book of Death,
about 1100 BC, (22nd Dynasty), black and red ink on papyrus, height 34 cm.
National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden.
Fig. 2-6. The goddesses Isis and Nepthys pouring holy water over the diseased
Djedmontefach, Thebes, about 1000 BC, (21rst dynasty) detail of a coffin:
wood with canvas and painted stucco, 187,5 x 50 x 30 cm. National Museum
of Antiquities, Leiden.
xii List of Illustrations
Fig. 2-7. Jan Toorop, poster for Arthur van Schendel’s play “Pandorra,” 1919,
lithography, 114 x 85 cm. © Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Fig. 2-8. Funeral procession of Pakerer, Sakkara, 19th-20st dynasty (ca. 1300-1100
BC), detail red and black ink on papyrus, h. ca. 20 cm. National Museum of
Antiquities, Leiden.
Fig. 2-9. Hippopotamus hunt, about 2400 BC (5th dynasty) detail of painted wall
relief of lime stone in the mastaba of Ti, Sakkara. Photo by the author.
Fig. 2-10. Jan Toorop, Nirwana, 1895, pencil heightened with white, 55.5 x 34 cm.
Studio 2000 Art Gallery, Blaricum.
Fig. 2-11. Jan Toorop, Thoughtful, Meditation, Fire, 1923, pencil on paper (also as
litho), 18.5 x 15 cm. Studio 2000 Art Gallery, Blaricum.
Fig. 2-12. Ramose, about 1411-1375 BC (18th dynasty) detail of a partly painted
wall relief in the tomb of Ramose (TT55) in the Valley of the Nobles, Thebes,
discovered in 1861. Photo by the author.
Fig. 2-13. Humbert de Superville’s scheme of Egyptian sculpture related to the
Memnoncolossi.
Fig. 2-14. Johannes van Vloten’s scheme of line symbolism related to Greek
goddesses.
Fig. 2-15. Grid recognized in Van Konijnenburgs work.
Fig. 2-16. Willem van Konijnenburg, Diligence, 1917, oil on canvas, 151.5 x 106.5
cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
Fig. 2-17. K.P.C. de Bazel, The natural development of mankind from the mineral,
plant and animal world, 1894, woodcut, 14 x 11.3 cm, Drents Museum, Assen.
Fig. 2-18. Magic: white and black, 1886 reproduced in Le Lotus 1887 as illustration of
the article by Franz Hartmann.
Chapter Three
Fig. 3-1. Armand Point, At Rest in the Desert, 1887, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 100.3
cm. Private Collection (Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. ©1993).
Fig. 3-2. Carlos Schwabe, Salon Rose Croix, 1892, lithograph, 198 x 80.5 cm. The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (The Museum of Modern Art/
Licensed by SCALA).
Fig. 3-3. Armand Point and Léonard Sarluis, Poster for the Fifth Salon
Rose+Croix,1896, 75.8 x 102.6 cm. (Photograph Courtesy of Les Amis de
Bourron-Marlotte).
Fig. 3-4. Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera, 1477, tempera on wood, 203 x 314 cm.
Uffizi, Florence (Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY).
Fig. 3-5. Armand Point, The Eternal Chimera, 1895, pencil and pastel, 715.0 x
42.0 cm. (Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 1994).
Fig. 3-6. Leonardo da Vinci, The Madonna of the Rocks, 1483, oil on canvas, 199
x 122 cm. Louvre, Paris (Photo Credit : Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art
Resource, NY).
Fig. 3-7. Armand Point, April or Saint Cecilia, 1896, pencil and charcoal
heightened with chalk on paper, 184 x 74.5 cm. Private Collection (Photo
Credit: Private Owner).
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences xiii
Fig. 3-8. Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the head of Leda, 1506-1508 (Facsimile -
original in the Windsor Collection). Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe,
Uffizi, Florence (Photo Credit : Scala / Art Resource, NY).
Fig. 3-9. Armand Point, A Portrait of Madame Berthelot, 1895, charcoal and
coloured chalks, 43.2 x 31.1cm. Private Collection (Photograph Courtesy of
Sotheby’s, Inc. © 1993).
Fig. 3-10. Armand Point Cover of the catalog for the exhibition, “Peintres de l’âme
[Painters of the Soul],” 1896, Paris, Bibliothèque Doucet.
Chapter Four
Fig. 4-1. Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera (Spring), 1477. Tempera on wood, 203 x
314 cm. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Uffizi, Florence,
Italy.
Fig. 4-2. Sandro Botticelli, Smeralda Bandinelli, 1471. Tempera on panel, 65.7 x
41 cm. ã V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Fig. 4-3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Donna Della Finestra, 1879. Oil on canvas.
100.65 x 73.98 cm. Framed 137.16 x 111.13 x 8.98 cm. Harvard Art Museum,
Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.200. Photo: Katya
Kallsen ã President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Fig. 4-4. Sandro Botticelli, “Mystic Nativity,” 1500. Oil on canvas, 108.6 x 74.9
cm. Bought, 1878. (NG1034) ã National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY.
National Gallery, London, Great Britain.
Fig. 4-5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel, 1871-1878. Oil on canvas.
136.84 x 96.52 cm. Predella 35.2 x 96.2 cm. Framed 212.09 x 133.03 x 8.89
cm. Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Grenville L.
Winthrop, 1943.202. Photo: Imaging Department ã President and Fellows of
Harvard College.
Fig. 4-6. Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne, Plate 39. (The Warburg Institute, Archive)
University of London.
Chapter Five
Fig. 5-1. The Secession Building in 2008.
Fig. 5-2. Inscription above the entrance to the Secession.
Fig. 5-3. Back of the Secession; Moser's frieze is no longer there.
Fig. 5-4. Side Niche of the Secession's Reception Hall.
Chapter Seven
Figure 7-1. Fernand Khnopff, Memories (Lawn Tennis), 1889. Pastel on paper
mounted on canvas, 127 X 200 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium,
Brussels.
Chapter Eight
Fig. 8-1. Fernand Khnopff, Une cigarette, ca. 1912 (pastel and charcoal on paper,
diam. 15.8 cm., 38 x 21.5 cm. overall; private collection).
Fig. 8-2. Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: Grass (oil on panel, 20.4 x 30 cm., 1893,
private collection).
xiv List of Illustrations
Fig. 8-3.Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: Twilight (oil on panel, 37.8 x 66.5 cm., ca.
1890-1895, private collection).
Fig. 8-4. Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: A Stream (oil on canvas, 40 x 32 cm., 1897,
Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts).
Chapter Eleven
Fig. 11-1. Edward Burne-Jones, Prioress’s Tale, c. 1865-98 (watercolor, bodycolor
and pastel, 27 ¾ x 19 in., 70.3 x 48.3 cm). Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington.
Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial.
Fig. 11-2. Edward Burne-Jones, Le Chant d’Amour, 1868-77 (oil on canvas, 45 x
61 3/8 in, 114.3 x 155.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The
Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund, 1947, 47.26). Image copyright The
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 11-3. Edward Burne-Jones, Cupid and Psyche, c. 1865 (watercolor,
bodycolor, and pastel, 27 ¼ x 19 in, 70.3 x 48.3 cm. Yale Center for British
Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, New Haven. Mary Gertrude Abbey Fund
B2979.12.1038).
Fig. 11-4. Edward Burne-Jones, The Sleeping Beauty from the small Briar Rose
series, c. 1870 (oil on canvas, 24 x 45 ½ in, 61 x 115.6 cm. Museo de Arte de
Ponce. The Luis A. Ferre Foundation, Inc. Ponce, Puerto Rico 59.0114).
Photograph by John Betancourt.
Fig. 11-5. Edward Burne-Jones, The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, 1881-98 (oil
on canvas, 110 x 256 in, 279.4 x 650.2 cm. Museo de Arte de Ponce. The Luis
A. Ferre Foundation, Inc. 63.0369). Photograph by John Betancourt.
Chapter Thirteen
Fig. 13-1. Odilon Redon. L’Apparition. 1883. Charcoal with white gouache
highlights on chamois paper. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. © Cliché du
M.B.A. de Bordeaux/photographe Lysiane Gauthier.
Fig. 13-2. Gustave Moreau. L’Apparition. 1876. Watercolor. 106 x 72.2cm.
Cabinet des dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Réunion des Musées
Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi.
Fig. 13-3.Gustave Moreau. Salome Dancing before Herod. 1876. Oil on canvas.
The Armand Hammer Collection. Gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation.
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Fig.13-4. Gustave Moreau. Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. ca. 1870. Oil on
canvas. 85 x 60 cm. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris. Réunion des Musées
Nationaux/Art Resource. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda.
Fig. 13-5. Puvis de Chavannes. The Beheading of St. John the Baptist. 1869. Oil on
canvas. 124.5 x 166 cm. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of
Birmingham/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Fig. 13-6.Eugène Delacroix. The Death of Saint John the Baptist. 1843-1854.
Frescoes from the spandrels of the main hall. Assemblée Nationale, Paris,
France. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences xv
Fig. 13-7.Gustave Moreau. Salomé dancing. ca. 1875. Pen and black ink with
white highlights. 29.4 x 14.8 cm. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, France.
Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY; René-Gabriel Ojéda.
Fig. 13-8.Edouard Toudouze. Salome Triumphant. ca. 1886 (Salon of 1886). Oil on
canvas. Current whereabouts unknown.
Fig. 13-9.Odilon Redon. Head of a Martyr. 1877. Chalk and charcoal on paper. 37
x 36 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, The Netherlands. Photo: Erich
Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 13-10. Odilon Redon. Head of Orpheus Floating on the Waters. 1880.
Charcoal on paper. 41 x 34 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, The
Netherlands. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 13-11. Stéphane Mallarmé. Page from Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le
Hasard. 1897-1898. Paris, Doucet. Photo: © Roger-Viollet.
Fig. 13-12. Unknown artist. Chef-reliquaire de saint Jean-Baptiste. Second third of
the 14th century. Polychrome wood sculpture. Musée Historique de Haguenau,
Haguenau, France. Photo: ©Musées de Haguenau.
Fig. 13-13. Odilon Redon. Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. ca.1880-
1885. Charcoal and black chalk on tan paper. 22 x 19.8 cm. Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of Milton McGreevy, 81-
30/67. Photo: Mel McLean.
Fig. 13-14. Photograph of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) (b/w photo) by Guy &
Mockrel (19th-20th century). Archives Larousse, Paris, France. Photo:
Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library International.
Fig. 13-15. Artemisia Gentileschi. Judith Slaying Holofernes. ca.1612-1613. Oil on
canvas. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy. Photo: Scala/
Ministero per I Beni e le Attivitá culturali / Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 13-16. Caravaggio. David with the Head of Goliath. ca.1605-1606 (?). oil on
canvas. Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy. Photo: Mauro Magliani for Alinari,
1997/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 13-17. Jeanne Jacquemin. Christ á la couronne d’épines. Lithograph,
published in Le Courrier Françias, June 23, 1895.
Fig. 13-18. Jean Baptiste (Auguste) Clésinger. Tête de saint Jean-Baptiste. 1877.
Terra cotta. Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France. Photo: © Eric Emo / Musée
Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet.
Fig. 13-19. James Ensor. The Dangerous Cooks. 1896. Oil on panel. 38 x 46 cm.
Private collection, Belgium. Photo: © DACS / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art
Library International.
Fig. 13-20. Emile Bernard. Salomé. 1897. Oil on canvas. Private collection,
Switzerland.
Fig. 13-21. Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), American, 1890-1976. Mary
Reynolds and Marcel Duchamp. 1937. Gelatin silver print. 15 x 14.9 cm. Gift
of Frank B. Hubachek, 1970.796, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography ©
The Art Institute of Chicago.
Fig. 13-22. Jeanne Jacquemin. La Douloureuse et glorieuse couronne (The Crown
of Thorns). 892. 52 x 34 cm. Pastel on paper. Private Collection, Paris, France.
Photo: Lessing Photo Archive.
xvi List of Illustrations
Fig. 13-23. Jeanne Jacquemin. Saint-Georges. 1898. Color Lithograph. Appeared

in L’Estampe moderne, March 1898.
Fig. 13-24. Photograph of Alice Guszalewicz starring as Salome in the opera by
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) (b/w photo). ca. 1910. Private collection/Roger-
Viollet, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library. (This photograph was identified in
1987 by Richard Ellman as being a photograph of Oscar Wilde, an error which
was corrected in 1992).
Chapter Fourteen
Fig. 14-1. Gustave Moreau, Jupiter et Sémélé, Musée Gustave Moreau.
Chapter Fifteen
Fig. 15-1. Paul Gauguin, In the Waves, 1889, oil on canvas, The Cleveland
Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH.
Fig. 15-2. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Automne (Autumn), 1863-64, oil on canvas,
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, France.
Fig. 15-3. Leonhart Thurn-Heisser, The Four Humours, 1574 (Image in the public
domain).
Fig. 15-4. Paul Gauguin, Soyez mystérieuses (Be Mysterious), 1890, polychrome
wood relief, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY).
Fig. 15-5. Paul Gauguin, Fatata te miti (By the Sea), 1892, oil on canvas, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY).
Fig. 15-6. Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: Auti te Pape (Women at the River), 1893-94,
woodcut, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH.
Fig. 15-7. Odilon Redon “Le Passage d’une âme,” Les Feuillets d’art V (15 Avril
1920): 31. Ingalls Library, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Rare Books and
Special Collections, Cleveland, OH.
Fig. 15-8. Aristide Maillol, The Wave, 1898, Musée du Petit Palais, oil on canvas,
Paris, France.
Fig. 15-9. Maurice Denis, Polyphemus, 1907, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum of
Fine Arts, Moscow ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
(Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY).
Chapter 21
Fig. 21-1. Paul Ranson, La Farce du pâté et de la tarte, 1892, stonecutting. Saint-
Germain-en-Laye (France), departemental museum Maurice Denis “Le
Prieuré”.
Fig. 21-2. Paul Ranson, program for Les sept princesses, 1892, stonecutting. Saint-
Germain-en-Laye (France), departemental museum Maurice Denis “Le
Prieuré”.
Fig. 21-3. Maurice Denis, Pelléas et Mélisande, 1893, drawing (pencil on paper).
Private collection © SABAM Belgium 2009 © ADAGP, Banque d’Images,
Paris 2010.
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences xvii
Chapter 22
Fig. 22-1. Nikolaos Gysis, The Worship of Angels, 1898, oil on paper, 38cm,
National Gallery –Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-2. Nikolaos Gysis, Study of the archangel of The Triumph of Religion or
The Foundation of Faith , 1894-1895,charcoal and lavis on paper, 60x44,5
National Gallery- Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
The Foundation of Faith , 1894-1895, oil on canvas, 91x69, National Gallery-
Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-4. Nikolaos Gysis, Study of the head of the archangel of The Triumph of
Religion or The Foundation of Faith , 1894-1895, oil on canvas, 46x37,
Fig. 22-5. Nikolaos Gysis, The Triumph of Religion or The Foundation of Faith ,
1894-1895, oil, on canvas, 145x73, Koutlidis Foundation’s Collection,
Fig. 22-6. Dimitrios Mpiskinis, The Time of Vesper, 1916, oil on canvas, 65x85,
Fig. 22-7. Dimitrios Mpiskinis, The Expulsion from Paradise, 1930-1935,
Constantinos Ioannidis’ Private Collection) is on the Internet site:
www.amvrakia.blogspot.com.
Fig. 22-8. Constantinos Parthénis, Annunciation, 1910-1911, oil on canvas, 45x44,
National Gallery-Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-9. Constantinos Parthénis, Saint Sophie, 1917-1919, oïl on canvas, 85x78,
National Gallery-Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-10. Constantinos Parthénis, study for Under the auspices of the patroness
Virgin, 1920-1922, india ink on paper, National Gallery-Museum Alexandros
Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-11. Constantinos Parthénis, Angel Trumpeter, 1940-1941, oil on canvas,
95x90, National Gallery-Museum Alexandros Soutzos.
Fig. 22-12. Constantinos Parthénis, Athanasius Diakos’ Apotheosis, before 1927,
oil on canvas, 117,5x 117, Private Collection) is on the Internet site:
www.eikastikon.gr/zografiki/parthenis.html.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Fig. 23-1. Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926), The Death of the Gravedigger, 1900,
watercolour, gouache, black lead. Paris, Orsay Museum. Conserved at the
Department of Graphic Arts (D.A.G) of the Louvre Museum, Michonis’ legacy
(RF 40162 bis).
Chapter Twenty-Four
Fig. 24-1. Giovanni Segantini, The Angel of Life, 1894, The Galleria d’Arte
Moderna, Milan.
Fig. 24-2. Giovanni Segantini, The Fruit of Life, 1889, Museum der bildenden
Künste, Leipzig.
Fig. 24-3. Cavalier Cesare d’Arpino, Madonna of the Tree, 1590, The Galleria
degli Uffizi, Florence.
xviii List of Illustrations
Fig. 24-4. Giovanni Segantini, The Two Mothers, 1889, Galleria d’Arte Moderna,
Milan.
Fig. 24-5. Giovanni Segantini, Ave Maria at the Crossing, 1886. Fischbacher
Foundation, San Gallen.
Fig. 24-6. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust I, 1891. Walker Art
Gallery, Liverpool.
Fig. 24-7. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust I, 1891, drawing. Private
Collection, Washington, DC.
Fig. 24-8. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust II, 1896-1897. Kunsthaus,
Zurich.
Fig. 24-9. Giovanni Segantini, Evil Mothers I, 1894, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna.
Fig. 24-10. Giovanni Segantini, Evil Mothers II, 1896-1987, Kunsthaus, Zurich.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Fig. 25-1. Odilon Redon, Pégase captif. Lithograph published in Vittorio Pica,
“Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux
- Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 122.
Fig. 25-2. Odilon Redon, Serpent-auréole. Lithograph published in Vittorio Pica,
Fig. 25-3. Odilon Redon, Lumière. Lithograph (published in Vittorio Pica,
Fig. 25-4. Félicien Rops, illustrations for the tale Le bonheur dans le crime (left
below) and the book Les diaboliques (right above) by Jules-Amédée Barbey
d’Aurevilly. Etchings published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le
cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III
(1896): 130.
Fig. 25-5. Félicien Rops, illustration for the novel Le vice suprême by Joséphin
Péladan. Etching published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle
(sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896):
128.
Fig. 25-6. Auguste Rodin, Printemps. Dry-point published on the cover page of
Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica. Eaux-fortes, Pointes Sèches, Vernis
Mous, Lithographies des Grands Maîtres du XIXème Siècle (Milano,
Antiquariato W. Toscanini, 9 december 1931).
Fig. 25-7. Auguste Rodin, studies. Pen-drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I
disegni di tre scultori moderni. Gemito - Meunier - Rodin”, Emporium XLIII
(1916): 402.
Fig. 25-8. Auguste Rodin, studies for female nudes in different poses. Pen-
drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni. Gemito -
Meunier - Rodin”, Emporium XLIII (1916): 419.
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences xix
Chapter Twenty-Six
Fig. 26-1a. Mario de Maria, photograph portrait of Angelo Conti, about 1886.
Fig. 26-1b. Mario de Maria, photograph portrait of Angelo Conti at the Ca’ d’Oro
(?) in Venice, 1896 Rome, Conti Estate.
Fig. 26-2. Mario de Maria, Moonlight. Tables at an inn at Prati di Castello,1884,
Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. Su concessione del Ministero per i
Beni e le Attività Culturali.
Fig. 26-3. Mario de Maria, Egloga The end of a summer’s day, 1899-1909, Venice,
Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro.
Fig. 26-4. Mario de Maria, La barca a torsio (The moored boat), 1895 Piacenza,
Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci-Oddi.
Fig. 26-5. Francesco Saverio Castracane degli Antelminelli, Fluvial, sea and fossil
Diatomaceæ microphotography, 1877 from Studi sulle Diatomee (Rome:
Tipografia della pace, 1877) table, 171.
Fig. 26-6. Hilma af Klint Group IV, the ten largest, infancy, 1907 Stokolm, The
Hilma af Klint Foundation.
Fig. 26-7a. Mario de Maria, illustrations for L’Alunna by Gabriele D’Annunzio,
Isaotta Guttadauro, 1886-87.
Fig. 26-7b. Mario de Maria, illustrations for L’Alunna by Gabriele D’Annunzio,
Fig. 26-8. Odilon Redon, Germination (Dans le rêve, 2), 1879, Paris, Biblioteque
National Français.
Fig. 26-9. Odilon Redon, Araignée qui sourit (The smiling spider), 1888 Paris,
Biblioteque National Français.
Fig. 26-10. Gaetano Previati, Spider and Flies, 1888-90 Milano, Private colletion.
Fig. 26-11. Félicien Rops, Rare Fish, 1877 Paris, Private collection.
Fig. 26-12. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Allegory, 1909 ca, Rome, Private collection.
Fig. 26-13. Giuseppe Cellini, Garisinda: E sul dal corda l’anima sospira (Up the
Heart, Spirit sighs), 1886.
Fig. 26-14 and 26-15. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Donna Francesca, Ballata VI,
illustrations for Isaotta Guttadauro, 1886.
Fig. 26-16. Giuseppe Primoli, Concert. Marie and Lisa Stillman, Giorgina Costa
1890-92, Rome, Primoli Foundation.
Fig. 26-17. Giuseppe Primoli, The marquise Sanfelice, the count Primoli and
Sartorio pose as tableau vivant, 1890-92, Rome.
Fig. 26-18. Caravaggio, Cardsharps, ex-collection Sciarra, now Fort Worth,
Kimbell Art Museum.
Fig. 26-19. Sebastiano del Piombo, Viola player ex-collection Sciarra.
Fig. 26-20. John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848-1849 Liverpool, Walker Art
Gallery.
Fig. 26-21. Gabrielle Hebèrt, Eléonore d’Ukermann poses on the wood, 1891
emultion print La Tronche, Musée Hebert.
xx List of Illustrations
Fig. 26-22a and 26-22b. Ernest Hébert, To the Heros without Glory, 1888 from “La
Tribuna illustrata”, 1891; Ernest Hébert, Roma sdegnata, Roma, Museo di
Roma.
Fig. 26-23. Giuseppe Primoli, Maria Hardouin Gallese e la marquise Sanfelice
pose as Annunciation 1890ca., Rome, Primoli Foundation; [Giuseppe Primoli,
Ernest Hébert and his model at Villa Medici, 1890 ca Fondazione Primoli].
Fig. 26-24. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1849-50 London, Tate
Gallery.
Fig. 26-25. Giuseppe Primoli, The marquise Sanfelice, 1890 Primoli Foundation.
Fig. 26-26. Edward Burne-Jones, Psiche’s Wedding, 1895 Bruxelles, Musées
Royaux des Beaux Arts
Fig. 26-27. Mario de Maria, Portrait of Daniela von Bülow (Green Vision), 1893
Unknown site.
Fig. 26-28. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna degli alberelli. Venice, Galleria
dell’Accademia.
Fig. 26-29 and 26-30. Cesare Laurenti, Beautiful Mask and Conversation, 1900 ca
Unknown sites.
Fig. 26-31. Vittorio Bressanin, Modesty and Vanity, 1899 Venice, International
Gallery of Modern Art Ca’ Pesaro.
Fig. 26-32 and 26-33. Mario de Maria, Casa dei Tre Oci, 1912-13 Venice,
Giudecca.
Fig. 26-34 and 26-35. Museum Mariano Fortuny, Venice, Palazzo Pesaro degli
Orfei.
Fig. 26-36. Mario de Maria, Chiesa e Campo dei Giustiziati in Val d’Inferno, 1907
Trieste, Civico Museo Rivoltella.
Fig. 26-37. Pordenone, The Family of the Satyr or The wounded Satyr, Private
collection (ex-Colletion of Mario de Maria).
Fig. 26-38. Eugene Benson, Orpheus wakes Eurydice on the river Lete, 1907
Asolo, Museo Civico.
Fig. 26-39. Frederic Leighton, Idyll, 1880-81 Private collection.
Fig. 26-40. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Summer, 1891 detail. The Cleveland
Museum of Art.
Fig. 26-41. Mario de Maria, The square at Borca, Cadore (Moonlight at Borca)
1909 Private collection.
Fig. 26-42. Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Sinfonia crepuscolare (Lago Maggiore),
1896 Milano, Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna.
Fig. 26-43. Giovanni Segantini, Springtime in the Alps (The Allegory of Spring)
1897 New York, Private collection.
Plate 26-1. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, The wise and foolish Virgins, 1890-91, Roma,
Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.
Plate 26-2. Mario de Maria, The Fondaco of Turkishs in Venice, 1909, Roma,
collezione privata.
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences xxi
Chapter Thirty
Fig. 30-1. Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Das Schlangenweib (Snake Woman),
Piccadilly Gallery, London, Great Britain. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art
Resource, NY.
Fig. 30-2. Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Die Sünde (Sin), 1893, Oil on canvas.
94.5cm x 59.5cm, Inv. 7925, Pinakothek der Modern, Bayerische
Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich, Germany. Photo Credit: Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kuturbesitz/ Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 30-3. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Erste Fassung, Weib und Tier (First version,
Woman and Beast), 1903, Etching, 21.7cm x 28.2cm, Kunstmuseum Bern,
Hermann und Margrit Rupf-Stiftung. © by ARS, New York.
Fig. 30-4. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Weib u. Tier (Woman and Beast), 1904, 13,
Etching, 20cm x 22.8cm, Zentrum Paul Klee Bern. © by ARS, New York.
Fig. 30-5. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Jungfrau (träumend) (Virgin [dreaming]), 1903,
2, Etching, 23.6cm X 29.8cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © by ARS, New York.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Fig. 32-1. Robert Motherwell, A Throw of the Dice No. 1,1963, lithograph on white
woven Rives BFK paper, 30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm). Art © Dedalus
Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Fig. 32-2. Robert Motherwell, A Throw of the Dice No. 2, 1963, lithograph on
white woven Rives BFK paper, 30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm) Art © Dedalus
Fig. 32-3. Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea No. 5,1962, Oil onStrathmore paper,
sheet: 29 x 23 in.; 73.66 x 58.42 cm Smith College Museum of Art,
Northampton, Massachusetts. Purchased with the gift of Bonnie Johnson
Sacerdote, class of 1964, and Louisa Stude Sarofim, class of 1958 and the
Dedalus Foundation Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New
York, NY.
Fig. 32-4. Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea No. 22, 1962, Oil on Strathmore
paper, sheet: 29 x 23 in.; 73.66 x 58.42 cm. Private Collection Art © Dedalus
Chapter Thirty-Three
York, NY.
xxii List of Illustrations
Chapter Thirty-Four
York, NY.
Chapter Thirty-Five
York, NY.
INTRODUCTION
ROSINA NEGINSKY
Without symbolism there can be no literature;

indeed, not even language. What are the words
themselves but symbols, almost as arbitrary as
the letters which compose them, mere sounds
of the voice to which we have agreed to give
certain significations, as we have agreed to
translate these sounds by those combinations of
letters?
Symbolism began with the first words uttered

by the first man, as he named every living
thing; or before them, in heaven, when God
named the world into being. And we see, in
these beginnings, precisely what Symbolism in
literature really is: a form of expression, at the
best but approximately, essentially but
arbitrary, until it has obtained the force of a
convention, for an unseen reality apprehended
by the consciousness.
—Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in

Literature1
Since the birth of the Symbolist movement in the middle of the nineteenth
century, there have been many attempts to define, explain, and expose
different sides of this movement. Russian literary critic Zinaida
Vengerova, while analyzing and documenting the evolution of Western
European Symbolism as it emerged, wrote that
Symbolism is everything that reflects the essential as a sign of the

unincarnated. The Symbolist is the one who does not merge with the
existing moment, is not immersed in it, but perceives it as a search for the
purpose of existence, as a path.2
2 Introduction
Probably the key word that describes the Symbolist movement is

imagination. The role of imagination was identified in the Saint-Simonist
dialog of 1825, which compared artists, scientists, and industrialists. It
contends that “Artist means the man of imagination, and the artist
embraces at once the works of the painter, the musician, the poet, the man
of letters.”3 Although Symbolism flourished throughout Western and
Eastern Europe, in the English, French, and Spanish-speaking Americas,
and even in Turkey, Symbolist aesthetics and sensibility developed first in
France and in England. It was the French Symbolist aesthetic that first
became known and affected the development of Symbolist trends in other
countries. Even in England, where the Symbolist aesthetic started with the
Pre-Raphaelite movement and developed very early, it was predominantly
French Symbolism that influenced the Aesthete movement that formed
around Oscar Wilde.
At the root of the Symbolism there is a discontent with and a
withdrawal from the society. The Symbolist sensibility, as Wallace Fowlie
notes, could be born and developed only in “a blatantly materialistic age.”4
Symbolist art and literature originated in opposition to the industrialized
and materialist society and opposed rationalist and positivist doctrines.
Overall, the Symbolist sensibility rejects society, is intolerant to humanity,
revolts against life, and has a complex relationship with nature. When
nature represents an alternative to the industrial world, it is attractive to
Symbolists, but when it is a symbol of perishable, life-related phenomena,
Symbolists rebel against it and reject it. One of the reasons why Symbolists
often portrayed Woman as a monster is because she was the one who gave
birth and was perceived as the origin and the essence of the physical life;
she was a part of matter, of a perishable physical existence. Imagination is
a key word and concept for Symbolism, because it is through imagination
that one can escape from unsatisfactory surroundings to more attractive
worlds created by the imagination.
Among those who embraced the new sensibility, imagination led
toward new inventions in art and literature. Those new “inventors” used
themselves as a basis of their creativity, celebrating their own subjective
experiences. They were interested in the past, which they usually invented
and represented differently from historical reality. They were attracted to
the folkloric and imprecise aspects of the Middle Ages and to pagan
primitive and archaic cultures. They were fascinated by the transcendental
and mystical aspects of existence in a search that manifested itself as a
metaphysical quest. Those “inventors” created their own societies. They
gathered in cafés, published their own magazines, created groups and
circles. As the Encyclopédie du Symbolisme points out,
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences 3
All that was colored by the asocial and antisocial spirit of subversion. As a
result, the communities of those artists and poets kept an air of secrecy and
were overall communities of an anarchic individualism.”5
Romanticism played an important role in the development of Symbolist

aesthetics and sensibility. For example, for English poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, who influenced English Symbolism, the role of poetry was to
evoke the mystery of the world.6 For Novalis, a German philosopher and
writer of early Romanticism, who also had an impact on Symbolists,
nature was a symbol for something grander than philosophy. The French
poet Charles Baudelaire, who was considered the “founder” of French
Symbolist aesthetics, was influenced by the German Romantic writer,
E.T.A. Hoffman, who was famous for his fantastic horror works. The
novel Aurélia by French writer Gerard de Nerval, in which daydreams
replace reality, and his twelve sonnets published under the title Chimères
at the end of the novel Filles du feu, played an important role in the
development of a mysterious and dreamy side of Symbolist sensibility.
The pessimism of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, as stated in
the following citation, played an important role in the evolution of the
symbolist worldview:
our ordinary existence, driven by will, is subject to an endless dialectic of

desire and boredom, and the only way to escape it is either ascetic
renunciation or art. Fine art can give us temporary relief from ceaseless
striving by making us forget our desiring individuality in the aesthetic act
of rapt contemplation.7
Schopenhauer significantly influenced J-K Huysmans’ novel, A rebours

(Against Nature), and Decadence, a branch of the Symbolist movement.
One of the most important concepts on which Symbolist aesthetics
were constructed is art for art’s sake. For centuries human beings have
been preoccupied with this concept, but the first reference to l'art pour
l'art, as it was referred to by nineteenth century artists, writers, and poets,
appeared in Victor Cousin’s Questions esthéthiques et religieuses
(Aesthethic and Religious Questions, 1818), in which Cousin developed
the idea that “art is not enrolled in the service of religion and morals or in
the service of what is pleasing and useful.” As Cousin states, “Religion
exists for the sake of religion, the moral exists for the sake of the moral,
and art should exist for its own sake.”8 Art is a purpose in itself, and, as
Alfred de Vigny pointed out, “the modern . . . spiritual belief.”9
In France, the idea of “art for art’s sake” began to take hold among
French artists and writers as a doctrine from 1835, when Théophile
4 Introduction
Gautier proclaimed the importance of art for art’s sake in the preface to his
novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin. At the same time, Gautier published a
poem “L'Hippopotame,” in which he established the poet’s mocking attitude
toward bourgeois society and bourgeois literary criticism. With the
foundation of the Second Empire in 1852, French poets and writers such
as Charles Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Gustave Flaubert, Théodore de
Banville, and Théophile Gautier proclaimed that the bourgeois art did not
have any originality or style, and bourgeois social values were meaningless
and laughable.
In his 1857 poem “L'Art,”10 published in the second edition of the
collection of poetry entitled Emaux et Camées, Théophile Gautier
reinforces the idea found in Alfred de Vigny’s works that “a book must be
composed, cut, and sculptured as if it were a statue of Parian marble.”11
When in 1866, 1869 and 1877, the publisher Alfred Lemerre published
three anthologies of the new poets under the title Le Parnasse
Contemporain, the editor, Catulle Mendès, was guided by the ideas stated
in Gautier’s poetry and works, such as art for art’s sake, the cult of formal
beauty embodied in faultless workmanship, and the contempt for
contemporary bourgeois society. Worship of beauty was essential for
Parnassian poets, since it separated the artist from everything that is banal
and vulgar. “Hatred of successful mediocrity,” of a society in which those
poets lived, was the basis for that attitude. Their style indicated the
withdrawal from the world around them and the aspiration to stand aside
and be above the society in which they lived.
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), published in 1857
and dedicated to Gautier, is a revolt against the society he deeply hated
and despised. “Le beau est toujours bizarre” (beauty is always strange), a
statement associated with Baudelaire, becomes the foundation of the new
aesthetic credo.”12
It stresses the artist’s attraction to the strange as an element of the artist’s

personality and his aspiration to separate himself from most men, who
submit easily to the conventional and the traditional, who prefer not to be
startled by originality. Those impulses that often manifest themselves in the
subconscious—fantasies, hallucinations, and sentiments of fear—and
which in most men are not allowed to develop, represent the sources of
experiences in man’s moral and physical life. The artist, for Baudelaire,
feels a desire to know and explore such fantasies that border on dreams and
nightmares.13
Baudelaire was very much under the spell of an American writer,

Edgar Allan Poe, for whom the bizarre and unusual were at the root of his
art. Baudelaire and later Mallarmé, who was also fascinated by Poe,
together with Emile Hennequin, a friend of French writer J-K Huysmans,
who wrote the famous decadent novel A rebours, translated into French all
of Poe’s works. Poe’s works were published in France beginning in the
1880s. Poe’s Philosophy of Composition also influenced Baudelaire’s
concept of imagination. Baudelaire perceived imagination as “the queen of
the faculties” and “quasi-divine.”14 For him,
Imagination is not a fantasy; it is not a sensitivity either, though it would

not be possible to imagine a man with an imagination who is not sensitive.
Imagination is an almost divine ability which perceives intuitively the
intimate and secret relationship, the correspondences and analogies.15
Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondences” confirms and establishes in a

poetic form the key role of the imagination.16 Baudelaire also popularized
the notion of non-belonging. It is especially pronounced in his poem “Le
Cygne” (The Swan), which stresses the feelings of a constant exile from
the world around him, exile that occurs either in myths, or dreams, or
fantasies, or memories.17 As one critic pointed out:
That feeling of exile introduces us already to Baudelaire’s symbolism, to

the world of the Ideal from which he was originally exiled but to which he
is conscious to belong. It is a world that has something in common with the
Platonic world of Ideas. For the poet, the forms are the presentations, the
symbols of the ideal and more real reality. The “painful secret” which is in
the center of the sonnet “La Vie antérieure” (The Anterior Life) is a hidden
desire to arrive to that supreme state of elevation. … The elevation will be
the privileged mode of the access to the Ideal, but it will remain in a state
of a dream.18
If the word associated with Baudelaire and early evolution of the

Symbolist sensibility was bizarre, Paul Verlaine in his three essays written
in 1883 about three French poets — Corbière, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé —
introduced a concept of a maudit, cursed poet. In his essays he also calls
these poets Satanic. They were a threat to the bourgeois society because
they potentially could “contaminate” the society with their ideas and sow a
germ of destruction.
At the time of Verlaine, vers libre (free verse), a new phenomenon in
writing poetry, was born. Verlaine was at the center of this phenomenon,
although at the same time, other poets with the same Symbolist sensibility
began to write in vers libre. Verlaine describes the art and principles of
writing in his poem “Art Poètique” (Ars Poetica).19 One of the major
precepts of this “new” poetry is that it should follow the music of the
6 Introduction
poet’s soul, and the rhyme of the poetry is determined by the rhyme of
poet’s soul. Hence, the number of sounds in the line loses its importance;
only rhyme, the pulse of poet’s soul, remains.
Paintings from artists such as Francisco Goya, William Blake, and

Henry Fuseli contributed to the development of the spiritual and the
mysterious in art. Those artists did not reproduce reality around them but
concentrated on dreams, hallucinations, and nightmares—that is, on
everything that is an extension of the inner life and of the world of
mystery.
Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman
Hunt, William Morris, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and art
critic John Ruskin, all contributed to the development of English
Symbolism and Symbolist aesthetics, which manifested itself at first in the
revolt against academic art that the Pre-Raphaelites considered deprived of
any life. They were searching in early Renaissance and Gothic art for
inspiration for new forms and ideas. The Pre-Raphaelites were influenced
in part by the mysticism, spirituality, and imagination of William Blake
and were his followers. They regarded him as one of the precursors of
their Brotherhood. Nonetheless, the English cult for beauty started with
the poetry of the English poet John Keats and was reformulated by the
Pre-Raphaelites. The Pre-Raphaelites were also followers of the German
Nazarene movement, which reacted against the art of the academy and
tried to revive in their art spiritual values while searching for inspiration in
late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
The Pre-Raphaelites questioned artistic techniques. In their works they
used much brighter colors; they tried to recreate a depiction of the world
around them, not in the conventional required-by-the-academic-art way,
but in a new way. They aspired to be true to the perception of reality they
painted. They endowed it with precise details that were supposed to
convey the spirit of “real” life and the soul of their characters. For topics,
they used as a point of departure history, which they reinvented, and
literary works, which they reinterpreted; nature, which they endowed with
the spirit of primitive innocence, distant from social tumult and the
industrial spirit of big cities; and social situations, in which they depicted
an awaking of the human soul yearning to be free from social constraints.
The inspiration from nature became pivotal in Art Nouveau, which
manifested itself in architecture, decorative arts and jewelry. The Pre-
Raphaelite sensibility and inspirations led to the development of the Arts
and Crafts movement, whose leader and founder was William Morris. The
movement reinvented new styles of furniture and new objects of art that
could be used in daily activities and were priced to be accessible to the
middle and lower classes. The Arts and Crafts movement also influenced
architectural styles and the Art Modern that developed at the end of the
nineteenth century across Europe.
The image of Woman became central in the works of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, who created a new type of Madonna—a woman who, with her
penetrating glance and long red hair, was at once divine and earthly, divine
and demonic. The theme of Woman dominated Symbolism. As in
Christianity, there were two main tendencies. One represented an idealized
woman, either distant or pure, chaste, and exceedingly religious. The other
tended to represent Woman as a monster, the seducer and a destroyer of
man, the symbol of evil and perversity. We find idealized and dreamy
images of Woman in Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol, Alphonse Mucha, in
the later works of Puvis de Chavannes, and even in the works of Gustave
Moreau—La Sulamite, Orphée in the musée d'Orsay—and Paul Gauguin.
Although Gustave Moreau also created inaccessible women—Galatée—
who were not evil, the demonic beauty or the beauty of anguish incarnated
in women is present in his works—Eve, Dalila, Salomé, Messaline. These
images of women are close to those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In
Germany, the demonic Woman is seen in the art of Franz von Stuck, in
Austria, Gustave Klimt, in Belgium, Fernand Khnopff, and in Norway,
Edvard Munch. All women were depicted as evil, seductive destroyers,
men’s lustful executioners. In their perception of women, artists successfully
omitted the fact that in order to seduce, the seduced has to wish to be
seduced and should have the same lustful inclinations as the seducers
supposedly have. Those images certainly demonstrate a fear of women
who, in the nineteenth century, began to enter the workforce, became more
active in life of society, and could be easily perceived by men as their
competitors. Now, not only were men sexually dependant on woman, they
also had to compete with her for social recognition and for their place
within society. The images of a threatening, beautiful women appeared not
only in painting; they were also central in many literary works.
One might observe that the French version of the Pre-Raphaelite
painting can be found in the works of French painter Gustave Moreau,
who in his turn was directly influenced by the grand romantic artists such
as Delacroix and Chassériau, as well as by the artists of the Renaissance.
Moreau influenced the art of his students, such as Henri Matisse, George
Rouault, his admirer Fernand Khnopff, and the works of French Symbolist
painter Odilon Redon, who already in 1865 saw Moreau’s Oedipus and the
8 Introduction
Sphinx. Moreau’s art also mesmerized the Surrealist André Breton who,
while visiting the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris, found in Moreau’s
work an inspiration for his movement. French artist Rodolphe Bresdin, in
addition to Moreau, undoubtedly played a role in the development of the
art of Odilon Redon, who was Bresdin’s student and who partly under
Bresdin’s influence came to the conclusion that, “In art everything is
accomplished through the docile submission to the orders of the
unconscious.”20
The Pre-Raphaelite movement was also a literary movement. Dante
Gabriel Rossetti was not only a painter, he was also a poet and an editor of
the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which, among other publications,
stated the precepts of the movement. His sister Christina, a very talented
poet, also participated in the meetings of the Pre-Raphaelites, and her
poetic works reflect the spirit of the movement. The work of the Pre-
Raphaelites, together with Baudelaire’s poetry, had an impact on the
English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is considered one of the
most important English Symbolist poets. He participated in the Pre-
Raphaelite gatherings and in 1866 published Poems and Ballads, which
was very much influenced by Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal.
Another major contributor to the development of the Symbolist
aesthetic and sensibility was Walter Pater, an English literary and art critic
who also wrote fiction. His Studies of the Renaissance (1873) and the
novel Marius The Epicurean (1885) helped to shape English Aestheticism,
the movement associated with Oscar Wilde, which was derived partly
from French Symbolism, partly from the English Pre-Raphaelite
movement, and partly from Pater’s aesthetics. Wilde and his followers
were under the spell of French literature of the second part of the
nineteenth century, and they read it avidly. They were particularly
sensitive to the notion of the bizarre and the cursed, similar to French
“cursed” poets who felt disgust toward “well thinking” society.
Oscar Wilde’s dandyism was, as stated in the following passage, a
challenge to conformity. Dandyism was
… at its best an individual’s response to society’s demand for conformity

in the 19th century, to the homogenizing tendencies of bourgeois society
and morals. Dandyism confronted bourgeois morality and ideology with its
refusal to glorify labor, to idealize the natural, its rejection of utility, its
scorn for the sacred cow of progress, and the skepticism with which it
greeted the great liberal ideals of democracy and equality. The dandy felt
himself set apart from society, or above it; his life’s task therefore, was to
manifest the distance he felt. He resisted society by amazing it, shocking it,
testing its tolerance, by persistently going “too far” in his dress, gestures,
actions, and opinions.21
The editor John Lane, who published The Yellow Book, the artist Aubrey
Beardsley who, among other things, illustrated Wilde’s play Salome, and
Arthur Symons, who together with Beardsley published The Savoy, a
follow-up of The Yellow Book, shared many of Wilde’s ideas.
One of the most important contributions to the development of
Symbolist aesthetics and sensibility and to the growth of the Symbolist
movement took place in Belgium. Belgian literary Symbolism occurred
mainly in the French language. Belgian Symbolist poetry and, to a degree,
painting and sculpture, emphasized the spiritual aspects of Symbolist
aesthetics. Poetry and prose expressed the themes of an inner search, of
the attitude of the soul in relationship to God, nature, and the city. Belgian
writer, poet, and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck created a new theater, a
theater of silence, which accentuated the invisible world of the human soul
and stressed not the text but the subtext. Maeterlinck’s dramatic genius
played a central role in the development of Anton Chekhov’s dramatic art.
The Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren made a considerable contribution to the
development of vers libre in poetry. The prose writer Georges Rodenbach,
who lived in Paris between 1881 and 1891 and represented “young
Belgium,” influenced the evolution of the mysterious and dreamy side of
Symbolism. The fantastic, spiritual, psychological, mocking world of
Belgian painter James Ensor, as well as the bizarre and unreal world of
Fernand Khnopff, revolutionized Symbolism in painting.
France, Belgium, and England played important roles in the development
of Symbolist aesthetics and of the Symbolist movement per se in
Germany, Austria, and Russia and many other countries. Russian
Symbolism was influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
and by the Russian idealist philosopher Vladimir Soloviev.
One of the features of the Symbolist movement is the relationship
between visual and literary artists. Painters and writers shared the same
creative processes and exchanged ideas. They were influenced by many of
the same philosophical and social ideas. Poets and writers wrote about art
and promoted painters such as Moreau, Whistler, and Bresdin. Similarly,
painters were inspired by literary works, but they did not illustrate them.
They used literature as a point of departure for their works and endowed
literary motifs with their own meaning. Writers borrowed their ideas from
works of art. Both visual and literary artists attempted to “paint” the
subconscious. Some of the Symbolists were both painters and poets, and
they either interpreted their own literary works in poetry or “illustrated”
their poetry with their works of art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti followed
10 Introduction
Blake’s example in illustrating his own poetry.
The notion of the symbol is at the root of the Symbolist movement, and
it is very different from the way it was used in earlier times. In the
Symbolist movement, a symbol is not an allegory. Its essence is
beautifully defined by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck in an article
that appeared on April 24, 1887 in L'Art moderne. He wrote that
the notion of a symbol in the Symbolist movement is the opposite of the

notion of the symbol in classical usage: instead of going from the abstract
to concrete (Venus, incarnated in the statue, represents love), it goes from
the concrete to the abstract, from “what is seen, heard, felt, tasted, and
sensed to the evocation of the idea.”22
“To suggest,” or suggérer, is a key word in Symbolist aesthetics. Wallas

Fowlie pointed out that
It means first to awaken, to indicate without specifically naming or

defining, to propose a meaning without dogmatically imposing it. Suggérer
can also mean to incite and prolong an emotion on the part of the reader …
The object in Parnassian art and the symbol in symbolist art are primarily
aesthetic, intended to give to the reader a sense of the beautiful. But the
literary symbol, as it has been used since Baudelaire’s time, in its aesthetic
power, has a closer relationship with the religious spirit of man than with
any reasonable, practical, or didactic use.23
The poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the painter Gustave Moreau were avatars
of that ability of suggestion. The poet Jean Moréas, in his Manifest of
Symbolism, summarized some general tendencies of already developed
Symbolist aesthetics and sensibility.
For the plastic arts, the important theorists of Symbolism were Albert
Aurier, Maurice Denis, and Paul Sérisier. In his article Paul Gauguin and
Symbolism in Painting, Albert Aurier described five fundamental rules of
Symbolist art:
A work of art should be first of all based on an idea, since its unique ideal
will be the expression of the idea. Second it should be symbolist since it
will express that idea in forms. Third, it should be synthetic since it will
transcribe its forms and its signs; fourth it should be subjective, since the
object will not be perceived as an object, but as a sign perceived by the
subject. Fifth, the work of art should be decorative (this is a consequence),
since the decorative painting as it was conceived by Egyptians, probably

by Greeks and the primitives, is nothing but the manifestation of art at once
subjective, synthetical, symbolist and ideist. … For the artist to be the
vehicle of the absolute beings, he should simplify the writing of signs.24
There has long been confusion over the terms Symbolism and
Decadence. For example, when Zinaida Vengerova wrote about French
Symbolist poets, she used the term “decadent.” More recent writers and
critics more clearly distinguish between these terms. J-K Huysmans’s
novel A rebours (Against Nature) developed the idea of decadence in art
and literature. As Wallace Fowlie noted,
The mysterious word décadence would seem to mean the will of the artist
to understand the basic drives of his nature, to explain what Baudelaire
called the ‘inner abyss’ or ‘cemetery’ of the self, and to use the creation of
art as a remedy for ‘ennui’ or ‘spleen,’ or what might be called by the
simpler term ‘pessimism.’25
On April 10, 1886, the manifesto of the decadents appeared in the

magazine Le décadent. Decadents claimed that they came out of a
civilization impregnated with the philosophy of Schopenhauer. They stated
that they were not a literary school and that their mission was not to found
something; that they were here to destroy, to eliminate all the old
banalities and traditions. These banalities were social customs, religion,
and justice.26 Both Symbolism and Decadence were born from the same
root: the dissatisfaction with society and social values. Both movements
valued imagination and beauty, which for both represented everything that
could awaken the soul and endow it with a life of its own. Decadence,
however, did not go beyond it, whereas Symbolism went further.
Symbolism proclaimed that the new reality should come to replace the
unsatisfactory surrounding world. Symbolism had a transcendental spin. It
searched for symbols on earth that would evoke the presence of an eternal
and better transcendental reality. Art was often perceived as a theurgical
activity because it was a vehicle of bringing the divine on earth through
the soul.
The Symbolist movement had a powerful impact, often not sufficiently
recognized, on the art and literature of the twentieth century. The purpose
of the conference Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences, which
took place in April 2009 in Illinois, USA, and the purpose of this volume
is to explore the complexity of the movement, its origins and its influence
on the art and literature of the twentieth century.
The present volume is divided in three major parts: Origins of the
12 Introduction
Symbolist Movement, the Symbolist Movement, and Consequences of the

Symbolist Movement. Each part explores Symbolism in both visual arts
and literature.
In the volume, many articles illuminate the issues of French and
Belgian Symbolism in literature, painting, sculpture, and theater. There are
also articles that address issues of Italian Symbolism. The volume gives
voice to Greek Symbolism in painting and literature and to Turkish
Symbolism in literature. While illuminating the specificity of Symbolism
in art and literature in each respective country, these articles also
demonstrate the crucial role of French Symbolism in the development of
the Symbolist movement in those countries. Two articles in the volume
analyze the particularities of Russian Symbolism, quite different from,
although at the same time similar in its flavor to, French and Belgian
Symbolism. Two articles in the volume apply Lacanien theories to the
study of Symbolism: “Woman, the Symbolist Movement, and
Psychoanalysis” examines works of Moreau, and “The Paranoiac
Discourse of Symbolism and Delusion of Persecution” analyzes the
Russian Symbolist novel The Petty Demon.
One of the topics that has been insufficiently studied is Symbolism in
architecture. The article “Symbolism and Crime: Architecture of the
Vienna Secession” gives us a rich picture of the role of Symbolism in
Viennese architecture of the turn of the century. Unfortunately, the volume
only has two articles that address the issues of English Symbolism. One of
them describes a controversial reception of the Pre-Raphaelites in France.
The volume also contains a number of articles that illuminate the legacy of
Symbolism in Europe and the United States in literature and art.
In scope, this volume does not attempt to encompass all aspects of the
origins of the Symbolist movement, to explore all Symbolist aesthetics
and manifestations, and to illuminate all influences Symbolism had on
artistic and literary movements that came later, either as a reaction to or a
continuation of Symbolism. It does attempt to give a glimpse into the
power of the Symbolist movement and the nature of its fundamental and
interdisciplinary role in the evolution of the art and literature of the
twentieth century.
Acknowledgments
My special gratitude goes to Geneviève Lacambre, Deborah Cibelli and
Peter Cooke for reading the Introduction and making valuable suggestions
that have been incorporated.
Notes
1
Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: William
Heinemann, 1899), iii.
2
Rosina Neginsky, Zinaida Vengerova: In Search of Beauty. A Literary
Ambassador between East and West (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH,
2004), 25; see also 182, endnote 11.
3
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 199.
4
Wallace Fowlie, Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism
(University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 10.
5
Jean Cassou in collaboration with Pierre Brunel, Francis Claudon, Georges
Pillement, Lionel Richard, Encyclopédie du Symbolisme (Somogy, 1988), 8. All
translations are mine.
6
He also “developed the most sophisticated theory of the imagination in his
threefold distinction among a general imagination that all people share, the
associative ‘fancy’ of persons of mere talent or craft, and the truly creative
imagination of the artist.” See Shiner, The Invention of Art, 199.
7
Ibid., 195.
8
Fowlie, Poem and Symbol, 2. “Il faut de la religion pour la religion, de la morale
pour la morale, et de l'art pour l'art.”
9
Shiner, The Invention of Art, 194.
10
Here is the poem:
Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle
Vers, marbre, onyx, énamel.
Tout passe. – L'art robuste

Seul a l'éternité:
Le buste
Survit à la cité.
[Yes, the work emerges more beautiful

from a form
rebellious to labor
Poetry, marble, onyx, enamel.
Everything disappears – Robust art

alone is eternal:
The Bust survives the city.]
11
Fowlie, Poem and Symbol, 2.
12
Ibid., 5.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 199.
14 Introduction
15
Encyclopédie du Symbolisme, 160.
16
Charles Baudelaire. The Flowers of Evil. A new translation with parallel French
text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 18–19.
17
Ibid., 162-163.
18
19
Paul Verlaine. One Hundred and One Poems (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1999), 126.
20
“En art, écrit-it, tout se fait par la soumission docile à la venue de l'inconscient.”
21
Cited in Neginsky, Zinaida Vengerova: In Search of Beauty, 124 from Betsy F.
Moeller-Sally, “Oscar Wilde and the Culture of Russian Modernism,” Slavic and
East European Journal, 34, no 4 (1990): 461.
22
23
24
Cited in Encyclopédie du Symbolisme, 50 from the article published in February
1892 in le Mercure de France.
25
26
Ibid., 107.
PART I:
ORIGINS OF THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT

CHAPTER ONE
TOWARD SYMBOLISM:
GUSTAVE MOREAU, THE MASTERS
OF THE PAST AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
GENEVIEVE LACAMBRE
Gustave Moreau was born in Paris in 1826 and died there in 1898.
Upon his death, he bequeathed his house to the state, having enlarged it
during his lifetime to become a muséum.1 It now contains a great number
of his works, as well as his archives, which he carefully sorted out,
keeping only what was related to his artistic life—his library, his souvenirs
and his collections, on which he constantly drew for models.
We now know that the antique vases, the sculptures and old books
belonged for the most part to the collection of his father, the architect
Louis Moreau, who was born in 1790 and died in 1862. Louis Moreau was
a student of Charles Percier and an admirer of the painter Jean-Antoine
Gros, but of Greco-Roman antiquity in particular. Although he recognized
Gustave’s precocious gifts for drawing, he nonetheless insisted that his son
receive a serious education in the classics leading to a baccalaureate in
letters. It seems however that he never finished his studies,2 although in a
handwritten note on her son’s childhood, Pauline Moreau writes: “Finally
after his baccalaureate, his father left him free to do as he wished,
especially after having submitted to M. Dedreux-Dorcy a painted sketch of
Phyrne before her judges. It was at about this time, around 1844, that he
entered the atelier of M. Picot.”3 Gustave Moreau nonetheless kept and
used the textbooks describing the program of this baccalaureate
examination, more prestigious at the time than it is now. In particular, the
library contains the Mémento méthodique des aspirants au baccalauréat es
lettres d’après le programme du 14 juillet 1840 4 (Methodical memento
for candidates for the baccalaureate of letters for the July 14 1840
program) by Em. Lefranc, Paris 1845, with a few notes in his handwriting
in the margins. The history of the Near East was required study, and
Moreau retained the episode of the strange destiny of Cyrus, decapitated
Toward Symbolism 17
by Queen Thomyris,5 as told by Herodotus. In Latin literature, the program

included several chants from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and the fourth
book of Virgil’s Georgics on the care of bees, which recalls the story of
Aristaios with the episode of Orpheus and Eurydice, a legend also found in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Moreau was able to refer to the complete text of
this founding work in a superb edition in French printed in 1660,6
translated and commented on by the academician Pierre du Ryer—a rival
of Pierre Corneille—and with illustrations copied from Antonio Tempesta,
artist of the early seventeenth century. This book in particular bears the
traces of intensive use by the artist. In a text on Phaethon, the large
watercolor7 shown in the 1878 World’s Fair, he wrote “this tale from Ovid
is a sublime masterpiece.”8 He had even cut out the engraving from his
book.
It is thus very tempting to look through all this carefully preserved
literary and artistic material to discover what Gustave Moreau used in his
work. It is an inexhaustible mine, an unending search.
To give reality to dream and form to what his imagination conceived,
Moreau relied on what was real: on nature itself—the poplar trees in the
region of Etampes, where he visited his friend Narcisse Berchère, for his
background landscapes; a naturalized swan’s wing or a stuffed vulture
(rented from a specialized shop), but also on the live animals in the Jardin
des Plantes; also, more traditionally, on the human model—man, woman
or child—posed in a position previously fixed in his preliminary sketches.
But in many cases, the “real” that he used was a work of art—an
illustration, a photograph—perfect substitutes for reality.
I would like to mention a few examples of these inanimate models
conserved in the musée Gustave Moreau:
The plaster mask of Michelangelo’s dying slave9 in the Louvre. We
can follow its transformations in the series of studies for the
Orphée10 of the 1866 Salon. And for the same painting—and a few
other representations of poets—the wooden plank11 cut in the shape
of a lyre with the marks drawn in pencil of where the model posing
as the young girl placed her fingers.
The bronze copy of the antique bull12 from the Vatican, thanks to
which he didn’t need a living model, as for example with Cain
working the soil in La Vie de l’humanité (The Life of Humanity). 13
Canova’s bronze of Hercules and Lichas14—the 1834 bronze
edition made in Paris from the sketch of this monumental marble—
which he used for Diomedes’ distorted pose.15
The white color of the faces on the beautiful volute vase that his
father had acquired in 1835, at the sale of the collection of the
18 Chapter One
painter Gros, described under number 334.16 Although he was

doubtless unaware of the funerary significance of this white color,
it seems to mean to him a kind of purity worthy of great men, a
poet, like Tyrtaios,17 or a prophet, such as Moses.18
The album of various Piranesi engravings with the vase19 of
Œdipus and the Sphinx20 of the 1864 Salon; or the arch of the
imperial forums21 in the background of Diomedes devoured by his
horses22 shown in the 1865 Salon.
But of course, all of Moreau’s sources of inspiration are not to be found
there, even in the form of written notes or sketches. Contrary to what
Huysmans thought, Moreau did not live closed up in an ivory tower—
rather he studied, made copies, searched in museums, expositions, libraries
in Paris and in Italy, where he made a long study trip from 1857 to 1859.
In that sense, he was not different from many of his contemporaries, as
was the artist Bouguereau, who also had a large collection of photographic
documents, still preserved in his atelier by his heirs.
Now that Moreau’s numerous writings have been published, rather
than speak only about their contents, I would like to suggest a few
hypotheses that I believe revelatory of what he reacted to the most deeply
and did not take the trouble to write about for future generations. His
relative silence concerning Chassériau is evidence of this: Chassériau, who
died in 1856, had an atelier close to Moreau’s near Place Pigalle, until
Moreau moved to 14, rue de la Rochefoucauld in 1853, the address of the
actual muséum.23 When we analyze Moreau’s early works, we wonder
whether Chassériau’s influence didn’t go beyond feelings of deference and
admiration to a possible collaboration in the elaboration of Gustave
Moreau’s first large works of 1852 and 1853. Perhaps because the critics
reproached Moreau for imitating Chassériau, Moreau later thought it
unnecessary to insist on this founding episode, even if he does do homage
to Chassériau in Le Jeune homme et la mort (The Young Man and Death)24
of the 1865 Salon.
An interesting example of these influences—because it touches on
form and language both—is one of the sources for Les Prétendants (The
Suitors)25 brought to light by Peter Cooke:26 Moreau defines the figures as
“struck by lightning,” “figures of the last judgement fleeing before divine
thunder.” In the library of the Villa Médicis in Rome, 1859, Moreau
copied with great precision an engraving entitled fulminati,27 literally,
“those struck by lightning,” from one of the frescoes of Signorelli in the
Cathedral of Orvieto, representing the end of the world.
We could mention many others.
The musée Gustave Moreau thus conserves thousands of painted
Toward Symbolism 19
copies and drawings done in the Louvre or in Italy. We find them,

combined with one another in his works, in a syncretism with its own
significance. We can say that Moreau made use of everything and also that
he used his sources as it pleased him—that they comprised a repertoire of
forms that he used with a solely decorative intention and with no concern
for historical verisimilitude. To reconstitute history—as was attempted by
Rochegrosse at the same time—was of no concern to Moreau.
Thus, next to Salome dancing,28 he paints the threshold decorated with
elephants in the form of a Celanese Moonstone—copied from a
photograph29 of Ceylan in the 1873 Palais de l’Industrie exposition of the
collection that Henri Cernuschi brought back from his world tour. But to
my mind, this decorative structure is not used as a significant document,
but only for its graphic value, which contributes to the atmosphere of a
dreamlike Orient.
What was important to Moreau was to give his paintings significance
in the highest sense; his subjects—the most classical mythological and
biblical themes, fables in general—should be imbued with a highly moral
and symbolic message.
Note, of course, that he treated the same subjects as his predecessors,
and that his choice was not very original. But he rejected or totally ignored
the treatment given them by the painters of the eighteenth century, as we
can see if we compare his works to those in the exposition Les Amours des
dieux, organized in 199130 by Colin Bailey.
Looking at the subjects of the Prix de Rome of his century—Moreau
would have seen the winning paintings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts when
preparing for the examination himself (he failed it in 1848 and 1849)—we
see that he treated some of the same subjects, but dealt with them
differently. He might have seen the painter Heim’s 1807 Prix de Rome,31
Thésée vainquant le minotaure au moment où les jeunes Athéniens lui
expriment sa reconnaissance (Theseus Vanquishing the Minotaur,
representing the moment when the young Athenians express their
gratitude), a subject from the Metamorphoses (book 8, fable 2).
But for the 1855 World’s Fair, Moreau chose an episode before the
arrival of Theseus: the moment when the young Athenians were delivered
to the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Crete: Les Athéniens livrés au
minotaure dans le labyrinthe de Crète.32
It was Pallière who received the first grand Prix de Rome of 1812 with
Ulysse et Télémaque massacrant les prétendants de Pénélope (Ulysses and
Telemachus massacring Penelope’s suitors), a subject that tempted Moreau
from the very beginning.
He also knew Theodore van Thulden’s engravings, representing
20 Chapter One
Primaticcio’s murals in the galerie d’Ulysse in Fontainebleau (this décor

has disappeared), and in the album of 164033 in Moreau’s library, there are
sketches of his in the margins. Thus he was able to broaden the subject,
since he also found the theme of the unfaithful maids there, a theme on
which he made a number of remarkable studies but which never gave rise
to a large composition, a fact that surprises many critics.
Although the title of the Prétendants (The Suitors) was already
mentioned in a letter from Narcisse Berchère in 1856, encouraging Moreau
to accompany him to Egypt and to bring along his rolled up painting,
Moreau makes no mention of it in the alphabetical list of his studies for
compositions, established before 1870 in his Livre de Notes (rouge)34; the
references correspond to registers numbered in Roman numerals where
they were classified. These registers disappeared after 1898 during the
preparation of the museum when these studies were put in frames. We find
however four distinct mentions, and three different subjects: (1) Suivantes
infidèles (fragment), II 45, (2) Suivantes infidèles, III 42, VII 16, (3)
Suivantes infidèles, on les pousse de la salle (driven from the room), III,
44, (3) Suivantes infidèles enlevant les corps (carrying away the bodies)
IV 2-3.35
We can also consider two sketches in the margins of his edition of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 253: here, we find two widthwise compositions.36
The upper one shows the crowd of unfaithful maids driven to the exterior
of the room; towards the right of the lower one, we recognize a figure with
legs apart, a veil flying over his head, a foretaste of the figure on the right
of Les Prétendants (The Suitors). The vertical lines of this sketch recall the
architecture of the room in the Ithaca Palace, treated in the same way in
another rapid sketch in one of Moreau’s early sketchbooks.
If we look at various preparatory drawings for this composition, which
was enlarged later on and left partially unfinished at the artist’s death, we
see that the artist’s kinetic vision of the room in the Ithaca Palace, with
variable points of view—Ulysses on the left, then in the background37—
finally led him to make the maids disappear,38 to drive them literally
outside the room or to shove them into the background at the left in a
crowd whose details are difficult to discern.
Thus we see that in the end he relinquished the idea of giving the
unfaithful maids the importance they had earlier when he was under the
influence of Van Thulden. In the end, the maids are integrated into Les
Prétendants,39 but we hardly notice them. The same will be true twenty-
five years later for the figures of nymphs. Moreau carefully studied them
for Galatea,40 but they are hardly visible in the sea vegetation at the
bottom of the composition.
Toward Symbolism 21
To return to the Suitors, we see that Moreau attempted representing

different moments within the same story, eliminating in the end the one he
considered too narrative, too much like a conventional scène de genre.
In the chest containing watercolors, we find two projects of
compositions for the “unfaithful maids taking away the bodies”41: the
central corpse is in the pose of Christ deposed from the cross, which
hardly corresponded to a suitor, as vile as a man could possibly be.
Also, having done this small sketch in the margin of the Metamorphoses,
Moreau sketched on the right a suitor with upraised arms and a veil
floating over his head, which would not take its definitive form until after
he had studied a statue of Atys with a bare torso in Italy, in 1859.
Let us remain a moment longer with the Prix de Rome. In 1821, Court
won first prize and Dubois second, on the theme of Samson and Delilah,
both having treated the scene in a dramatic manner. Moreau, on the other
hand, sought at all costs to avoid the gesticulation that proved to the
establishment the painter’s knowledge of anatomy. In Moreau’s different
versions, Delilah barely holds the scissors that will put an end to Samson’s
strength … whether he is with her,42 or whether she awaiting him;43 he
also represents her at her toilette, preparing herself for the final seduction.
Lastly, the year he failed the Prix de Rome competition in historical
painting, Moreau certainly knew that the subject of the first part of the
Historic Landscape test was the kidnapping of Deianira, and the second, an
elm tree with Narcissus admiring himself in the water, two themes he dealt
with in his own fashion, placing them both in vast landscapes, according to
an academic tradition that was to disappear with the reform of the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts in 1863, but which he perpetuated in his own way.
Several variations, either drawn or painted, show Moreau’s hesitation:
should he represent Nessus mortally wounded by Hercules’ arrow44 or the
preceding episode, when Deianira turns to Hercules and asks for help?45
The first theme had been illustrated by his faithful friend Elie Delaunay
in Mort de Nessus (The Death of Nessus), with the centaur pierced by an
arrow in the foreground. This painting, acquired by the state at the 1870
Salon, was exhibited in 1874 at the musée du Luxembourg and is now in
the musée des beaux-arts of Nantes. This subject too is treated in a vast
landscape.
But the final composition, of modest size, sold for the high price of
6,000 francs in October 1873 to H. Lepel-Cointet,46 illustrates a more
delicate, more subtle moment, when Deianira consents to Nessus’ gesture
of seduction. Moreau represents Hercules—a very small figure in the
center of the other side of the river—readying himself to shoot an arrow.
We feel that the artist is making him into a symbolic image of guilty desire
22 Chapter One
and jealousy. This final version has a second title L’Automne (Autumn).
The season can be found in the red colour of the trees, but, in this way,
Moreau suggests the announcement of Hercules’s death when he receives,
later, the poisonous Nessus’ cloth.
Later, he uses a similar procedure, the contrast between the woman in
the foreground and the tiny figure of David at the top of his palace to
suggest seduction in David and Bathsheba.47 This represents a new
approach, after having given priority, during the Second Empire, to
compositions with two large figures.
However, this search for a new iconographic solution was due not only
to his desire to avoid gesticulation. The best example is Œdipus and the
Sphinx. Clearly, Moreau knew Ingres’ Œdipus and the Sphinx, presented
in 1808 in Rome. This painting, with its particularly calm mise en scène,
had been engraved by Magimel in 1851 and shown at the exposition of the
Bonne Nouvelle Bazar in 1846, then again at the 1855 World Fair in Paris,
where Moreau could have seen it. One wonders whether he drew from
memory the famous little sketch in a collection of old engravings
conserved in his library, Antiquarum statuarum urbis Romæ of Cavelleris,
dated 1585. He also made the sketch of an intaglio with a sphinx clinging
to an upside-down man, that can simply be held vertically.48
It was thanks to this painting, the fruit of several years of various kinds
of research, that Moreau finally gained recognition at the 1864 Salon. He
sold it for 8,000 francs on the very first day to Prince Napoleon.
However, during the years of the Second Empire, this recognition was
not enough to bring him the success that should have followed. Although,
as Cham wrote, “M. Moreau’s sphinx keeps Courbet awake at night,”49
buyers were few and far between, even when trying his luck with
exhibitions in the provinces. From that point of view, the 1869 Salon was a
total failure, although for the third time he received a medal with Jupiter
and Europa50 and Prometheus.51 In the end, both paintings remained in the
atelier.
For the first, he treated an episode in the story of Europa other than the
usual representation of her being carried off by the bull—which he knew
well, if only thanks to his Ovid and a copy made in the rooms of the
Louvre’s Campana collection.52 He used only the end of the fable: “Jupiter
changes into a bull, takes Europa, with whom he is in love, on his back
and carries her off across the seas to the island of Crete, where he reveals
his true form and satisfies his passion.” Moreau represents Jupiter at the
moment when “the bull changes into a man.”53 Drawings show that he
hesitated about showing Europa’s surprise54 or fright … deciding in the
end on giving her an expression of serenity.
Toward Symbolism 23
His Prometheus, which Théophile Gautier claimed had a Christ-like

air, likewise found no buyer; the state wasn’t interested, and chose instead
Bin’s Prométhée enchaîné (Prometheus Bound)55 for the musée de
Marseille—a particularly grandiloquent work, with a curious mythological
realism.
Bin—born in 1823—was only a few years older than Moreau. He
obtained a second Prix de Rome in 1850 and a medal in 1865 at the same
time as Moreau. Besides exhibiting at the Salon of Subjects from
Antiquity, he led a brilliant career as a painter and decorator.
The fact that the two works were presented at the same Salon goes to
illustrate the broad divergences in the manner of interpreting a subject—at
the same time, it is revelatory of the administration’s taste in art.
It was above all the painting that Bin exposed at the 1872 Salon that
caught Moreau’s attention. Entitled—rather pompously and a bit
mysteriously—L’affût. Hérakles Teraphonios (The Hunt) (Fig. 1-1), 56 he
shows Hercules (or Herakles) and his companion Iolaos approaching the
Hydra of Lern, with the monster emerging from a swamp edged with
immense hyper-realistic reeds. The state bought the work for the musée de
Reims—which could have caused Moreau a bit of jealousy.
For we note that in some of the studies for his own Hercules and the
Hydra, exhibited four years later at the 1876 Salon, Moreau first
represented Hercules and his nephew Iolaos,57 but in the end, he
suppressed Iolaos and reduced the scene to a combat between Hercules
and the Hydra, between the hero and the monster to be vanquished,
between good and evil—in fact a symbol of the anarchy during the
Commune of 1871.
Among the more than 350 works on this theme conserved in the
museum, only a few show Iolaos, who would soon disappear, leaving the
hero alone faced with the monster; he even seems about to disappear—
partially erased—on Hercules’ left, in one of the large versions58 (Fig. 1-2)
conserved in the museum.
Hercules’ pose is also gradually modified: at first it is similar to what
he probably studied, in the manner of Canova’s Hercules and Lycas in the
family collection—the face in profile, the torso facing, the left leg bent—
he then studied a bent right leg,59 and for the Salon painting, chose the
pose of a serene walker, legs slightly apart and in a walking position.
It is interesting to note that Moreau was truly satisfied to have arrived
at this solution. He wrote: “Nothing is more beautiful than this man and
this beast contemplating each other before the combat. It is frightening in a
very strange way.”
24 Chapter One
Fig. 1-1. Emile Bin, L’affut. Héraklès Teraphonios.
To my mind, this looks like a criticism of his early inspiration—

Canova’s bronze of Hercules gathering strength to throw Lycas in the
sea—a spectacular creation indeed, qualified at the time as frightening.
Several contemporary examples show Moreau’s constant attention to
solutions proposed by other artists and his reactions to them.
In relation to the famous Salome series that brought him definitive
glory at the 1876 Salon and the 1878 World Fair, we can mention
paintings on a neighboring subject by Puvis de Chavannes, and note that
after the war and the Commune, it was Salome’s victim, John the Baptist,
who first interested Moreau. Like Orpheus, John the Baptist was a superior
man who was decapitated. For Moreau, poets and prophets were quasi-
synonymous, because like the works of an artist, their thoughts and
discourse are perpetuated after their physical death.
But it also seems interesting to me to note that at the time, Moreau was
planning a sort of polyptych for a frieze60 for which he was studying and
developing the various panels as independent compositions. This project
can be related to a triptych that Glaize presented to the 1873 Salon entitled
Toward Symbolism 25
Salome, The Death of Saint John, Herodias.61

To my mind, the case of Galatea62 (Fig. 1-3) for the 1880 Salon is
exemplary. The circumstances surrounding the creation of this exceptional
work are quite interesting. For once, the work was rapid. For Galatea’s
pose, he just reversed the pose of the Fairy with Griffins,63 as we learn
from several drawings.
After the succès d’estime obtained during the 1878 World Fair,
Gustave Moreau seems to have renewed interest in the Salon, at least for a
time. We know that the last one he participated in was in 1880— also the
last official Salon, since from 1881 on it was organized by an artists’
society, “La Société des Artistes français.”
It seems to me that Moreau, encouraged by the admiration and rivalry
of his collectors, Charles Hayem and Antony Roux, grew more confident
in his creative process and was eager to prove it further, remaining in the
tradition of the nude, highly valued at the Salon. Moreover, he gave this
work a broad renaissance frame sculpted in columns (unfortunately
disappeared), which set it in a veritable temple-like décor. Thus it is not
surprising that in a critique of 1880, Marius Vachon compared it with Da
Vinci’s Joconde.64
It also seems to me that another painting attracted his attention—one
exhibited at the 1879 Salon by an artist of his generation, James Bertrand
(born in Lyon in 1823, died in Orsay in 1887), Galatée et son amant
surpris par le cyclope Polyphème (Galatea and her Lover Surprised by the
Cyclops Polyphemus) (Fig. 1-4). This painting, which James Bertrand had
unsuccessfully proposed for purchase by the Beaux-Arts administration,
was bought by the museum of Saint-Etienne in 1882. A photograph of the
painting was recently published in the museum’s catalogue of ancient art.65
James Bertrand’ career had been very similar to Moreau’s: three
medals during the Second Empire, another in 1878, the Légion d’honneur
in 1876, as well as the purchase by the state in 1869 of Mort de Virginie
(The Death of Virginie) for the musée du Luxembourg66 .
James Bertrand treats the literary and legendary subjects he chooses in
the spirit of the sentimental scène de genre, which probably seemed to be a
weakness in the eyes of the very demanding Moreau. My impression is
that it may have made Moreau say to himself: “I can do better than that”—
while nonetheless retaining certain aspects of Bertrand’s composition, in
particular the Cyclops in the upper left-hand corner. Certainly, he didn’t
find the vision of a corner of a garden with a rocky wall and a tree
protecting the lovers satisfactory, and chose instead to represent Galatea as
a sea nymph amidst a network of sea animals and plants, carefully studied
in the library of the Museum of Natural History.
26 Chapter One
Fig. 1-4. James Bertrand, Galatée et son amant surpris par le cyclope Polyphème.
Polyphemus’ personality was obviously familiar to Moreau, since he

had listed the composition as Polyphème regarde la mer III 49, 50
(Polyphemus looking at the sea) in one of the lists of studies of
compositions indexed before 1870 in his Livre de notes (rouge)67. We
wonder whether this was the watercolor conserved in the museum68 or
another composition—there are so many different compositions on this
theme in the museum. In any case, the personage of Polyphemus, linked as
he is to the story of Ulysses and to that of Acis and Galatea, had already
caught the attention of Moreau, faithful reader of Homer and Ovid. At
times he represented him bearded, at other times not; in the end, he chose
in Galatea to present him as young and beardless, a possible lover not
without seductive qualities, but disdained by Galatea, who turns away
from him. Ten years later, we find the same evolution for the face of
Jupiter, during the genesis of the different versions of Jupiter and Semele.
I may have suggested that seeing Goya’s black paintings at Trocadero
during the 1878 World Fair—noted on a sketch of a nude woman in the
inverted pose of Galatea69—gave Moreau the idea of representing the
Cyclops as a huge figure in relation to Galatea. I also believe the painting
of James Bertrand to perhaps have been an additional influence. Although
in Moreau’s painting—barely finished for the 1880 Salon—the Cyclops’
right arm is not outstretched towards the bottom of the painting, this
outstretched arm appears in a number of studies70 (Fig. 1-5) used for the
large version in the Gustave Moreau Museum71 done after 1890 (Fig. 1-6).
Toward Symbolism 27
Indeed, during the last years of his life, in order to fill his future museum
with all the themes that were important to him, he went back to subjects he
had already worked on, but that he had sold the first finished version of to
a collector. Galatea entered the collection of Edmond Taigny at the end of
1881, a year and a half after the end of the 1880 Salon, because he had
wanted to give it some final touches after the Salon.
Of course, the sketches of Polyphemus with his right hand outstretched
towards the bottom are not dated. Were they done in 1879 or, most
probably, later? In that case, they are once again proof of Moreau’s
extraordinary visual memory.
In a commentary of 1897, Moreau emphasizes the opposition between
the two protagonists:
The big round eye of the earth, surprised and troubled, remains fixed on
this limpid and pure jewel of the Waters. And the big round eye fills with
sadness and its expression becomes veiled with bitterness and love,
contemplating this flower from the unfathomable depths.72
He knew of course the story told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses; in his

large 1660 in folio illustrated edition, he could see the Cyclops watching
the couple of lovers, then, after having crushed his imaginary rival Acis
with a rock. But as in many other cases, it is not Tempesta’s composition
that influenced him, but rather the commentary of Pierre du Ryer, who
drew a very relevant moral from the story: the simple confrontation
between an ugly man and a woman who scorns him, perhaps a variation on
the eternal story of Beauty and the Beast.
It is on the subject of this painting that J-K Huysmans praises “the
magisms of this visionary’s brush.”
Once again, rather than “story-teller,” Huysmans uses the word
“visionary”—one who seizes the essence of the subject.
All one need do is compare his Moïse exposé73(Moses, exposed to the
elements)—in an imaginary canyon, dominated by Egyptian heads from
Abou Simbel or other sites of the Valley of the Nile drawn from his
collection of photographs—to see that he rejects the naturalistic reeds of
painters like Delaroche74 in 1853 or Bin (in his Herakles) in favour of an
imaginary landscape inspired by an idea of ancient Egypt, about which he
nonetheless had precise information, thanks to his friends Berchère and
Fromentin. But we know that he was doubtful, even mistrustful, of the
commercially successful orientalist landscapes painted by the latter.
In conclusion, I would like to say that even though he considered
himself a painter of history, many years before the 1886 Symbolist
manifesto of Jean Moréas, Gustave Moreau was already seeking out the
28 Chapter One
symbol as the highest subject of his art.

In the description of one of his studies for compositions before 1870,75
he even uses the word in parentheses: on page 216 we find: “Christ
(symbolic subject) V 5.” Thus we understand why he preferred his 1863
paintings of the fourteen stations of Christ for the church of Decazeville to
remain anonymous. It was an order accepted only for the payment
involved and which had to be narrative due to its religious purpose.
We can also recall this rather reprimanding note to his mother
concerning Salome in the Garden, a composition exposed in 1878: “If you
made the effort to enter into this mysterious, symbolic, and wholly
intimate manner of portraying things, which is the very nature of my
unique talent, you would enjoy the subjects rendered as they are.”76 He
was probably defending the static pose of his Salome, and he must have
been speaking of a small sketch opposing the dances of antiquity with the
wild movements of modern dance.
In 1880, Ernest Chesneau, a critic who had known and frequented
Moreau for the past fifteen years, wrote of his Galatea: “Galatea here is
only a symbol, that of Beauty; a name, that of Woman,” and concluded his
enthusiastic commentary by stating that this painting was “an admirable
evocation of the mysteries of life.”
The same vocabulary can be found in the writings of Ary Renan, a
young poet, art critic and painter, student of Puvis de Chavannes and
admirer of Moreau. He too frequented Moreau’s atelier rue de La
Rochefoucauld and, in a long article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in
1886, spoke of the refusal of narrative as characterizing Moreau’s art: “he
chooses a decisive instant from the moral point of view and not a
palpitating instant from the scenic point of view.”77
He cites as examples of the idea of a heroic duel between man and the
beast the Œdipus of 1864 and the Hercules of 1876 and emphasizes the
importance of suggestion and silence, of avoiding moments of violence
and combat—the exact opposite of the gesticulation of academic painting,
which Moreau rejects, along with naturalism.
Ary Renan evokes Baudelaire and his famous words from L’Art
Romantique on correspondences, ending with: “A painting, faithful to and
equal to the dream that inspired it, must be produced as a world.”78
Comparing painting to sculpture, he says:
The painter has immense resources that the sculptor is unaware of: he can
surround his figure with symbols explaining the figure, show a bit of a
coloured universe around him, in a word, clarify and confirm the feelings
that fill the actors in the drama he is imagining by scattering sentiment
about them. M. Gustave Moreau is well acquainted with these vast
Toward Symbolism 29
resources and uses them continually … the entire landscape is in sympathy

with what the personage is feeling.79
Further on, he adds: “the landscape is very much a new element in

pictorial poetics,”80 and with Moreau, “it is entirely invented, yet it has the
same penetrating seductiveness as that of reality.”81
In analyzing today some of Gustave Moreau’s major works in relation
to works of art of all kinds of the past and of his times, my aim has been to
describe a certain aspect of his creative process—his way of reacting,
sometimes violently, to what he was given to see. A true dialogue took
place: the copy, followed by a tentative acceptance of a formula he would
then abandon and go beyond, purifying it until his mythical figures
expressed an idea, a symbol. His use of composition and color—which we
observe in his small oil or watercolour studies that may seem abstract, but
are in fact used to place the main lines and luminous areas of the
composition—show how much importance he gave to using the technical
means of painting to communicate the great ideas he wanted to express.
We can understand that the artists of the Symbolist generation were
interested in his innovative and already Symbolist work, even if the
alchemy of the artist’s work was unknown to them until the opening of the
museum.
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1-1. Emile Bin, L’affut. Héraklès Teraphonios, Salon de 1872. Photo
documentation du musée d’Orsay.
Fig. 1-2. Gustave Moreau, Hercule et l’hydre de Lerne, Paris, musée

Gustave Moreau , Cat. 34. Photo RMN (cliché 85-002151),
www.dessins-musee-moreau.fr/outils/peintures_h.php.
Fig. 1-3. Gustave Moreau, Galatée, Salon de 1880, Paris, musée d’Orsay,
RF 1997-16. Photo RMN (cliché 97-022129),
www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=1&FP=14375990&E
=2K1KTS2LVS9RG&SID=2K1KTS2LVS9RG&New=T&Pic=1&SubE=
2C6NU0GJR5MZ.
Fig. 1-4. James Bertrand, Galatée et son amant surpris par le cyclope
Polyphème, Salon de 1879, Saint-Etienne, musée d’art moderne. Photo du
musée.
30 Chapter One
Fig. 1-5 Gustave Moreau, Etudes pour Polyphème , Paris, musée Gustave
Moreau , Des. 12469. Photo RMN (cliché 01-002494),
www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=1&FP=14375990&E
=2K1KTS2LVS9RG&SID=2K1KTS2LVS9RG&New=T&Pic=1&SubE=
2C6NU0GJR5MZ.
Fig. 1- 6. Gustave Moreau, Galatée, Paris, musée Gustave Moreau , Cat.

100. Photo RMN (cliché 94-002324),
www.dessins-musee-moreau.fr/outils/peintures_g.php.
Notes
1
See for example exhibition catalogues: Maison d’artiste, maison musée.
L’exemple de Gustave Moreau, Paris, musée d’Orsay, 1987, reed.; Geneviève
Lacambre, Maison d’artiste, maison musée. Le musée Gustave Moreau (Paris:
RMN, 1997) and Gustave Moreau, 1826-1898 (Paris: Galeries nationales du Grand
Palais, 1998).
2
See Geneviève Lacambre, “Gustave Moreau et son edition de 1660 des
Métamorphoses d’Ovide,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’Art français.
Année 2007 (Paris, 2008), 343-351.
3
Arch. PM 2. Except, references concern the collections and archives of the musée
Gustave Moreau, in Paris.
4
Inv. 16799. For works in the musée Gustave Moreau, images can be found on
internet: www.photo.rmn.fr/ and www.musee-moreau.fr/ for the “catalogue
sommaire des dessins” (Des. 1 à Des. 4830, corresponding to the new fully
illustrated printed catalogue: Gustave Moreau. Catalogue sommaire des dessins.
Musée Gustave Moreau (dir. Marie-Cécile Forest), Paris, 2009.
5
Inv.13653 et Des. 2697.
6
Inv. 13978. Cf. Exhibition catalogue Gustave Moreau et l’antique (Millau: musée
de Millau et des Grands Causses, 2001), no. 66.
7
Paris, musée d’Orsay .
8
Gustave Moreau. Ecrits sur l’art, ed. Peter Cooke (Fontfroide: Fata Morgana,
2002), 1:108.
9
Inv. 16076.
10
Paris, musée d’Orsay.
11
Inv. 16075 et Des. 2881.
12
Inv 13654 et Des. 1083
13
Cat. 216 et Cat. 1155-7.
14
Inv. 16245. See for example Geneviève Lacambre, “De l’usage de la sculpture
par les peintres: Gustave Moreau regarde Canova,” La sculpture au XIXe siècle:
Mélanges pour Anne Pingeot (Paris: Nicolas Chaudun, 2008), 166-169.
15
Rouleau 38 n° 1.
16
Inv. 13665. Nathalie Balcar, Brigitte Bourgeois, Martine Denoyelle, Christine
Merlin, “Les vases grecs de Gustave Moreau. Etude et restauration,” La Revue des
Toward Symbolism 31
musées de France: Revue du Louvre (December 2004): 35-45.

17
Cat. 18.
18
Cat. 21.
19
Inv. 11919-23.
20
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
21
Inv. 11919-48.
22
Rouen, Musée des beaux-arts.
23
On the history and transformations of this house in 1895 for the future museum,
see Geneviève Lacambre, Maison d’artiste, maison musée. L’exemple de Gustave
Moreau (Paris: RMN, 1987; reissued 1997).
24
Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum, Winthrop Collection.
25
Cat. 19.
26
Peter Cooke, “History painting as Apocalypse and Poetry. Gustave Moreau’s Les
Prétendants, 1852-1897. With Unpublished Documents,” Gazette des beaux-arts,
January 1996, 14, fig. 10.
27
Des. 4251. Cf. Peter Cooke, op. cit. , p. 45, note 39 ( but not reproduced).
28
Cat. 211.
29
Paris, musée Cernuschi, Inv. MC 4682. See Exhibition catalogue L’Inde de
Gustave Moreau (Paris: musée Cernuschi – Lorient, musée de la Compagnie des
Indes à Port-Louis, 1997), n° 44, repr.
30
Exhibition in Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais and in Dallas, Kimbell
Art Museum.
31
The “Prix de Rome” are in the collection of the Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts,
Paris, www.ensba.fr/ow2/catzarts/.
32
Bourg-en-Bresse, musée de Brou. See for example Paris, Archives nationales,
F/21 99.
33
Inv. 13836.
34
Arch. GM 500.
35
Ibid., 225. See for example Des. 65 and Des 3513.
36
See Art. cit. note 2, supra, repr. fig 9, 348.
37
Des. 674 and Des 373.
38
Cat. 445.
39
Cat. 19 (enlarged in 1881).
40
41
Cat. 339 et Cat. 526.
42
43
Des. 2021 et Inv. 13961.
44
Cat. 38.
45
Cat. 17.
46
Los Angeles, The Jean P. Getty Museum .
47
48
Des. 4318.
49
Cham, “Une promenade au Salon,” Le Charivari, May 15, 1864.
50
Cat. 191.
51
Cat. 196.
32 Chapter One
52
Des. 4242 , d’après Liberale da Verona.
53
See for example Geneviève Lacambre, “Les Europe de Gustave Moreau,”
D’Europe à l’Europe -III- Actes du colloque tenu à l’ENS, Paris (29-30 novembre
2001), ed. Odile Wattel-de Croizant (Tours: Centre Recherches A. Piganiol, 2002),
208.
54
Des. 2966.
55
Archives nationales, F/21/ 7640. Photographs of works bought by the state
between 1864 and 1900 at the Salon can be found on the internet (base Arcade).
56
Archives nationales, F/21/7642. On Emile Bin, see Pierre Sérié, Joseph Blanc
(1846-1904) peintre d’histoire et décorateur (Paris: RMN - Ecole du Louvre,
2008).
57
Des 3864, Des. 343 et Cat. 644.
58
Cat. 34.
59
Des. 8273 et Des 8398.
60
Des. 1705.
61
Archives nationals, F/21/7643.
62
63
Cat. 183.
64
Dans La France, April 30, 1880. See Geneviève Lacambre, “La Galatée de
Gustave Moreau entre au musée d’Orsay,” 48/14. La revue du musée d’Orsay, 6
(Spring 1998), 49.
65
L’art ancien au Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, under the
direction of Jacques Beauffet (Paris, 2007), 259, no. 226, repr. (Inv. 43.4.39)
66
Chateauroux, musée Bertrand.
67
Arch GM 500, p. 224.
68
Cat.587.
69
Des.3547.
70
Des 367 et Des. 12469.
71
Cat. 100.
72
Gustave Moreau. Ecrits sur l’art, ed. Peter Cooke, 1:140.
73
Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum, Winthrop Collection.
74
See Exhibition catalogue Paul Delaroche. Un peintre dans l’histoire (Nantes:
musée des beaux-arts; Montpellier: musée Fabre, 2000), no. 94f, repr.
75
Arch. GM 500, 214-227.
76
Gustave Moreau. Ecrits sur l’art, ed. Peter Cooke, 1:101 with a sketch .
77
Ary Renan, “Gustave Moreau,” Gazette des beaux-arts, July 1886, 38.
78
Ibid., 44.
79
Ibid., 47.
80
Ibid., 48.
81
Ibid., 49-50.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ELOQUENCE OF LINE THAT THE DUTCH
SYMBOLISTS LEARNED FROM EGYPT
LIESBETH GROTENHUIS
“Most of all, I like Egyptian art,”1 wrote the Dutch Symbolist Johan
Thorn Prikker (1868-1932). He was not the only one. “Let us take
examples from the Egyptians,”2 preached Jan Theodoor Toorop (1858-
1928) for the sake of art.3 This article explores the influences of Egyptian
art on painting in the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century: it follows the international trend of Egyptomania, in which
popular Egyptian visual and stylistic elements were translated into the art
and design of the day. Both Orientalism and Historicism borrowed avidly
from the examples Egypt offered. Egyptian art informed and helped to
shape Dutch Symbolism in three ways: First, Dutch Symbolists literally
incorporated Egyptian objects into their work. Second, just as Japanese art
had come to the aid of artists striving to create a new visual language,
Egyptian art also offered premises for the development of a new direction
in art. The fascination for Egyptian motifs and art gave rise to a new
language; Dutch artists and designers opted to place an emphasis on
linearity. Third, drawing on examples from Egypt also added depth and
dimension to the content and meaning of Dutch art.
This article focuses on Toorop, a seminal figure in Dutch Symbolism,
taking his drawing The Sphinx (Fig. 2-1) as an example in which all three of
the above facets are present, and ends with an interpretation of this work.
Napoleon’s Expedition
The fascination with Egyptian art begins in the eighteenth century as
the direct result of a French military expedition to Egypt. Wishing to
establish a French presence in the Middle East, Napoleon arrived in
Alexandria on July 2, 1798. The campaign was a military shambles, but it
34 Chapter Two
turned out to be a great scientific success: the staff of Dominique Vivant

Denon (1747-1825) kept copious notes and made painstaking sketches of
all that they saw. The results were published between 1809 and 1829 in
the “Egypt-Bible” to be: the Description de l’Egypte. The plates,
particularly those taken from the volumes on antiquity, were an enormous
new source of material for artists. French designer Edme François Jomard
(1777–1862), for example, made a bookcase to house several volumes of
the Description as “a shrine of knowledge” in homage to the temple of
Dendera. Meanwhile, Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934)
designed an Egypt-inspired chair as a prototype of “Egyptomania,” a
phenomenon Jean Marcel Humbert described as follows:
any modern Neo-Egyptian creation may partake of Egyptomania if it is

reinterpreted and re-used in a way that gives it new meaning, as is the case
in films or advertising.4
A vast number of explorers flocked to Egypt, following in Napoleon’s

footsteps. There, painters reveled in the lambent light and shimmering
colors of a world that time had apparently forgotten; it was reminiscent of
the “world of Cato and Brutus,” as Delacroix once noticed. Such dazzling
impressions resulted in a fascination for all things Egyptian, which is
literally reflected in both Orientalism and Historicism. Working in a style
that can largely be classed as Orientalism, Dutch painter Marius Bauer
(1837-1932) painted diverse exotic scenes of Arab landscapes of his day,
complete with Pharaonic ruins. In a school of painting I refer to as “neo-
Egyptian art,” with a definite nod to Historicism, artists re-envisioned the
ancient world.5 In the Netherlands, Lourens Alma Tadema (1836-1912)6 is
an example of an “amateur Egyptologist”7 bent on recreating the world as
it would have looked 3000 years ago with laborious accuracy, using
authentic artifacts correctly arranged in the authentic period. And to
intensify the Pharaonic spirit, he models his Joseph after royal sculptuary
and actually includes a standing statuette in the niche.8
In his work The Sphinx (Fig. 2-1), created between 1892 and 1897, Jan
Toorop (1858-1923) also incorporates Egyptian statues in the background,
but with a very different approach. With no interest in recalling Pharaonic
pastimes or staging an Oriental world, Toorop casts elements of Egyptian
art into a melting pot of devices and references from other cultures to
forge a new style with a symbolic content of its own. This same occurs in
Les Rôdeurs (1889-92), in which a sculpture is positioned between the
shrubberies.9 This adding of Egyptian artifacts in an illustrative way is an
example of Toorop’s first stage in the usage of Egyptian art. I distinguish a
further two stages of Egyptian influence.
The Eloquence of Line That the Dutch Symbolists Learned from Egypt 35
Egyptian Artifacts
Fig. 2-1. Jan Toorop, “The Sphinx,” 1892-97, black and colored chalk and pencil
on canvas, 126 x 135 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
36 Chapter Two
Fig. 2-2. “Maya and Merit," about 1300 BC (late 18th-early 19th dynasty)
limestone, height 158 cm. National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden. Photo by the
author.
In stage two, Toorop transforms Egyptian art into a new idiom. The
third and final phase I have distinguished is the utilization of Egyptian
content in pursuit of creating greater meaning, which is essential for
Toorop. I will discuss these three stages, illustrated with Egyptian
examples taken from the most comprehensive and interesting collection of
Egyptian art in the Netherlands at the National Museum of Antiquities in
Leiden. The highlight of the collection is three sculptures presenting the
seated “director of the Royal treasury,” Maya and his wife Merit (Fig. 2-
2).10 By 1891, the archeological museum’s Egyptian collection was almost
as complete as it is today, including this trio, and was visited by Toorop on
at least four occasions between March 15, 1889 and August 22, 1892, as
evidenced by his signatures in the guestbook.
Beside sculpture, there are more examples of visual elements that
Toorop literally borrowed, as in Song of the Times (1893).11 The costume

of the figure on the right in this work is an Egyptian quotation: the leopard
skin draped over one shoulder of the figure, the tail visible between the
legs, is the typical garb of a priest. An example is the figure before the sled
on the two upper lines in Pakerer’s funeral procession of the Leiden-
papyrus (Fig. 2-8).
Fig. 2-3. Postcard “CAIRO–Sphinx and Pyramids,” The Cairo postcard Trust,
Cairo, series 629, 14.1 x 9.1cm. photo: between 1890 and 1900, Private collection.
In the study for La femme éternelle (1891) on the never executed right
hand side, we recognize the outlines of a pyramid against a lighter sky.12
More prominent is the sphinx, the damaged headdress reminiscent of the
famous Giza sphinx (Fig. 2-3). But unlike reality, an obelisk is shown just
behind its head which, although it seems convincing and is even complete
with hieroglyphs, hardly conforms to reality as this creature stands in front
of pyramids. This is a fact Toorop must have known; the sphinx and the
pyramids were a very popular item for photographers. When printed on
postcards from the 1860s, their products reached the status of collector’s
item, especially those of Egyptian scenes, which were so successful that
38 Chapter Two
Osman speaks of “cartomania.”13

It is evident that Toorop’s narrative makes no attempt to offer a
historical or current view of Egypt. Nor do the Egyptian elements
comprise the narrative thrust in the case of La femme éternelle, as shown
by the telephone-wires dissecting the picture plane at the level of the
sphinx’s chest and the tulips in the foreground. What we are looking at is
hardly typical desert vegetation. The Egyptianizing elements have been
substituted and added to converge to a personal vision. And it is this new,
non-academic, idiom that takes us to the second stage.
Born from Nature

Thorn Prikker, the Netherlands’ second best-known Symbolist, also
incorporates tulips into his work The Bride (1892-93)14 depicting them as
pale heads bowing in the foreground, at the feet of a lady who is far from a
woman of flesh and blood. The execution focuses on her garland of
flowers that gradually metamorphoses into Christ’s crown of thorns. There
are no direct references to Egypt here, but the organic shapes summon up
Prikker’s explanation of his preference for Egyptian art: “it is born from
nature and stylized by the artist.”15
Without cultural precedents, Egypt developed its art and architecture
directly from nature, which resulted into a pure and recognizable style.
Papyrus and lotuses were not just copied, but transformed into patterns
and columns. It was theorized in literature: the Austrian Aloïs Riegl, for
example, explained in his influential book Stilfragen (1893) that Egyptian
ornamental art was an example of how a decorative pattern evolved in the
mind of an artist. It was the perfect validation for using these examples
and approaches to develop a new language in reaction to the highly
finished, naturalistic style of academic painting. It not only explains Thorn
Prikker’s use of floral forms, but it also resulted in an intentionally flat
effect. Egyptian two-dimensional art, mural drawings and reliefs in
particular, served as a perfect model to deny the illusion of depth.
As a painter of a later generation, active in the early twentieth century,
Willem van Konijnenburg (1868-1943) also used Egyptian examples. A
frieze-like background in his hunting scenes from 1912 transforms the
work into a flat composition.
In his plaster relief Lioba (Fig. 2-4), Toorop not only created a work
highly reminiscent of Egyptian art in his choice of medium, but also in his
figures: presented in typical Egyptian convention, the head is shown in
profile, shoulders facing forward. However, his placement of the hands is
highly evocative of Egyptian figures in adoration as shown in the papyrus
of Horemachbit (Fig. 2-5).16 This follows the Egyptian artistic principle of

showing what you know, not what you see: in painting, you can easily turn
a hand to show all five fingers, or you can extend the hindmost arm to see
the complete second hand without overlap.17
Furthermore, Lioba is flanked by figures in a type of composition that
follows the Egyptian device of presenting a figure standing between two
protecting figures.18 In the Leiden collection this three-figure constellation
can be found in a vignette on the coffin of Djedmontefach (Fig. 2-6),
where the goddesses Isis and Nephtys ritually pour water over the
deceased. Toorop used this compositional device again in a poster for a
play Pandorra (1919) (Fig. 2-7).
Fig. 2-4. Jan Toorop, Lioba, plaster, lost. Published in “Die Kunst für Alle”
reproduced in Marian Bizans-Prakken, Toorop/Klimt. Exhibition Catalogue
(Gemeentemuseum) (The Hague: Waanders 2006), 174.
Fig. 2-5. “Horemachbit in adoration,” (detail) spell 125 from the Book of Death,
about 1100 BC, (22nd dynasty), black and red ink on papyrus, height 34 cm.
40 Chapter Two
Fig. 2-6. “The goddesses Isis and Nepthys pouring holy water over the diseased
Djedmontefach,” Thebes, about 1000 BC, (21rst dynasty) detail of a coffin: wood
with canvas and painted stucco, 187,5 x 50 x 30 cm. National Museum of
Fig. 2-7. Jan Toorop, poster for Arthur van Schendel’s play “Pandorra,” 1919,
lithography, 114 x 85 cm. © Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
The centrally placed Pandorra can also be compared to the wailing women
that accompany funeral processions, as in the Leiden papyrus of Pakerer
(Fig. 2-8), which shows the women baring their breasts so they can berate
themselves in a gesture of mourning. In their grief, they dash sand into
their loose hair. The upraised arms of the apparently chaotically placed
women clearly evoke the figures on the left-hand side in Toorop’s drawing
The Sphinx. The female head, turned to face the sky, her neck extended, is
another device Toorop uses repeatedly, as can be seen in Lioba.19
Fig. 2-8. “Funeral procession of Pakerer,” Sakkara, about 1300-1100 BC (19th-20st

dynasty), detail red and black ink on papyrus, h. ca. 20 cm. National Museum of
Eloquent Lines
From 1891 on, both Toorop and Prikker began experimenting with
line,20 assisted to some extent by scholars who also propagated the use of
Egyptian art as an answer to the popular “Stilfragen.” In his “Grammaire
des arts du dessin” (1867), Charles Blanc (1813-1882) recognized
repetition as a sublime movement, like the stalks of papyrus bushes that
serve as a background for a fisherman in the marshlands (Fig. 2-9), and
which Toorop references in tree trunks ranged one in front of the other
(Fig. 2-10). This device is used to even better effect in figures that are
grouped in a rhythmic procession. Toorop transmutes them into a queue in
Fatalism (1893); the bare breasts and ornamented garments have also been
given a touch of the Egyptian.21 Blanc considered repetition the most
characteristic means of expression in Egyptian art, while Theosophy
explained it as the manifestation of the essential in nature.
42 Chapter Two
Fig. 2-9. “Hippopotamus hunt,” about 2400 BC (5th dynasty) detail of painted wall
relief of lime stone in the mastaba of Ti, Sakkara. Photo by the author.
Fig. 2-10. Jan Toorop, “Nirwana,” 1895, pencil heightened with white, 55.5 x 34
cm. Studio 2000 Art Gallery, Blaricum.
The works that are influenced by Egypt date primarily from Toorop’s
Symbolist period, between 1891 and 1898. Prior to 1891, he largely
experimented with techniques, while after 1898 his symbolic language is
gradually replaced as he turns his attention to content of a more Catholic
nature. But Toorop continued to reiterate the device of the overlapping
silhouettes as late as the 1920s, aligning his profiles in the way of
Egyptian figures, as in Thoughtfulness, Meditation, Fire (1923) (Fig. 2-
11).22 In Egyptian art, this overlap must be read as figures standing next to
each other. The headdresses with the headband and razor-sharp folds used
by Toorop are also evocative of the royal nemes.
Fig. 2-11. Jan Toorop, “Thoughtful, Meditation, Fire,” 1923, pencil on paper (also
as litho), 18.5 x 15 cm. Studio 2000 Art Gallery, Blaricum.
Fig. 2-12. ”Ramose,” about 1411-1375 BC (18th dynasty) detail of a partly painted
wall relief in the tomb of Ramose (TT55) in the Valley of the Nobles, Thebes,
discovered in 1861. Photo by the author.
Toorop prefers three profiles to represent different ages or states of mind.

It follows the symbolism of line that Dutch “scientist” Humbert de
Superville (1770-1849) presented in his “Essai sur les signes
inconditionnels dans l”art” (1828).23 He argued that lines express an
emotion of their own, with the human vertical position on Earth as a
starting point. Upward strokes are associated with joy, while downward
strokes are related to moods like sadness. The horizontal line is inactive
and therefore associated with stability (Fig. 2-13). Artistically, this
balanced direction was ideal for Humbert because it created the effect of
harmony. Together with Blanc, he preferred Egyptian art to Greek and,
more specifically, to Hellenistic sculpture with its chaotic axes.
Fig. 2-13. Humbert de Superville’s scheme of Egyptian sculpture related to the

Memnoncolossi.
Fig. 2-14. Johannes van Vloten’s scheme of line symbolism related to Greek
goddesses.
44 Chapter Two
The critic Johannes van Vloten (1818-1883) updated these theories in

the Netherlands, despite an antipathy to Egyptian art, which he described
as “oppressive and monotonous” or “cumbersome” and “stiff.”24 Van
Vloten also added a liberal sprinkling of moral interpretation in relation to
the Greek goddesses (Fig. 2-14).25 As the wife of Zeus himself, Hera is the
horizontal line, positive and stable. The joyful upward line, Aphrodite,
could hardly be considered positive—after all, was not the goddess of love
the bringer of lust and sin? And Athena, with her downward line, stood for
wisdom. With this theory it is easy to see how, on numerous occasions,
Toorop uses the line, like in self portraits where he depicts himself as
“wise.”26 But this symbolism is also visibly evident in the execution of the
different types of women, especially their eyes. Take, for example, The
Three Brides (1893):27 the female on the right wears a pair of snakes on
her forehead, her eyes sharp with malice, echoing the malevolent arc of
the serpents’ bodies. The skulls strung about her neck and her witchlike
stirring of a potion underline her evil intentions; Bisanz-Prakken dubs her
“the bride of hell.”28 The lines in the background issuing from the mouths
of her sinister collaborator are aggressively angular, in contrast to the
figure on the left, who is surrounded by rhythmic, smooth coils. This
woman’s eyes are wide open, her gaze directed modestly downwards; she
is a humble, enlightened bride of God, as is shown by her nun’s habit.
Van Konijnenburg developed Toorop’s lines into a 60° lattice pattern
(Fig. 2-15 and 2-16): the grid is used as the basis for drawing a
composition.29 In giving a work its final meaning, the natural figure is
crucial for Van Konijnenburg. And when the contours of this figure (or
being) follow the pattern of the grid, the meaning is intensified.
In this way, the use of the line was promoted in the Netherlands and
deployed by the Symbolists as the key element in expressing the Ideal. It
was not surprising that color began to go out of favor. Egypt supplied a
plethora of examples for linear patterns: striped wigs on coffins suggest
Toorop’s tufts of hair, while the pleated skirts offer almost endless
permutations of parallel line patterning.
Moreover, as Toorop explained in a letter, he was excited by the
contour of Egyptian art, since these outlines “carried a form and that form
is deliciously beautiful: real in being and character and pure in meaning.”30
Fig. 2-16. Willem van Konijnenburg, “Diligence,” 1917, oil on canvas, 151.5 x
106.5 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
Theological Messages
Let us return to The Sphinx, the huge drawing given over to pure line.
In understanding the content of this piece, we come to Toorop’s third
stage, in which drawing on Egyptian influences afforded him spiritual
meaning. Barely recognizable thanks to the use of brown tones, in the
background we find a Buddha and the windows of a gothic cathedral
flanking a double Egyptian sculpture.31 The combination of different
religions32 is described by Edouard Schuré (1841-1929): great initiates
served as interpreters of God. His “Les grands initiés: Esquisse de
l’histoire secrète des religions” (1889) not only influenced Toorop and the
Dutch writer Frederik van Eeden (1860-1932), but also the French
Symbolists of Les Nabis, who painted combinations of different religions
as well.33 It is interesting to compare their Cloissonist use of fields of color
to express a deeper meaning to the Dutch attempts to achieve the same
effect by paring down color to express the eloquence of their lines.
Returning to the now bright white Egyptian statues of Maya and Merit,
the masterpieces of the archaeological museum in Leiden, we see an
extraordinary double statue of a seated couple, executed with supreme
workmanship and artistry, beside the two single portraits. Toorop
mentions the duo as: “those large bright sculptures of a man and a woman
46 Chapter Two
next to each other”34 and worked them into The Sphinx. It must have
seemed the perfect embodiment of male and female, an aspect considered an
essential sacred facet of Egyptian culture. In “Origine de tous les cultes ou
religion universelle” (1794), Egypt was presented by Charles F. Dupuis
(1742-1809) as the source of religious knowledge in which the myth of
Isis and Osiris teaches about duality. The double sculpture represents the
transcendent conjunction of male and female in an ancient echo of the
couple presented supine on the globe in the centre. Toorop gives an
explanation: “They rise higher and higher in their evolution, despite their
attachment to the globe.”35
In my opinion they attain this in their search for harmony between male
and female—a topic close to Toorop’s heart, given that his marriage of 1886
was proving far from successful.36 This view was also contested by
Rosicrucian Sâr Peladan (1858-1918) whose comment on the status of artists
is much quoted: “Artiste, tu es prêtre, tu es roi, tu es mage.”37 But, in this
context, what is more pertinent is his conviction that ancient religion is a
prerequisite for arriving at serious art: “Hors des religions il n’y a pas de
grand art.”38 Small wonder that Jan Toorop actually became a Rosicrucian,
as evidenced by the roses and crucifixes strewn throughout a variety of
canvases, although he was unable to find the much-lauded “higher psychic
expression,” so he used what he could use for his art and left after a year.
But how must we read the reference to Egyptian religion, since it was—
unlike Buddhism or Catholicism—a dead culture?
Similar to Freemasonry, Egypt was widely considered a well of deep
insights and knowledge with a Hermetic slant. In a mural at a Freemasonry-
related residence in Scheveningen, the Netherlands, Thorn Prikker united
the material and the spiritual with the aid of Egyptian art. As the universal
meaning and substance of all religions was centered on Egypt, the
composition heavily referenced the lines of the pyramids.
The Riddle of the Sphinx

In addition to the pyramid, Egypt also provided the motif of the sphinx,
as shown by a vignette by Dutch artist J.L.M. Lauweriks (1864-1932),
which seemed to emblematize the meaning of Egypt in mystical
movements.39 It also plays a role in the Belgian “Société des Vingt,” a
source of inspiration for Toorop, with a more modest symbolic language
than their French colleagues. Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) presented a
lying sphinx in Un ange (1889);40 the sphinx is depicted with her head
nestling in the hands of a standing knight-like female. Toorop accurately
reproduced this typical pose for the couple in the centre of Song of the
Times. Also open to association with the Greek sphinx who engaged
Oedipus in an intellectual battle with her riddle, the sphinx was the ideal
motif for symbolizing wisdom.
We can also interpret the piece for its theosophical content, which was
also extremely popular in the Netherlands at the turn of the century.
Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891) teaches that the cosmos is a regulated
unity, the substance of which creates life in seven steps. Dutch Symbolist
K.P.C. de Bazel (1869-1923) illustrates this in a woodcut (Fig. 2-17). It
starts with the crystal in the hand of the figure. The next stage to evolve is
the plant world, followed by the world of the animals. The fourth sphere
marks the appearance of man, who holds the crystal. The spiritual world
awakens with the fifth sphere, which Karel de Bazel depicts as the
harmony of male and female, by giving the figure the attributes of both
sexes; breasts and a moustache.
Fig. 2-17. K.P.C. de Bazel, “The natural development of mankind from the
mineral, plant and animal world,” 1894, woodcut, 14 x 11.3 cm, Drents Museum,
Assen.
The exalted state achieved by the figures is accentuated by the costume: an

Egyptian-style skirt and headdress. The sixth and seventh spheres are
beyond human comprehension, and cannot be explained. Man is able, in
addition to our human essence, to switch from the animal world, while a
grasp of more enlightened concepts takes him to the spiritual realm.
It was a popular but inordinately complex theme to expand upon. The
path, or narrative, of the Ideal, is told by the line. And it is precisely this
48 Chapter Two
line that had an afterlife leading in two different directions: Van

Konijnenburg elaborated it into a lattice-like grid that, along with the
figure, tells a neo-classical story.
While in pursuit of the Ideal, other artists stripped color and line back
to the minimum, resulting in abstraction. And, like Toorop, in their search
for the Ideal, they concluded that all religions are essentially the same:
Isn’t Roman Catholicism originally the same as Theosophy? I agreed with

Toorop on the main line and noticed that he really delves deeply and wants
the spiritual.”41
This is quoted from Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944), who illustrated three

stages of human existence in his triptych “Evolution” (1910-11),42 a term
and concept that is even more logical in light of Charles Darwin’s
relatively new theories. The effect of the use of color is accentuated by
details in form, like the triangles and stars for the navel and nipples of the
figure. However, this experiment was not a success, and Mondrian went
on to develop his now signature style with a further reduction of color and
line. But the message remained the same.
In essence, Toorop has an identical content in his Sphinx. On the right
we see outstretched muscular arms that represent the theosophical animal-
like world, the starting point for self knowledge. In the centre we see the
quest for harmony, while the higher figures on the left depict the spiritual
state with thin, attenuated arms that are no longer of our world. Between
them we see a nun and an old, wise man. Toorop continued to be
fascinated by the theme, also referring to it more literally in his Catholic
works, as we can see in his Evolution of 1918 and The Pilgrim of 1921.43
We can read the spiritual development quite clearly, going from right
to left in a “pure” reading direction that Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) also
used in Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
(1897).44 But what is the role of the sphinx? It rests heavily on its pedestal
of human caryatids. Toorop explains that “lower creatures are pushed
downwards,”45 in an oppositional movement to the transcending couple.
Thus Wells interprets Toorop’s sphinx as follows: “For modern Theosophy
the sphinx, especially if asleep, represents the lower, material world of
illusion.”46 Robert Siebelhoff joins this conclusion, commenting on a
sphinx Toorop used in a different work:
Toorop regarded the sphinx, which appears in the foreground of the Study
Sheet [study for The Three Brides lg], as a symbol of materialism just as he
viewed the Cleopatra-like woman on the right side of The Three Brides.47
The relation to Theosophy is as it should be, but Theosophists do not

consider the sphinx to be the quintessence of earthly materialism. Had
Toorop intended his sphinx to symbolize the temptations of materialism, he
would have given it a more pernicious appearance, probably depicting the
sphinx as female, with slanting eyes. Despite its cumbrous nature, Toorop’s
sphinx is dignified, as is the sphinx’s more distinct task, “to invest the
creature with a soul, striving for transcendence,” as Toorop says.48 Indeed,
Demisch associates the creature with sleep, because of its closed eyes.
That state moves the soul to supernatural regions:
It seems to us that we have to think this scene, in which the Sphinx

dominates, in the supernatural world. It could be Sleep, that carried the souls
to this region, in which they rest, with closed eyes, still partly unaffected,
while others find themselves praying and groping a way, and a third group
raise their arms in a hymn for the Sphinx.
Uns scheint dass die Szene, in der die Sphinx dominiert, in der
übersinnlichen Welt zu denken ist. Es könnte der Schlaf sein, der die Seelen
in diese Region getragen hat, in der sie, mit geschlossenen Augen, zum Teil
noch unbeweglich ruhend, zum anderen sich betend und tastend
zurechtzufinden suchen, während eine dritte Gruppe die Arme zu einem
Hymnus vor der Sphinx erhebt.49
Although this may sound convincing, his explanation is, to my mind, just a
little too easy: Toorop’s approach is extremely complex and many-layered,
especially in his intricate Symbolist compositions. And if he had intended
the sphinx to be a creature of slumbers and dreams, it would perhaps have
made more sense to add wings to aid the beast’s passage to higher realms? I
do, however, agree that the sphinx does aid one in experiencing a more
exalted realm, one that can be accessed through meditation. Which is
precisely what the sphinx is telling us: meditation takes effort and
persistence; at first it may lead only to frustration until, with diligent
practice, the fruits of insight are attained and, ultimately, transcendence.
Just like the central figure in Thoughtfulness, Meditation, Fire (1923) (Fig.
2-11) who, with eyes closed, literally represents meditation. Here, again,
we recognize the three stages of the human state.
This work dates from Toorop’s Catholic period, in which the message
is clad in less profound language. With the symbolic sphinx, Toorop is
following the fashion of the day. Consider the cover of the Theosophical
magazine “Lotus”, where a sphinx is presented as part of micro and macro
cosmos, and can resolve nature and the fate of mankind (Fig. 2-18):
[The sphinx] meditates on the solution of the great problem of the

50 Chapter Two
construction of the Universe, on the nature and the destiny of man, and its
thoughts take the form of that which is represented above itself, which is to
50
say the Macrocosm and the Microcosm in their combined actions.
Fig. 2-18. “Magic: white and black” 1886 reproduced in Le Lotus 1887 as illustration
of the article by Franz Hartmann.
Toorop sees opportunities: “With the sphinx, I try to show the eternal
dualism in man, who, despite everything, aims for an ideal on earth.”51
And since the sphinx houses animal, human, and spiritual life as a lion
with human head that is the keeper of knowledge, he, or she, can be a
perfect coach in one’s personal spiritual development. That the three
aspects that belong to the human sphere can be combined in one creature
makes it a Theosophical possibility par excellence.
With his symbolic works, specifically The Sphinx, Toorop produced a
manifesto on spiritual development. To capture the essential, he took
examples from the Egyptians in three different ways: first, he adds
artifacts like the sculpture; secondly, the Egyptian idiom changed his
personal language; and, at last, ancient Egypt is seen as the keeper of truth,
housing the essential of religions and therefore recalls deeper meaning. It
resulted in Toorop’s typical style, which set the tone for Dutch
Symbolists: the eloquence of line.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Marianne Bizans-Prakken and Maarten J. Raven.
Thanks to Lisa Holden for her translation.
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inleiding aan de hand van de Egyptische verzameling in het
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te Leiden. Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.
Leiden, 1981.
Rijnders, Mieke. Willem van Konijnenburg: Leonardo van de Lage
Landen. Zwolle: Waanders, 2008.
Rothuizen, William, ed. Jan Toorop in zijn tijd. Amsterdam: Studio 2000
Art Gallery with Publisher Boxhoorn, 1998.
Schäfer, Heinrich. Principles of Egyptian art. Translated and edited by
John Baines. Oxford: University Press, 1974.
Siebelhoff, Robert. “The three brides: a drawing by Jan Toorop.” Nederlands
kunsthistorisch jaarboek 27 (1976): 254.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Symbol and myth: Humbert de Superville’s essay
on absolute signs in art. Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses,
1979).
The spiritual in art: abstract painting 1890–1985. Exhibition catalogue.
Los Angeles (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Chicago (Museum
of Contemporary Art), The Hague (Gemeentemuseum), 1987.
Symbolismus in den Niederlanden: von Toorop bis Mondriaan. Museum
Fridericianum exhibition catalogue. Kassel, 1991.
Toorop/Klimt: Toorop in Wenen: inspiratie voor Klimt. Gemeentemuseum
exhibition catalogue. The Hague.
Vloten, Johannes van. Aesthetika of leer van den kunstsmaak, naar uit- en
inheemsche bronnen, voor Nederlanders bewerkt. Deventer: Ter
Gunne, Plantinga, 1871.
Warlick, Marjorie. “Mythic rebirth in Gustav Klimt’s Stoclet frieze: new
considerations of its Egyptianizing form and content.” The Art Bulletin
74, no. 1. (1992).
Fig. 2-1. Jan Toorop, The Sphinx, 1892-97, black and colored chalk and
pencil on canvas, 126 x 135 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
Fig. 2-2. Maya and Merit, about 1300 BC (late 18th-early 19th dynasty)
limestone, height 158 cm. National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden. Photo
by the author.
Fig. 2-3. Postcard CAIRO–Sphinx and Pyramids, The Cairo postcard

Trust, Cairo, series 629, 14.1 x 9.1cm. Photo: between 1890 and 1900,
Private collection.
Fig. 2-4. Jan Toorop, Lioba, plaster, lost. Published in “Die Kunst für
Alle” reproduced in Marian Bizans-Prakken, Toorop/Klimt. Exhibition
Catalogue (Gemeentemuseum) (The Hague: Waanders 2006), 174.
Fig. 2-5. Horemachbit in adoration, (detail) spell 125 from the Book of
Death, about 1100 BC, (22nd dynasty), black and red ink on papyrus,
height 34 cm. National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden.
Fig. 2-6. The goddesses Isis and Nepthys pouring holy water over the
diseased Djedmontefach, Thebes, about 1000 BC, (21rst dynasty) detail of
a coffin: wood with canvas and painted stucco, 187.5 x 50 x 30 cm.
Fig. 2-7. Jan Toorop, poster for Arthur van Schendel’s play “Pandorra,”
1919, lithography, 114 x 85 cm. © Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Fig. 2-8. Funeral procession of Pakerer, Sakkara, about 1300-1100 BC

(19th-20st dynasty), detail red and black ink on papyrus, h. ca. 20 cm.
Fig. 2-9. Hippopotamus hunt, about 2400 BC (5th dynasty) detail of

painted wall relief of lime stone in the mastaba of Ti, Sakkara. Photo by
the author.
Fig. 2-10. Jan Toorop, Nirwana, 1895, pencil heightened with white, 55.5
x 34 cm. Studio 2000 Art Gallery, Blaricum.
Fig. 2-11. Jan Toorop, Thoughtful, Meditation, Fire, 1923, pencil on paper
(also as litho), 18.5 x 15 cm. Studio 2000 Art Gallery, Blaricum.
Fig. 2-12. Ramose, about 1411-1375 BC (18th dynasty) detail of a partly

painted wall relief in the tomb of Ramose (TT55) in the Valley of the
Nobles, Thebes, discovered in 1861. Photo by the author.
Fig. 2-13. Humbert de Superville’s scheme of Egyptian sculpture related

to the Memnoncolossi.
Fig. 2-14. Johannes van Vloten’s scheme of line symbolism related to

Greek goddesses.

54 Chapter Two
Fig. 2-16. Willem van Konijnenburg, Diligence, 1917, oil on canvas,

151.5 x 106.5 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
Fig. 2-17. K.P.C. de Bazel, The natural development of mankind from the
mineral, plant and animal world, 1894, woodcut, 14 x 11.3 cm, Drents
Museum, Assen.
Fig. 2-18. Magic: white and black, 1886 reproduced in Le Lotus 1887 as
illustration of the article by Franz Hartmann.
Notes

1
In Brieven (Letters) (1897) July 1893, Visé, Hotel de Braband, 81.
2
Jan Toorop in a lecture for the opening of the first exhibition of the “Moderne
Kunstkring” in Amsterdam, October 1911. Quoted in William Rothuizen, ed., Jan
Toorop in zijn tijd (Amsterdam: Studio 2000 Art Gallery with Publisher Boxhoorn,
1998), 78.
3
In this article, I focus on Egyptian influences, which are sometimes hard to
isolate, since Toorop also quoted eclectically from numerous sources, including
Japanese prints and woodcuts and Indonesian art. As a former Dutch colony,
Indonesia influenced Dutch art. Toorop was born on Java and familiar with its
visual culture, so batik patterns and the empty skirts of wayang-puppets are
elements that can also be recognized in his symbolic work.
4
Jean Marcel Humbert, “Egyptomania: A Current Concept from the Renaissance to
Postmodernism,” in Egyptomania: l'Egypte dans l'art occidental 1730-1930,
exhibition catalogue (Paris: Musée du Louvre; Ottawa: Musée des Beaux-Arts du
Canada; Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1994), 21.
5
Liesbeth Grotenhuis, “Cleopatra's kattige karakter,” in Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek
Koninklijk Museum van Schone Kunsten (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor
Schone Kunsten, 1998), 419-439.
6
After he went to England, he changed his name to “Lawrence”.
7
Maarten J. Raven, “Alma Tadema als amateur-egyptoloog,” Bulletin van het
Rijksmuseum, 28, no. 3 (1980): 103-117.
8
Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), “Joseph, Overseer of the Pharaoh’s
Granaries,” 1874, oil on panel, 33 x 43.2 cm, Dahesh Museum of Art, New York.
9
Jan Toorop, “Les Rôdeurs,” 1889-92, chalk and pencil on paper, 65 x 76 cm.
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo.
10
They are not a royal couple, since the two are wearing wigs rather than nemes,
the royal head cloth, as suggested in Kunstenaren der Idee: symbolistische
tendenzen in Nederland ca. 1880-1930. Exhibition catalogue (The Hague:
Gemeentemuseum, 1978), 93.
11
Jan Toorop, “Song of the Times,” 1893, black and colored chalk, pencil,
heightened with white on dark paper, 32 x 58.5 cm, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller,
Otterlo.

12
Jan Toorop, Study for “La femme éternelle” or: “O thou, my spirits mate!,” ca.
1891, pencil and chalk on cardboard, 16.2 x 20.5 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-
Müller, Otterlo.
13
Colin Osman, Egypt: Caught in Time. (London: Garnet Publishing Limited,
1997), 110.
14
Johan Thorn-Prikker, “The Bride,” 1892–93, oil on canvas, 146 x 88 cm.
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo.
15
In Brieven (Letters), no.1, 81.
16
Toorop referred literally to this act in his drawing “Dead Nun Mourned by Two
Figures,” 1893, pen and ink with water color, 22.2 x 27.6 cm., Rijksmuseum
Kröller-Müller, Otterlo.
17
Heinrich Schäfer, Principles of Egyptian Art (originally 1919), trans. and ed. by
John Baines (Oxford: University Press, 1974).
18
Van Konijnenburg also uses this formula: a couple in the upper corners adores
Queen Wilhelmina in his design for a series of stamps in 1923.
19
The head of the female figure on the cover of Louis Couperus (1863-1923),
Metamorfoze is also raised to face upwards, the neck taut. The linen that is
wrapped around her skirts also recalls the strips of cloth used to mummify the
dead. Jan Toorop, Metamorfoze 1897, book cover: stamp on linen on cardboard,
21.5 x 17 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
20
Christiane Heiser, Johan Thorn Prikker: vom Niederländischen Symbolismus
zum Deutschen Werkbund. Das Werk zwischen 1890 und 1912 (PhD diss.
Groningen University, 2008).
21
Jan Toorop, “Fatalism,” 1893, pencil, black and colored chalk, heightened with
white, 60 x 75 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo.
22
Jan Toorop, “Thoughtfulness, Meditation, Fire,” 1923, pencil on paper, 18.5 x
15 cm. Studio 2000 Art Gallery, Blaricum. Here we must also consider Roman
portraits on gems.
23
It is an interesting fact that Humbert’s brother, Jean-Emile, collected Egyptian
artifacts for the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, such as the Anastasi
collection from 1829. Barbara Maria Stafford, Symbol and Myth: Humbert de
Superville's Essay on Absolute Signs in Art (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses, 1979), 111.
24
Johannes van Vloten, Aesthetika of leer van den kunstsmaak, naar uit- en
inheemsche bronnen, voor Nederlanders bewerkt (Deventer: Ter Gunne, Plantinga,
1871), 178, 248, 256.
25
Ibid, 176, fig.8.
26
Jan Toorop, “Self Portrait,” 1915, black chalk and charcoal on paper, 23.4 x 20.3
cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
27
Jan Toorop, “The Three Brides,” 1893, pencil, black and colored crayon,
heightened with white, 78 x 98 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo.
28
Marian Bisanz-Prakken, “Hoffnung I en Hoffnung II: levensallegorieën van de
gouden stijl 1903-1907.” In Toorop/Klimt: Toorop in Wenen: inspiratie voor
Klimt, exhibition catalogue (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum), 215.
29
Mieke Rijnders, Willem van Konijnenburg: Leonardo van de Lage Landen
56 Chapter Two

(Zwolle: Waanders, 2008), 70.
30
Fragments from a letter from Jan Toorop to Mies Drabbe, August 30 1898, Royal
Library, The Hague. Quoted by Inemie Gerards and Evert van Uitert, Jan Toorop:
Symbolisme in de kunst (The Hague: Sdu Uitgevers, 1994), 23.
31
Toorop uses and combines these religious figureheads and emblems more
frequently: Buddha is added in “The Resurrection,” undated, Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam and “The young generation,” 1892, oil on canvas, 96.5 x 110 cm,
Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Church windows are related to
Christianity and more specific Catholicism, but Toorop also uses also the statue
from a cathedral in “Les Rôdeurs.”
32
Bettina Polak, Het fin-de-siècle in de Nederlandse schilderkunst: de
symbolistische beweging 1890-1900 (Thesis University of Utrecht, The Hague,
1955), 117.
33
For example Paul Gauguin’s (1848-1903) “La belle Angèle,” 1889, oil on
canvas, 92 x 73 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris or Paul Ranson’s (1861-1909) “Christ
and Buddha” (1890-92). See Robert P. Welsh, “Sacred geometry: French
Symbolism and Early Abstraction,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting
1890-1985, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: County Museum of Art; Chicago:
Museum of Contemporary Art; The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1987), 64.
34
Quoted in Robert Siebelhoff, “The three brides: A drawing by Jan Toorop,”
Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 27 (1976): 254.
35
Victorine Hefting, Jan Toorop: een kennismaking (Amsterdam: Bakker, 1989),
82.
36
As can be seen in a drawing, “Pauvre diable” 1898, etching VIII/25, 18.6 x 19.7
cm, Studio 2000, Blaricum: behind the sorrowful self portrait floats his wife
Annie, in her hand the dead child. Possibly as a result of Toorop’s syphilis, their
daughter Mary Ann died in 1887, soon after her birth. The bare-breasted women
behind Annie portray the lewd and amoral nature of woman. Peter van der Coelen
and Karin van Lieverloo, Jan Toorop, portrettist. Exhibition catalogue (Het
Valkhof) (Nijmegen: Waanders, 2003), 72-73.
37
This quote is taken from the catalogue of the First Salon de la Rose & Croix,
1892, 7-11.
38
Quoted in Kunstenaren der Idee, 37, note 10.
39
M. Lauweriks, “Egypte,” 1897, woodcut.
40
Fernand Khnopff, “Avec Verhaeren. Un ange,” 1889, pencil on paper,
heightened with white, 33.1 x 19.8 cm, Private collection, Brussels.
41
Mondriaan in a letter to Kees Spoor, October 1910. Quoted in Carel Blotkamp,
“Annunciation of the new mysticism: Dutch Symbolism and early abstraction,”
The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, Exhibition catalogue (Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Chicago: Museum of
Contemporary Art; The Hague: Gemeentemuseum), 98.
42
Piet Mondriaan, “Evolution,” 1910-11, oil on canvas, two outer panels 178 x 85
cm, middle panel 183 x 87.5 cm, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
43
Jan Toorop, “The evolution,” 1918, black chalk and pastel on paper, 67.5 x 62
cm, Galerie 2000, Blaricum; Jan Toorop, “The Pilgrim,” 1921, charcoal and chalk

on paper 156 x 150 cm, Museum het Catharijneconvent, Utrecht. Here we
recognize three pyramids in the background.
44
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where
Are We Going?,” 1897, oil on canvas, 139 x 375 cm, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.
45
Victorine Hefting, Jan Toorop: een kennismaking, 82.
46
Robert P. Welsh, “Sacred geometry: French Symbolism and Early Abstraction,”
79.
47
Robert Siebelhoff, “The three brides: A drawing by Jan Toorop,” 222. Although
the author suggests that this interpretation is a quote from Toorop himself, there is no
source mentioned.
48
Jan Toorop, in Bouw-en Sierkunst, 1898, quoted in Victorine Hefting, Jan Toorop:
1858-1928 (The Hague: Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1989).
49
Heinz Demisch, Die Sphinx: Geschichte ihrer Darstellung von den Anfängen bis
zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1977), 196.
50
Explanation of the text by Franz Hartmann, “Magic: White and Black”,
reproduced in Le lotus 1887, quoted and translated by Robert P. Welsh, “Sacred
geometry: French Symbolism and Early Abstraction,” 79.
51
In a letter to Miss Van Prooyen, date 27 February 1898, quoted in: Hefting, Jan
Toorop: een kennismaking (no. 49), 69.
CHAPTER THREE
ARMAND POINT’S ETERNAL CHIMERA
AND SAINT CECILIA:
A FRENCH QUATTROCENTO
SYMBOLIST AESTHETIC
CASSANDRA SCIORTINO
In 1893 Algerian born painter Armand Point (1860-1932) successfully

appealed to the Ministre des Beaux-Arts for funding to travel abroad to
study. Previously he had trained in Algiers, and his Rest in the Desert (Fig.
3-1) is of a type symbolist poet Camille Mauclaire called “intense desert
luminosities.”1 In 1888 he moved to Paris to pursue painting at the École
des Beaux-Arts. There he cultivated an academic technique touched by
impressionism, earning a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in
1889. But following his stay in Italy, particularly Florence, he underwent a
dramatic conversion to the forms and techniques of the “primitives,” a
term he uses generally to describe Italian artists from the time of Cimabue
to early Michelangelo.2 His visual and written work in these years is
focused predominantly on fifteenth-century Florentine art and its related
manifestations in Rome. The term quattrocento is used here to indicate
this predilection.3 Attesting to his radical conversion, Mauclaire writes,
“then he went to Italy … and he returned transformed. He was another
man, another spirit, another painter.”4
This chapter examines the mechanisms underlying Point’s conversion
and the quattrocento symbolist aesthetic to which it led. It begins with a
look at how tendencies toward fifteenth-century art in Paris, especially
Joséphin Péladan’s idealism, set the stage for his conversion. Analysis of
two published essays follows. Appearing in Mercure de France in 1896,
“Florence. Botticelli. La Primavera” is Point’s testimonial to the
consciousness altering power of the Primavera (1477) and fifteenth-
century Florentine art generally. The stress in the text is on the
transformative agency of this art. “Primitifs et Symbolistes,” published in
Armand Point’s Eternal Chimera and Saint Cecilia 59
L’Ermitage in 1895, establishes a theoretic explanation for the salutary

power of primarily quattrocento Florentine art, arguing that a distinct,
beneficent energy emanates from it. He attributes this radiance to a
metaphysical force which he calls “the unity of a universal harmony,”5 and
insists that the socio-spiritual conditions of fourteenth- and fifteenth-
century Italy enabled its manifestation in art.
Fig. 3-1. Armand Point, At Rest in the Desert.
The second part of this study looks at two pastels by Point: The Eternal
Chimera (c.1895) and Saint Cecilia (1896). Both pictures draw on
fifteenth-century Florentine art, particularly that of Botticelli and
Leonardo, highlighting an important element of Point’s theory: that the
transformative energy dwelling in quattrocento art is not only temporally
and spatially bound to the original work; it also radiates from its
characteristic forms.6 This indwelling energy might be understood as an
aura in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s use of the
term. But unlike Benjamin’s and Adorno’s conceptualization, the aural
power of the fifteenth-century work is not solely contingent on its status as
original artifact.7 Its distinctive formal characteristics also contain a degree
of the aura of the original. This analysis first identifies some of the ways in
which quattrocento elements in The Eternal Chimera and Saint Cecilia are
mediated by symbolist visual strategies to intensify their aural receptivity.
Then it considers how these images relate to two responses Point’s
investment in the transformative power of quattrocento art generated: first,
anxiety that it is an illusion or a chimera; second, hope that it could usher
in a new age in which the wounds of modern life—particularly its
fragmentation—are healed.
60 Chapter Three
Though neglected today, Point’s aesthetic played an important role in

the last manifestation of symbolism as a movement: the Artists of the
Soul.8 Recently, Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond has demonstrated the
importance of taking this movement seriously. Robert Doré’s dissertation,
a catalogue raisonné of Point’s work, and the archival documentation of
Pierre-Olivier Fanica open up his work for critical analysis and
revaluation.9 This chapter aims to show through a few images and writings
by Point that he and the Artists of the Soul should be recognized as an
avant-garde movement and an important facet of fin-de-siècle modernism.
The Anatomy of Conversion: Idealism, Symbolism,

and Quattrocento Currents in Paris
That Florence—especially its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century art
which dominates the city center—could infuse Point’s aesthetic may partly
be explained by a similar structuring of his experience in Algeria. His
paintings of Algerian life reflect his immersion in the then French
controlled region of North Africa. These roots may have also led him to
feel like an outsider in Paris, disposing him to the counter-cultural
tendencies of symbolism. Mauclaire notes that even at the École des
Beaux-Arts, “he curiously developed, in the society of symbolist and
decadent poets such as Mallarmé and Verlaine, every imaginative
tendency, a love of everything legendary, of the mysterious, of the occult,
all of which lay dormant within him.”10
In 1892 Point exhibited at Joséphin Péladan’s first Salon de La
Rose+Croix and went on to exhibit there until 1896.11 Péladan declared
the purpose of his salons was “to ruin realism, reform Latin taste, and
create a movement of idealist art.”12 His use of the term “idealist” reflects
the currency of this porous term in Paris in the 1890s, and his phrase, “ruin
realism,” places it in the context of the anti-naturalism of the period. As
Michael Marlais has demonstrated, the terms “ideal” and “idealism,”
though connoting opposition to naturalism and positivism, could also
conjure the “grand” painting of the French Academy.13 G.-Albert Aurier
was so concerned to distinguish this new idealism from that of the
Academy that he advocated using the neologism “idéist.”14 Even within
these parameters the term avoided a strict definition. M. Charles Henry
wrote in the early 1890s, “I don’t believe in the future of psychologism, or
of naturalism, nor in general of any realist school. I believe in the coming,
more or less, of a very idealist art, even mystical.”15 Anatole Baju, editor
of Le Décadent, defined the ideal as “physical beauty, the soul of things
and moral beauty, this quintessence of the soul.”16 The term is used here to
mean a new, vital form of idealism, self-consciously anti-naturalist, and an

important avant-garde tendency which influenced symbolism.
The question of whether styles based on past traditions belonged within
the compass of the new idealism was also contested. Charles Morice
stressed the importance of the “idea of God” but did not advocate a return
to a style that mocked the past.17 In his 1884 Salon review, André Michel
pronounced it absurd to revive Greek or Italian ideals in French
contemporary art, saying it is a “more complex and more troubled ideal
that emerges from modern hearts and minds.”18 In this essay he refers to
critics who defend the “Tradition” and the “Ideal,” a clear allusion to
Péladan’s criticism in Le Foyer, L’Artiste, and in a series of Salon reviews.
Péladan attacked all manifestations of naturalism in the arts and called
for a return to the style of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century art:
Here are the Christs of Margaritone, the Virgins of Cimabue. Giotto is

there; the blessed Fra Angelico follows. Primitive art, the greatest of all,
blossoms within the Godhead. But suddenly a mirage leads all astray: the
Renaissance. Man believed he had rediscovered antiquity; he had only
come upon Rome, that caricature of Athens.19
Framing Italian painting of the centuries preceding the so-called Renaissance

as exemplary of sincere Christian spirituality was not new in France.
Alexis François Rio, among others, was a spokesperson for an Ultramontane
aesthetic which was especially intense during the conservative reign of Pius
IX (1846 to 1878).20 This anti-naturalist tendency appreciated trecento and
quattrocento art—particularly the work of Fra Angelico—for its stasis,
sincerity, and simplicity.21 John Ruskin, who was early influenced by
these forces, was also important to Péladan who called him the “Saint
Augustine of Art.”22 In the second half of the nineteenth century, Ruskin
and the Pre-Raphaelites were widely acclaimed in France.23 Finally,
Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes, whom Péladan classed as two
of the five great masters of contemporary French art, drew inspiration
from the art of fifteenth-century Italy.24 Péladan described Moreau as “the
most idealist of painters,” his style “Lombardo-Florentine.” Puvis de
Chavannes, he called an “idealist, in the tradition of the quattrocentisti …
[and] a poetic dream of the spirit.” 25 The appreciation of quattrocento
Florentine painting in Paris, particularly that inspired by the campaign of
Péladan, played an important role in Point’s conversion. This is so much
the case with Péladan that his idealism must be considered in some detail.
62 Chapter Three
Péladan’s Concept of Ideal Art

Péladan’s idealism is founded on the esoteric tradition in which beauty
is a divine manifestation insofar as matter is an expression of the spirit, a
theory which draws on the idealism of Plato, Plotinus, and Hegel. In L'art
idéaliste et mystique (1894), Péladan writes that Plato “alone dared to
consider Beauty as a spiritual being, existing independently from our
conceptions.”26 While Plato’s notion of beauty leading love from carnal to
transcendent truth is important, the Neoplatonic idea of Plotinus’ “One”
corresponds more closely to Péladan’s Christian monotheism. He writes:
“There is no other reality than God, there is no other truth than God, there
is no other beauty than God.”27
Hegel’s premise that each age has a distinct mind or spirit, which is
expressed through its art, is also critical to Péladan’s idealism.28 “The
book, the monument, the fresco,” says Péladan, “express through different
modes—the words, the lines, the colors—the same thing: the state of the
soul of an epoch.” Unlike Hegel’s historical determinism in which the
Spirit or Geist is ever-advancing, Péladan’s epochal soul “elevates itself or
falls into decline as it nears or draws further from God.”29 In his
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, Hegel writes that “art has everywhere to
make into an eye, in which the free soul is revealed in its inner infinity.”30
This pronouncement is echoed by Alphonse Germaine who describes
Péladan’s Salon de la Rose+Croix as “the art of disengaging a soul from
its material envelope.”31 The poster for the first Rose+Croix Salon (Fig. 3-
2) appears as a visual analogue of this statement. Designed by the Franco-
Swiss painter and illustrator Carlos Schwabe, it depicts a woman immured
in a pool of viscous material. She looks toward an empyrean region
inhabited by two women who ascend steps—from which passion flowers,
roses, lilies, and daisies spring—which dissolve into clouds and then into a
field of scarcely visible stars.
The recurring symbol of a cross enclosed in a rose in the picture
highlights the Rosicrucian doctrine upon which the eponymous group was
founded.32 In 1891 Péladan founded the Rose+Croix du Temple, affirming
the Order to be Catholic, orthodox, and aligned to the pursuit of beauty.
Péladan annexed an arts society to it, establishing the Rose+Croix
Esthétique to sponsor a Salon in Paris. He assigned the role of
enlightening humankind to the artists who joined him. The decorative
motif of crosses enclosed within roses on the left and right margins of the
image operate as a framing device which blurs the boundaries of real and
fictive space, so that the two ethereal women may read as a picture within
the poster. The mired figure, whose body is pushed up against the surface
Fig. 3-2. Carlos Schwabe, Salon Rose Croix.
of the poster, inhabits a different strata of reality and seems to extend

beyond the pictorial field into the three dimensional space of the beholder.
With the viewer, she looks up at the image of spiritual ascent, framed by
Rose+Croix motifs. Following Marla H. Hand’s interpretation of the lily
64 Chapter Three
as Purity and the smoking heart as Faith,33 the poster reads as an image in
which art, albeit suffused with Christian imagery, replaces religion as a
source of transcendence.
Hand argues that an important layer of meaning in the picture is the
way it illustrates the ascent of Péladan’s initiated artist to illumination
through the agency of the Rosicrucian order. In this atmosphere Point was
likely primed to see himself as a chosen disciple who had undergone a
transmutation of spirit and was prepared to convey Péladan’s notion of
beauty to the world. His conversion in Florence operates as a reenactment
of this transformation, but one in which Péladan’s rhetoric is replaced by
the converted self Point constructs, empowering Florentine art, less
stringently aligned to Catholicism, with the capacity to initiate a conversion.
A French Quattrocento Symbolist Aesthetic:

Armand Point’s Theory in Writing
For the fifth exhibition of the Salon de la Rose+Croix, Armand Point
and Léonard Sarluis designed a poster of a Perseus Knight beheading
apostle of realism, Emile Zola, in the guise of the mythical Gorgon (Fig.
3-3). Despite his assistance executing the violent image, Point did not
follow Péladan’s militant approach. Instead he pursued a more subtle
strategy to attack materialist tendencies in art, framing his conversion in
Florence as a testament to the power of the city’s quattrocento art to kill
his academic methods. The idea that beauty kills is ancient. It is tied to the
story of Medusa who, according to John of Antioch, was a courtesan of
such beauty that she turned those who looked at her into stone.34 In
Dante’s Vita Nuova Beatrice’s beauty paralyzes the poet, and initiates his
“new life” of Christian enlightenment. In the Gospels the beauty of Christ
leads to death of one’s former life and rebirth into grace. It is to this
paradigm that Point aligns his account of conversion before Botticelli’s
Primavera (Fig.3-4).35
Point begins by invoking the symbolist opposition to naturalism’s
pursuit of externals and its favoring of the subject, writing that upon
entering Florence he senses that “ancient objects look at you and judge
you.” Unlike Baudelaire’s flâneur strolling through Paris as an anonymous
voyeur, Point is vulnerable to being seen by the city’s art. Before the
Primavera he writes, “My eyes are disquieted and trembling because of
the revelation of my own self in the presence of the unknown.” Like
accounts of mystical experiences by Christian saints, he insists his
experience is real but incomprehensible:
Rose+Croix
Unwilling to believe that this was disillusionment, I was frightened by

lack of understanding … my mind was guided by the spiritual radiation
emanating from the work. … For none of the thoughts that accompany the
creation of a work of art are ever lost: the molecules of matter shelter
them.”36
Fig. 3-4. Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera.

66 Chapter Three
While this emphasis on subjective experience is related to the diffusion of

the theses of Fichte and Schopenhauer, its stress on divine union between
the beholding subject and a work of art resonates with the theories of
Aurier, who insisted that “the only means of comprehending a work of art
is to become its lover.”37 Drawing on Plotinus’ Enneads, Aurier endows
quattrocento art with the power to initiate a romantic communion between
the human soul and the soul of a work of art:
Who thus, I ask, can boast of having truly understood La Gioconda, or the
Saint John of Leonardo, or the Glorious Virgin of Angelico or that of
Botticelli, before having felt before these mysterious and beautiful beings,
a delicious fusion of his soul, of itself, to another soul, theirs?38
The agency of this “delicious fusion” is Point’s subjectivity, which

takes the shape of an ecstatic ekphrasis, suggestive of a Neoplatonic state
of the soul susceptible to the divine: “Two powerful identical notes
resonate, two reds, one at the center, on the body of the princess, the other
on the body of the adolescent … the trees are bathed in the silent color of
the night.” Losing his voice, he takes up Botticelli’s: “I shall sing of La
Primavera, the painter-poet once said. In the garden of Hesperides …
grass will be a carpet, embroidered with plants, spreading out the rhythm
of their leaves.”39 While resonating with the symbolist interest in the free
play of association and synaesthesia—especially perceiving visual stimuli
musically—this passage recalls the romantic-expressivist orientation that
encouraged the transmigration of self into objects to be aestheticized. So,
as Keats observed, the artist speaks not as himself, “but from some
character in whose soul I now live.”40 The consequence is not only the
recognition of the surfacing self as “other” than the transmigratory self,
but also its annihilation. Point channels this annihilation into the form of a
conversion, disavowing his academic methods:
I know much pleasure there is in the stroke of a brush heavy with paint, in
crushing two harmonious tones that melt together like the flavorful juices
of two fruits. But how much nobler is the thorough search to express a
feeling, a thought, with the severe obedient modesty of the painter’s craft!41
Point’s description of his former techniques suggests the unenlightened

pleasures of the flesh, while Botticelli’s quattrocento technique is
expressed in the language of repentance. This conversion leads to a
denunciation of materialism and praise of a spiritually infused aesthetic:
Our time belongs to science: the [surgeon’s] scalpel has killed the soul;
only in the amphitheatre [medical school] are miracles performed.
Everything is positive. … Lie! Hypocrisy! All is mystery … Let us build a
temple to beauty, eternal, unchangeable beauty … which manifests itself in
the plant lifting its leaves toward the sky … for something greater than the
external exists in nature; it is animated by the breath of the Spirit.42
A vital energy in the Primavera is released by his subjectivity, leading to a

conversion that triggers a critique of positivism. Consistent with Plotinus’
view that the One can only be reached through mystical experience,
Point’s essay stresses the ecstatic element of his conversion.
An important premise of Point’s argument is that an energy inhabits
the Florentine quattrocento image which endows it with the power to
imprint the beholder’s consciousness. His comparison with the art of his
own era is telling: “How far I was from the frivolous, thoughtless,
formless sparkle of short-lived so-called modern art! I was now being
taught all the power of the subject in the work of art.”43 While an
impassioned account of the conversionary agency of the Primavera, the
essay does not explain what endowed it with this power. For this the
reader must turn to his essay, “Primitifs et Symbolistes,” published in July
1895.
The essay is prefaced with the famous first stanza of Baudelaire’s
sonnet “Correspondences,” first published in Flowers of Evil in 1857:
Nature is a temple in which living pillars

Sometimes emit confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.44
This is Baudelaire’s famous articulation of his theory of “correspondences,”

and is part of the “Spleen and Idéal” section of the book. While
Baudelaire’s “spleen,” as Benjamin puts it, “musters the multitude of the
seconds against it,” evoking “the present state of the collapse of that
experience,” the ideal pursues wholeness and reintegration in the face of
this disintegration.45 In Point’s essay, Florence, in contrast to Paris’ urban
fragmentation, is framed in terms of its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
past, becoming a manifestation of Baudelaire’s ideal: an imagined space of
preindustrial wholeness, outside contemporary temporality.
Baudelaire’s articulation of how the natural world may be experienced
through symbols bridging the immaterial and material world through
“correspondences” also enabled Point to position quattrocento artists with
a similar transcendental vision. He writes that these artists “did their
68 Chapter Three
utmost to find, through the observation of nature, the necessary elements

to create scenes viewed through the spirit.”46 Their vision is special
because it is endowed with a quality lost to contemporary artists steeped in
materialist thought and academic schemata: an uncorrupt gaze and hand,
enabling them to see nature and translate it into forms which point to a
metaphysical truth. This truth is immanent in the sense that Point
understands fleeting traces of it to appear in nature; and transcendent in
the sense that this truth in its wholeness is beyond the natural world. Thus
immanence reveals a transcendence which arrives as a gift to eyes
unclouded enough to receive it, and is most manifest in the art of
quattrocento Florence. The concept that art is shaped by its age is
traceable to Péladan’s Hegelian infused idealism, and John Ruskin’s idea
that art mirrors its age’s socioeconomic system.
By the 1890s fragments of Ruskin’s writing had been translated into
French, and his ideas no doubt found their way into contemporary artistic
and intellectual circles.47 In his Stones of Venice (1851-53) and The Two
Paths: Being Lectures on Art and its Application (1859), Ruskin argues
that laissez-faire capitalism is antithetical to the expression of beauty. The
epochs, especially what he calls the Gothic, preceding the sixteenth
century were not plagued by brute specialization of labor and so individual
workers had greater expressive freedom, without which the creation of
beauty is impossible. Point, echoing Ruskin, states that ages marked by
social happiness enable clarity of artistic expression, which he equates
with beauty:
Those centuries when people are happy, the artist is able to speak a clear
language that is easily understood. The masterpieces that time has
conserved for us, testify to the splendor of the spirits, when a thought could
unleash it as a flame, free and clear under the sky.48
For Point quattrocento Florence exemplifies a culture not contaminated by

social ills, so enabling artists to foresee (pressentir) and divine (deviner)
the mystery of a universal harmony unifying all aspects of being.49
Comparing the art of Masolino to contemporary naturalist and realist art,
he writes that “Adam and Eve by Masolino, in the Carmine Chapel in
Florence, resemble as closely as possible a man and a woman: but it is not
Mr. X, a pork butcher, taking his bath like a frog, nor Mrs. Z, a maid,
washing disgracefully nude in a bathtub.”50 Less inflexibly Catholic than
Péladan, Point goes on to hail the paganism of Botticelli:
A wind blows from Greece, and Venus and Bacchus spring up from the
earth … : the artists take their fantasies for a walk in the groves of oranges
where the Graces are enlaced with each other [Primavera]. … Blond
Venus, under a rain of roses, comes on a breath of wind toward Gaia who
presents her with a mantle of royalty [Birth of Venus].51
Botticelli’s pictures contain “eternal symbols, where humanity has

generalized the great feelings which move it.”52 He closes the essay
declaring that while others “study laws limited by the appearance of
nature, we reconstitute thus the true Tradition without which no art is able
to flower.”53 Quattrocento images operate symbolically; they refer to a
materially absent divine harmony that is alive with transformative energy.
Point’s creative work for the rest of his life aimed to refract these highly
charged forms through the prism of a deeply symbolist subjectivity.
The Eternal Chimera

Point created the delicate pastel, The Eternal Chimera (Fig. 3-5), soon
after his transformative visit to Florence. The picture is dominated by an
attenuated female figure standing in profile, a pool of water behind her,
and shrouded in an atmospheric landscape. The image of a solitary woman
chastely garbed in a garden setting alludes to the iconography of the
Virgin Mary as hortus conclusus. The term comes from the Vulgate
Bible’s Song of Songs 4:12: “A garden enclosed [“hortus conclusus”],
sister my bride / a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed.”54 Solomon’s song
to his bride was interpreted in the Christian tradition as an allegory of the
mystical union between Christ and his Bride, the Church. The closed
garden also alludes to the doctrine of the virginity of Mary, whose womb
was closed from sin as though by a wall. As Brian E. Daley has shown,
painted images of the Virgin Mary in a hortus conclusus and aligned to “a
fountain sealed” underwent a strong development at the beginning of the
fifteenth century.55 This symbolic Marian resonance and the figure’s
formal ethereality, which directs attention away from her physicality,
correspond to the Catholic idealism of Péladan. But in the absence of
emphatic Christian symbols—such as the Cross—the image is free to
operate within a broader range of signification outside of Catholic
doctrine. Clothed in a gown reminiscent of Venus from the Primavera, the
woman may also be read as an eternal symbol blossoming from the
“pantheist influence” Point assigns to Botticelli’s paintings.
Point’s mobilization of fifteenth-century Italian forms leads the
receptive beholder into a state of numinous awareness that might operate
as a consoling promise: in a society increasingly marked by fragmentation,
alienation, and materialism, an eternal unity exists beyond the physical
70 Chapter Three
world. While the first word in the title of the picture—eternal—points to

this harmony, the second—chimera—underlines an anxiety that haunts it:
that it is a delusion. The following examines these two aspects: first, how
the drawing expresses a quattrocento presence as a trace of a harmonious
energy that transcends materiality; and second, how this presence, in its
physical intangibility, evokes a disquieting elusiveness, the property of a
chimera.
Since this portion of the analysis is concerned with how Point’s
reception of quattrocento forms and his symbolist strategies serve to
express an immaterial presence inhabiting the image, Adorno’s concept of
aura is helpful as an interpretative lens. In her recent essay on this topic,
Yvonne Sherratt argues that Adorno’s neglected concept of the aura
“entails a unique kind of aesthetic experience characterized by the
refutation of interpretation and intensification of receptivity. This … form
of mediation allows the Object’s own voice to, in Adorno’s words, ‘come
shining through.’”56 Sherratt isolates three properties of Adorno’s aura: an
appearance of distance, particularly distance from concepts; the capacity
to point beyond a work’s givenness, that is its interpretative indeterminacy;
and the power to induce proximity through distance. While these
characterizations of Adorno’s aura are helpful, it is important to stress that
this analysis does not mean to suggest an exact corollary between
Adorno’s ideas and Point’s. Rather, this is one way to open a critical
examination and interpretation of Point’s imagery, which he imbued with
a kind of indwelling, transformative radiance, indeed a kind of aura in its
conventional definition as a halo. The discussion begins with a summary
of the three characterizations of the aura, and then turns to look at their
manifestation in The Eternal Chimera.
Adorno draws on Walter Benjamin for his formulation of the first
property of aura: “the unique phenomenon of distance” which cannot be
compromised by physical proximity.57 In his second stage of the historical
development of aura, that of autonomy, it is contingent on a work
retaining a sense of temporal and spatial distance. This distance is created
first in an object’s formation in the past, and second in its limited
availability in the present. While Benjamin and Adorno take as their object
a work of art as an original whole, Point’s faith that the forms of fifteenth-
century Florentine art also contain an aural presence makes the first aspect
of the aura’s temporal distance—its location in the past—especially
relevant to his imagery.58
The second characterization of aura is given by Adorno: “aura is …
whatever goes beyond [art’s] … givenness.”59 By evoking and refuting
interpretation, it invites an effort to understand it but its indeterminacy
makes the application of interpretative concepts impossible. So Sherratt

argues, “expressed in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s own figurative language,
‘pointing beyond the givenness’ of an image, in fact, evokes an
‘appearance of distance.’”60 The second property leads back to the first. If
concepts cannot be applied to it, the aura’s indeterminacy creates another
kind of distance: distance from concepts.
Fig. 3-5. Armand Point, The Eternal Chimera.

72 Chapter Three
The conceptual distance created by the aura leads to its third property:
proximity through distance. Benjamin writes, “proximity [is gained]
through distance.” What Sherratt’s analysis unfolds from this “clue” is that
“a kind of proximity … results from uninterpretability.”61 The key to this
idea is Adorno’s concept of “receptivity,” a component of aesthetic
experience derived from his German Idealist roots. In losing the capacity
to interpret via concepts, the beholder gains a heightened degree of
receptivity, which leads, for Adorno, to a “loss of self.”62 This is precisely
the process Point describes in his account of conversion before the
Primavera. His distance from interpretative concepts applicable to the
work brings a new kind of closeness or proximity: a communion that leads
to conversion.
The first issue of aural distance achieved through temporal remoteness
is manifest in Point’s work through his deployment of forms characteristic
of Botticelli and Leonardo of which only a few can be mentioned here.
The chimera’s dress, with its high bodice and composition of repeating
vertical folds, recalls the robe of the central figure in the Primavera. While
the design and the clear articulation of the garment’s folds suggest
Botticelli’s linearism, the drawing’s overall treatment of light and shadow
allude to the style of Leonardo. Subtly modulated sepia tones create a
picture that is almost wholly monochromatic, punctuated by only a
handful of flickering blue-lavender, warm silver, and copper highlights.
The atmospheric effect recalls several works by Leonardo da Vinci in the
Louvre: The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (1508-1519), Mona Lisa
(1503-06), and The Madonna of the Rocks (Fig. 3-6). Point’s attention to
plants in the drawing verges on the botanical attentiveness of Leonardo,
evident especially in the The Madonna of the Rocks.
These formal materializations of the quattrocento past generate the
property of aural distance in two ways. First, insofar as they are traceable
to specific works, they operate like a hyperlink causing the beholder to
contemplate the source of the imagery and, in doing so, engage the aural
properties of temporal and spatial distance. Second, since the formal
elements of fifteenth-century art are to be understood as having been
shaped by a transcendent presence, they allude to something even further
away: the supernal harmony that enabled their fifteenth-century manifestation
in the first place.
Fig. 3-6. Leonardo da Vinci, The Madonna of the Rocks.
The association of Leonardo’s work with interior mystery, indeterminate

emotions and sexual ambiguity was well established in France. Along with
Péladan, Jules Michelet, Hippolyte Taine, and Théophile Gautier all
assigned these qualities to Leonardo’s work.63 Among the Artists of the
Soul, Leonardo’s portraits were hailed as expressing the spiritual or
psychological life of his subject, as well as the immateriality of a
metaphysical ideal. Séaille’s study, Léonard de Vinci – L’artiste et le
savant (1892), attributes to Leonardo’s people “all that can appear of the
human soul,” and claims that Mary’s face in the The Madonna of the
74 Chapter Three
Rocks embodies the “eternal feminine.”64 Paul Valery in his Introduction à

la method de Léonard de Vinci (1894) wrote: “I name the man and
Leonardo … the power of the spirit.”65 Péladan wrote at length of the
ambiguity and mystery of Leonardo’s imagery, seeing his human figures
as exemplary of the ideal of the Platonic androgyne, an image of
wholeness through the union of male and female aspects. Botticelli’s
linearism and Leonardo’s characteristic use of sfumato and chiaroscuro are
formal elements congruent with a broader symbolist interest in line and
smoky effects as a means of unbinding forms from literality toward
evocative ambiguity. Leonardo’s art, especially, was felt to at once evoke
and refute interpretation, a reception which positioned his formal language
to operate in terms of the second property of Adorno’s aura—the property
of pointing beyond its givenness.
Like the multivalent content of The Eternal Chimera, Point’s
atmospheric use of pastel creates a ghostly enfeeblement of the physical
world that at once invites and refuses interpretation. Without the help of
anchoring signifiers, the woman in the garden may be a Christian Marian
exemplar, a pagan goddess of nature meant to invoke a meditation on
Pantheism, or “the wise mysterious woman bound to the heart of the earth
who holds all the answers and will not tell, Sibyl or Sorceress, like the one
in Rimbaud’s Après le Déluge.”66 Both in its atmospheric form and
inscrutable content, the image demands viewers to lose their interpretative
component which leads to the third characteristic of the aura: proximity
through distance. Though Sherratt is careful to qualify that this is never a
complete loss, it is one which leads to an act of aesthetic engagement that
Adorno calls auratic receptivity. Drawing on Benjamin’s discussion of
Baudelaire, Adorno provides an example of this kind of receptivity.
Contrasting the beholding gaze of the city dweller, whose eyes reside
behind a shutter of desensitized blankness, he frames auratic receptivity as
what happens when the “Subjects gaze into the distance. The gaze looks to
something ‘far away’, a ‘day-dreaming surrender’. Towards that which is
‘far away’, the gaze is intensely receptive.”67 For Point this receptive
surrender opens the beholder less to a subjective, far away “day-dream”
than to a metaphysical reality: specifically, an encounter with a divine, a-
temporal harmony which transcends the physical world.
Such an intense receptivity leads to “a loss of the boundary around the
self,” creating a “weakness of the Subject in the face of natural beauty.”68
Through this the Subject experiences a beneficent gain: “involuntarily and
unconsciously, the observer enters into a contract with the work [of art or
nature],”69 which is, for Adorno, “the most intensely pleasurable ‘sense of
the work of art.’”70 Such a conceptualization sounds a lot like Aurier’s
“delicious fusion” of the soul of a work of art with that of the beholder
discussed earlier. But it also resonates with Maurice Pujo who, in an essay
in the L’Art et la vie, wrote that for Artists of the Soul “the diffused light
does not exist without the human eye to receive; it would not harmonize
itself across the relief of objects without the human spirit who arranges it;
it would not move us without the human heart which animates it.”71 The
philosopher Gabriel Séailles echoed this point, writing that the these artists
“instead of regarding the spirit from the point of view of things … regard
things from the point of view of the spirit.”72 The pastel highlights that
flicker across the surface of Point’s drawing suggest a scarcely detectable,
glistening presence that perhaps refers to its indwelling spirit, which for
Séailles depends on the artist to receive and express, and the beholder to
surrender his or her “self” to a communion with it.
Stuart Merrill quotes Point to have said that line “corresponds to all of
our thoughts, to all of our feelings; it is a mysterious language that frees
itself from all materiality.”73 Line, like the melodic thread of music, is
imbued with the capacity to suggest intangible feelings, as though the
motion of the hand—of which the line is a trace—mirrors a feeling in the
artist; acting in the same way a hand’s gesture in life functions
expressively to iterate an emotion. Paul and Victor Margueritte, in an
essay in La Plume, credit Point with the ability to extract harmony from a
tangle of threads—the material world’s entanglement with the
metaphysical—quoting Point to have said that the artist is the “clairvoyant
of the laws of harmony.”74 Like the atmospheric qualities in The Eternal
Chimera, line operates for Point as a formal element whose capacity to
free itself from materiality simultaneously evokes and eludes interpretation,
opening the beholding subject to experience Adorno’s “distance induced
proximity,” and so enabling the aesthetic experience of “being ‘at one’ or
united with the Object.”75
In The Eternal Chimera forms from the quattrocento past are woven
with those of the symbolist present to create an aural distance that leads to
proximity. In the context of Point’s œuvre and his published writing, this
distance is none other than his eternal, universal harmony unifying all
aspects of the physical and spiritual world. He likely would have measured
the success of his picture by the degree to which it drew its beholding
subject—immured in the sensory dulling and socially alienating conditions
of modern urban life—toward an encounter with a beneficent
metaphysical reality that promised unity in the face of fragmentation.
However, the second part of the title of Point’s work, “Chimera,” calls
attention to how the work’s property of consolation was to some degree
unstable; its elusiveness rendering it conceptually ambivalent. “The motif
76 Chapter Three
of the chimera,” according to Peter Cooke, “represents a dual perception

of the imagination, conceived as both an inner realm superior to mundane
reality and a dangerous territory of delusion and desire.”76 The beneficence
offered by the chimera is a flight of the imagination of the kind pursued by
Gérard de Nerval in his Les Chimères (1854). Its threat lies in its power to
invoke an insatiable desire, provoking the perils of delusion. This duality
is famously expressed by Théophile Gautier in his poem “La Chimère”
from La Comédie de la Mort (1837). Once he has caught hold of the
mythical chimera, he commands her to carry him:
To farthest edge of all eternal things,

Beyond the sun, beyond the bounds of space.
But weary ere the end shall be thy wings, —
For I would see my vision face to face!77
The question of the chimera as a fleeting fancy or a trace of eternity

that eludes stable expression preoccupied Mallarmé, a friend of Point’s,
and it is to a brief consideration of him that the analysis now turns. For the
sake of brevity in the context of this chapter, the analysis focuses on the
image of the irises in the picture, a flower which recurs in Mallarmé’s
work. On one level the depiction of these flowers reflects Point’s
subjective response to the foliage of Primavera as a “carpet, embroidered
with plants,” translated here on the hem of the chimera’s gown. Here irises
appear as both actual flowers and textile designs, creating a visual
ambiguity which resonates especially powerfully with Mallarmé’s search
for an idiom of polyvalence in poetry. These irises function similarly to
the poet’s effort to use a single word to create a prismatic effect, opening
up symbols to multiple and simultaneous connotations. In Point’s drawing
the iris evokes at once an organic plant, a decorative motif on the figure’s
gown, and—aligned with the body of the woman herself—also the
possibility that the iris is she, or she the iris.
But the irises may also relate to a passage in Point’s account of
conversion, where he writes of the women in the Primavera—probably the
Graces and Chloris—as those “captivating sisters of the frail irises that die
from a kiss.”78 Did Point seek to highlight the associative connection he
made between the delicate flower and the semi-transparent sheaths of the
Graces by aligning the chimera’s body with them? The chimera in its non-
mythological sense is immaterial, a dream; as the delicate iris would die
from a kiss, so too would she. Her inaccessibility is underlined by her
enclosure, her averted and downcast gaze, and her consciousness absorbed
within a book, the title of which the beholder is denied. Her eyes, nearly
closed, enfold her within herself, further shutting out the viewer. In the
lower left corner is written “A mon ami Piazza [to my dear Plaza],” which
is an open space. Empty.79 Did Point intend to highlight the absence of the
spirit which inhabits him? Or to put it a differently: did he intend to
highlight the absence to which she as a symbol of a mystical ideal refers?
The quest to express an absolute ideal that eludes representation was
especially important to Mallarmé, with whom Point was in contact from
the early 1890s until the poet’s death in 1898. Mallarmé’s retreat from
Paris was Ponte de Valins in Vulaines-sur-Seine, a village near
Fontainebleau, where Aristide Marie cites Point as a regular visitor.80 In
1896 Point established an artist’s colony at Marlotte, a village not far from
Valins. Christened Haute-Claire in 1896 by Élémir Bourges, it was partly
inspired by the Arts and Crafts atelier of William Morris at Merton
Abbey.81 Point’s colony became a vital symbolist gathering place of which
Mallarmé was a part.82
The notion of the chimera frequently surfaces in Mallarmé’s poetic and
theoretic writing. It is related to his unstable faith in an absolute reality,
shaped by the idealism of Hegel, which manifests itself in the physical
world as an unattainable ideal.83 Mallarmé’s chimera moves between the
terrain of fantasy and faith; between the inner region of imagination and
the metaphysical region of the absolute. Its essence ultimately becomes
conceived through its absence. In his poem “What Silk with Balm from
Advancing Days” (1885), Mallarmé layers a single image with polyvalent
significance—at once a window, curtain, and a looking glass “through
which one could see the dying splendor of a “Chimere” which could be
either the cloud or twilight that the sun pierces with its rays or the setting
sun itself that represents the more or less unattainable ideal.”84 The stanza
reads:
What silk with balm from advancing days

in which chimeras writhe and pass
can match the tangled native haze
you bring beyond your looking glass!85
In his essay, “Crisis in Poetry,” the ideal takes shape from its absence:
I say: a flower! and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any
shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises
musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every
bouquet.86
78 Chapter Three
Saint Cecilia
In 1896 Point created a major charcoal and chalk study for a large-
scale fresco commissioned by the state. Called by the artist both April and
Saint Cecilia (Fig. 3-7), the drawing was exhibited at the fifth Salon de la
Rose+Croix. The dual titles point to an important relationship between
Point’s investment in the principle of harmony as a form of knowledge
and his faith in an ideal art ushering in a new era of social and spiritual
health. The title Saint Cecilia aligns the image with traditional
iconography of the patron saint of music, while April alludes to the season
of rebirth and regeneration. This image, henceforth called Saint Cecilia,
expresses symbolist allusions to musical harmony on several levels, but it
also resonates with socio-utopian investments in harmonics current in
sociological and philosophical thought; and it is from this intersection that
it is possible to trace how Point’s symbolist aesthetic was conceived to
engage actively with modern life.
Like the Eternal Chimera, Saint Cecilia deploys fifteenth-century
Florentine aesthetic forms. Her pose and gown recall Venus in Botticelli’s
Primavera (Fig. 3-4), and her head, Leonardo’s study for his now-lost
painting of Leda (Fig. 3-8). His interest in the head of Leda is clear in his
charcoal and chalk Portrait of Madame Berthelot (Fig. 3-9).87 Insofar as
these references evoke a sense of temporal and spatial distance, they
undermine the boundaries of the beholding self and create a sense of
proximity through distance—a property of aura, earlier discussed. These
forms are crossed by a more literal stress on harmony through the direct
reference to music in the image. The harp is an obvious allusion, but her
form too suggests the meter and melody of music. The long, repeated
frontal gathers of her gown invite association with the rhythmic
structuring of musical composition. The undulating hem of her mantle
recalls Wagner’s idea of music moving wave upon wave and invokes
Mallarmé’s description of music’s suggestiveness as “a line of vibration.”88
The flutes of fabric echo the plucked harp string, visually reinforcing the
prolongation of sound by reflection or synchronous vibration. Saint
Cecilia’s formal and thematic emphasis on musicality leads her to operate
something like a metonym for the importance of music in symbolist
aesthetics. The ideas of Schopenhauer played a crucial role in the
symbolist investment in music as the purest expression of the spiritual life.
In The World as Will and Representation he famously writes:
Music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is … directly a copy
of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything
physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon.89
Fig. 3-8. Leonardo da Vinci, Study

for the head of Leda.
Fig. 3-9. Armand Point, A

Portrait of Madame Berthelot.
Fig. 3-7. Armand Point, April or Saint Cecilia.

80 Chapter Three
In the second stanza of his poem “Correspondences,” Baudelaire draws

on the language of music to describe a cosmic concordance taking shape
in his “forest of symbols”:
Like long echoes that mingle in the distance

In a profound tenebrous unity,
Vast as the night and vast as light,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors respond to one another.90
Physiological and psychological faculties mingle—through the stimulus of

perfume, color, and sound—to generate a synaesthetic epiphany which
unveils a profound cosmic unity aligned to the principles of musical
harmony. Drawing on romantic aesthetics, Baudelaire articulated his
theory of “musicality”: “Harmony is the basis of color theory. … There
are tones that are gay and frolicsome, others frolicsome and sad, rich and
gay, rich and sad.”91
Benjamin, in his analysis of Baudelaire’s “Spleen and Idéal” cycle of
The Flowers of Evil, which includes the poem “Correspondences,”
interprets this work as a response to the trauma of modern urban existence.
This trauma unfolds as a series of shocks on the psyche which, ultimately,
he argues—following Freud’s argument on trauma and the unconscious in
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”—cannot fully be registered, leading to
the loss of a sense of integrity in the lived world. Benjamin sees the ideal
aspect of Baudelaire’s poetry as expressive of a longing to reintegrate
fractured, modern consciousness, writing that the poet’s “idéal supplies
the power of remembrance.”92 “Correspondences” points to Baudelaire’s
movement toward the ideal—that is toward reintegration. His “profound
tenebrous unity” expresses a yearning for integration and wholeness
against the inexorability of urban alienation and psychological fragmentation
which, quoting Benjamin, creates urban “pedestrians [who] act as if they
had adapted themselves to the machines and could express themselves
only automatically.”93
Saint Cecilia, with her multi-layered allusions to harmony, is not
unlike Baudelaire’s ideal vision of a profound unity. Like a religious icon,
she points beyond herself to a transcendent accord ordering the physical
and metaphysical world. In the shadow of a pointed Gothic arch
suggestive of a cathedral, this harmony is infused with the Catholic
mysticism of Péladan, while her immersion in nature suggests also Point’s
pantheistic perspective. Enamored with Cennino Cennini’s 1390 treatise
on painting, he quotes him in “Primitifs et Symbolistes”: “And this is an
art that one calls painting, which combines imagination and skill of hand,
(to find things not seen, hidden in the shadow of nature) and giving them
shape with the hand to demonstrate in plain sight what does not exist.94
Saint Cecilia is such a new and secret thing, hidden in the shadow of
nature, pointing beyond herself to a divine harmony, underwritten with
Neoplatonic and Catholic mysticism. That this harmony can lead to a new
age of rebirth is suggested by her alternative title, April, and the lilac
blossoms, evocative of spring, which surround her.
The idea that society might be led to a socially superior age founded on
the principles of harmonics was one that had a broader resonance in
philosophical and scientific thought in the nineteenth century. Sociologist-
philosopher Pierre Leroux in “On the poetry of our time” (1831) writes of
harmonic vibrations of different sense modalities constituting the soul:
One part of which is colors, another movements, another judgments, and

so forth, all vibrating simultaneously … so that a vibration in one region
communicates itself to another. … From these harmonic vibrations of the
diverse regions of the soul an accord results, and this accord is life; and
when this accord is expressed, it constitutes art. And it so happens that
when this accord is expressed, it is a symbol, and the form of its
expression is rhythm …: that is why art is the expression of life, the
reverberation of life, life itself.95
Leroux’s articulation of the constituents of the soul in terms of harmonic

vibrations relates to the way in which physicists had begun to see natural
phenomena in terms of simple harmonic motion. Musical notes were
understood in terms of different vibrational frequencies, sine or cosine
waves defined the motion of spring mechanisms, and Léon Foucault’s
demonstration of the constant plane of the oscillations of a pendulum (later
called Foucault’s Pendulum) in 1851 provided simple proof of the earth’s
rotation, causing a sensation in Paris.96 These new ways of structuring
knowledge led some to see harmonics as the key to solving social ails.
Charles Fourier went so far as to imagine an ideal social system aligned to
numeric harmonics.97
The concept that art in accord with a harmony at once transcendent and
immanent in nature may lead to an enlightened future is expressed on the
cover of the catalog for the 1896 Exhibition of the Works of the Painters of
the Soul–Art & Life (Fig. 3-10). Saint Cecilia is depicted with irises
springing up around her. Less multivalent and ambiguous than those on
the hem of the figure’s gown in The Eternal Chimera, they ground the
image in the living world. The subtitle of the exhibition, “Art and Life”
[L’Art et la Vie],” stresses the social ambition of the artists, like the journal
of the same title founded by Maurice Pujo in 1892. Unlike Jean Des
Esseintes’ withdrawal from the world into an artificial reality in J.-K.
82 Chapter Three
Huysmans’ Au Rebours, where the aesthetic sense becomes a neurotic

pathology, these artists sought to bring the transformative power of an
ideal art into the living world and inaugurate a socially and spiritually
superior future. Attesting to this aesthetically driven social-utopianism are
the activities in which the artists and their advocates participated. For
example, Alexandre Séon partook in the “Palais du Peuple” project,
publishing inexpensive prints and assisting organized tours of the Louvre.
Gabriel Séailles worked with the Union pour l’action morale founded by
humanist and philosopher Paul Desjardins.98
Fig. 3-10. Armand Point Cover of the catalog for the exhibition, “Peintres de l’âme
[Painters of the Soul].”
The artist colony, Haute-Claire, which Point founded at Marlotte was

very much in line with these socialist goals. Unlike urban life in Paris, the
colony operates as a domus, François Lyotard’s term for a space where
social life unfolds through a shared sense of locality, narratives, seasons,
and stories with beginnings and endings.99 This is in contrast to the urban
fragmentation of the city—Baudelaire’s Paris—which might be associated
with the city—or arkheion—where houses are not homes, and narrative is
lost to the service of urban remembering: the archive which cannot cohere
into narrative meaning.100 The colony as a space of social integration is
consistent with Haute-Claire’s foundational principles, inspired by the
Socialism of William Morris. Morris was a spokesperson and exemplar of
the idea that art should be for the people and by the people, as he believed
it had been in the Middle Ages. An important disseminator of Morris’
ideas at Marlotte was Stuart Merrill.101
The social consciousness motivating the Artists of the Soul has been
especially neglected. Typical is Michael Draguet who, adhering to a
characteristic modernist ideology, dismisses the movement as “out of
synch with history’s axis. … Idealism was a child of the past in an era
turned entirely toward the future.”102 Early Italian Renaissance forms,
interpreted through Point’s idealist symbolist subjectivity, were conceived
in response to modern life; his art was calculated to create a sense of
reintegration in the face of ever-increasing fragmentation and alienation,
which were the hallmarks of urban experience in nineteenth-century Paris.
His revolution was aimed at human consciousness. He sought to awaken
and reintegrate Baudelaire’s deadened city dweller who—as Benjamin,
paraphrasing Baudelaire, writes—has fallen out of time “like bells, which
were once part of holidays, have been dropped from the calendar … the
poor souls that wander restlessly outside of history.”103 Rather than
Baudelaire’s spleen, in which the perception of time is “supernaturally
keen” where “every second finds consciousness ready to intercept its
shock,”104 Point aimed to orient his beholder’s inner compass toward a
stable metaphysical ideal. Unlike Mallarmé’s “absent flower,” Point’s
idealism was less haunted by the despair of the inaccessible chimera than
it was underwritten with the hope of reintegration expressed by Saint
Cecilia. He sought to make social life and art interpenetrating realities.
Though looking to past traditions, his work was oriented toward the
future; his paintings and creative work at Haute-Claire were intended to
lead to “The City of the Future.”105
Acknowledgments
I thank Robert Williams for his early guidance, Ann Bermingham for
critical comments and support, Brendan Cole for an insightful reading of
an early draft, Peter Cooke for material on Moreau’s chimeras, Mireille
Dottin-Orsini for comments, and Rosina Neginsky who made this work
possible. Early research was funded by a Kress Institutional Fellowship at
the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Françoise Cantonnet sent source
material from the Amis de Bourron-Marlotte in France. Thanks to David
Boffa for insightful editing, and John Bird and Marybeth Rice for editing
the final draft. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
84 Chapter Three
Fig. 3-1. Armand Point, At Rest in the Desert, 1887, oil on canvas, 73.7 x
100.3 cm. Private Collection (Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc.
©1993).
Fig. 3-2. Carlos Schwabe, Salon Rose Croix, 1892, lithograph, 198 x 80.5
cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (The Museum of
Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA).
Rose+Croix,1896, 75.8 x 102.6 cm. (Photograph Courtesy of Les Amis de
Bourron-Marlotte).
Fig. 3-4. Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera, 1477, tempera on wood, 203 x

314 cm. Uffizi, Florence (Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY).
Fig. 3-5. Armand Point, The Eternal Chimera, 1895, pencil and pastel,
715.0 x 42.0 cm. (Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 1994).
Fig. 3-6. Leonardo da Vinci, The Madonna of the Rocks, 1483, oil on
canvas, 199 x 122 cm. Louvre, Paris (Photo Credit : Réunion des Musées
Nationaux / Art Resource, NY).
Fig. 3-7. Armand Point, April or Saint Cecilia, 1896, pencil and charcoal
heightened with chalk on paper, 184 x 74.5 cm. Private Collection (Photo
Credit: Private Owner).
Fig. 3-8. Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the head of Leda, 1506-1508
(Facsimile - original in the Windsor Collection). Gabinetto dei Disegni e
delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence (Photo Credit : Scala / Art Resource, NY).
Fig. 3-9. Armand Point, A Portrait of Madame Berthelot (née Hélène

Linder), 1895, charcoal and coloured chalks, 43.2 x 31.1cm. Private
Collection (Photograph Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 1993).
Fig. 3-10. Armand Point, Cover of the catalog for the exhibition, “Peintres
de l’âme [Painters of the Soul],” 1896, Paris, Bibliothèque Doucet.
Notes
1
Camille Mauclaire, “Armand Point: Peintre, Fresquiste, Émailleur, Orfèvre,”
Armand Point—La Plume numéro exceptionnel, 15 January 1901, 50: “luminosités
intense du désert.” Mauclaire goes on to say he produced “an important Orientalist
oeuvre revealing an affection for impressionist effects [Il rassemble une œuvre
importante d’orientaliste, où un impressionniste câlin].”
2
See Armand Point, “Primitifs et Symbolistes,” L’Ermitage, no.7 (July 1895), 12-
16. Point is not dismissive of Michelangelo, like John Ruskin, or disparaging of
the antique, like Joséphin Péladan (see, n. 19) who castigates it as bringing about
the baleful “Renaissance.” Nonetheless, the bulk of Point’s analysis praises
fifteenth-century art preceding Michelangelo for its purity. In this he is consistent
with the nineteenth-century tendency to frame Italian art along the lines of the
biological model employed by Giorgio Vasari in his The Lives of the Most Eminent
Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568). His history of art begins with its birth
and infancy marked by Cimabue and the thirteenth century; its growth as a child in
the age of Giotto and the fourteenth century; and youthful development up to the
early work of Raphael in the fifteenth century. For Vasari, Michelangelo
exemplifies adult maturity, while the sixteenth-century art succeeding him soon
manifests decline into decadence. A multivolume French translation of Vasari’s
Lives was published between 1839 and 1842 [Léopold Leclanché translated it and,
along with Philippe-Auguste Jeanron, wrote extended commentaries]. The
relationship between the structure of Vasari’s Lives and the nineteenth-century
association of quattrocento art with “child-like” innocence is a question my
forthcoming doctoral dissertation explores. For Vasari’s biological model, see
Robert Williams, "Vasari, Giorgio," in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael
Kelly. Oxford Art Online,
www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e051(accessed March 17,
2010).
3
For the terms quattrocento and quattrocentisti in nineteenth-century France to
indicate both fifteenth-century Italian art and contemporary artists working in this
style, see Le Trésor de la Langue Française, http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm (accessed
February 20, 2010).
4
Mauclaire, “Armand Point,” 52: “Puis il part en Italie … et il revient transformé.
C’est un autre homme, un autre esprit, un autre peintre.”
5
Point, “Primitifs et Symbolistes,” 11: “l’unité d’Harmonie universelle.”
6
The term “form” is used here to stress the formal characteristics of quattrocento
Italian painting—its linearity, for example—but also a recognizable style or
allusion to a known subject.
7
Benjamin’s and Adorno’s conception of aura is discussed later.
8
Formalized in 1894 at an exhibition in the Théâtre de la Bodinière, the tenets of
the Artists of the Soul [les artistes de l’âme] were articulated in a series of lectures
at this venue and published in the symbolist review L’Art et la vie in 1895. Works
by Aman-Jean, Jean Dampt, Andhré Gachons, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Henri
86 Chapter Three
Martin, René Ménard, Alphonse Osbert, Armand Point, Carlos Schwabe,

Alexandre Séon, and V. Vallgren were exhibited.
9
See, Robert 'RUp, Armand Point et son oeuvre (1861-1932), PhD diss. Université
3DQWKpon-Sorbonne (Lille: Atelier national de Reproduction des 7Kqses, 2008),
microfilm. 'RUp is preparing his dissertation for publication as a book.
Biographical and some source material appear in the slim exhibition catalog,
Robert Doré, Armand Point 1861-1932 (Mairie-Musée de Bourron-Marlotte,
2003); Pierre-Olivier Fanica, “A l’occasion du soixantième anniversaire de la mort
d’Armand Point et de Victor Point: Armand Point et Haute-Claire (seconde
partie),” Les Amis de Bourron-Marlotte. Bulletin d’information et de liaison de
l’Association des Amis de Bourron-Marlotte 30 (Autumn-Winter 1992), 22-38; a
short biography and some major works can be found in Jean-David Jumeau-
Lafond, Les peintres de l'âme: le symbolisme idéaliste en France (Gent: Snoeck-
Ducaju and Zoon, 1999); and expanded in Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond Painters of
the Soul. Symbolism in France (Tampere: Tampere Art Museum, 2006); for
analysis of decorative work by Point and his artist colony at Marlotte, see Stéphan
Laurent “Armand Point: Un art décoratif symbolist,” Revue de L’Art 116 (1997)
89-94.
10
Mauclaire, “Armand Point,” 51: “En même temps, il s’est organisé une âme
toute neuve. … Il a étrangement développé, dans la société des symbolistes et
poètes décadents qui se groupe alors autour de Mallarmé et de Verlaine, toute une
tendance imaginative, tout un amour du légendaire, du mystérieux, de l’occulte,
qui somnolait en lui.”
11
Geneviève Lacambre, P. Jullian, and Alan Bowness, French Symbolist Painters:
Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon and their Followers (London: Arts Council
of Great Britain, 1972), 97.
12
Joséphin Péladan,“Règle du Salon de la Rose+Croix,” Salon de la Rose+Croix.
Règle et Monitoire (Paris: E. Dentu, 1891). Reprinted in La Décadence Latine:
Éthopée, X: Le Panthée (Paris: E. Dentu, 1892), 291: “Le Salon de la Rose+Croix
veut ruiner le réalisme, réformer le goût latin et créer une école d’art idéaliste.”
13
Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-Siècle Parisian Art Criticism
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 25-76.
14
G.-Albert Aurier, Œuvres posthumes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1893), 209,
quoted in Marlais, Conservative Echoes, 41.
15
M. Charles Henry quoted in Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire
(Paris: Charpentier, 1891), 414, trans. in Marlais, Conservative Echoes, 41: “Je ne
crois pas à avenir du psychologisme ou du naturalisme, ni, en général, de toute
école réaliste. Je crois au contraire à l’avènement plus ou moins prochain d’un art
très idéaliste, mystique même, fondé sur des techniques absolument nouvelles.”
16
Anatole Baju, “Idéal,” Le Décadent I (21 August 1886), unpaginated, quoted
and trans. in Marlais, Conservative Echoes, 43: “La beauté physique, âme des
choses et la beauté morale, cette quintessence de l’âme: voilà l’idéal.”
17
Charles Morice, La littérature de tout à l’heure (Paris: Perrin, 1889), 57, quoted
in Marlais, 42: “l’idée de Dieu.”
18
André Michel, “Le Salon de 1884,” L’Art, xxxvi (1884), 182, quoted and trans.
in Marlais, Conservative Echoes, 42-43: C’est un idéal plus complexe et plus
troublé qui se dégagera des cœurs et des cerveaux modernes.”
19
Joséphin Péladan, “Materialism in Art,” in Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Henri Dorra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 265.
The essay first appeared as “Le Matérialisme dans l'art,” in Le Foyer, journal de
famille, 21 August 1881, 177-79. It was reprinted with minor changes in Joséphin
Péladan, L’art ochlocratique: salons de 1882 & de I883 (Paris: C. Dalou, 1888),
13-16. Péladan’s acclaim of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian art also
appears in Joséphin Péladan, L'art idéaliste et mystique: précédé la réfutation de
Taine (Paris: E. Sansot, 1911), 11, 27, 50.
20
Alexis François Rio’s, De la poésie chrétienne (1836), for example, shifted
emphasis from French Medieval architecture as repositories of a pure Catholic
spirit to Italian art from roughly the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. For this shift, see
J.B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (New
York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1994), 59-90.
21
See Bruno Foucart, Le renouveau de la peinture religieuse en france, 1800-1860
(Paris: Arthena, 1987); for the influence of Ultramontane aesthetics on fin-de-
siècle modernism, see Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art,
and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1992).
22
Quoted in René Louis Doyon, La douloureuse aventure de Péladan (Paris:
Connaissances, 1946), 89.
23
For a bibliography of French writing on Ruskin and fragments of his work
translated into French, see Jean Autret, Ruskin and the French before Marcel
Proust (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1965). For documentation of the reception of the
British Pre-Raphaelites in France, see Jacques Lethève, “La connaissance des
peintres préraphaélites anglais en France (1855-1900),” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 53
(May-June 1959): 315-28; Laurence Brogniez, Préraphaélisme et symbolisme:
peinture littéraire et image poétique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003); Annie
Dubernard-Laurent, “Le rôle de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts dans la réception de la
peinture préraphaelite britannique en France,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 131
(January 1998): 41-52; Susan P. Casteras, “The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy to
Symbolism: Continental Response and Impact on Artists in the Rosicrucian
Circle,” in Pre-Raphaelite Art in Its European Context, ed. Susan P. Casteras and
Alicia Craig Faxon (London: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1995), 33-50;
William Hauptman, “The Pre-Raphaelites, Modernism, and Fin-de-Siècle France,”
in Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor
of Gabriel P. Weisberg, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Laurinda S. Dixon
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 249-253; and Edith Hoffmann,
“Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Influence, in Paris,” The Burlington
Magazine 114, no. 830 (May 1972): 354-357. For a primary source examining the
influence of the British Pre-Raphaelites on the Artists of the Soul, and a few others
affiliated with Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes, see Camille Mauclair,
“The Influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in France,” The Artist (Dec. 1901): 169-180.
88 Chapter Three
24
Péladan, L'art ochlocratique, 48: “Le grand art contemporain est une quintette:
Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Ernest Hébert, Paul Baudry, Félicien
Rops.”
25
Péladan, L'art idéaliste et mystique, 67: “le plus idéaliste des peintres.”; Péladan,
L'art ochlocratique, 48: “Gustave Moreau possède le style lombardo-florentin”;
and Puvis de Chavannes is an “Idéaliste, issu de la tradition des quattrocentisti …
un rêve poétique d'esprit simple, une ode de l'éternel humain.”
26
Péladan, L'art idéaliste et mystique, 113: “Platon seul a osé considérer la Beauté
comme un être spirituel, existant indépendamment de nos conceptions.”
27
Ibid., 107: “Il n'y a pas d'autre Réalité que Dieu, il n'y a pas d'autre Vérité que
Dieu. Il n'y a pas d'autre Beauté que Dieu. ”
28
Hegel writes that “the final cause of the World at large we allege to be the
consciousness of its own freedom on the part of the Spirit.”G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures
on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894),
20-21. For Péladan’s references to Hegel, see Joséphin Péladan, Les idées et les
formes: antiquité orientale (Paris: Mercure de France, 1908), 176; Joséphin
Péladan, les idées et les formes: introduction à l’esthétique (Paris: E. Sansot,
1907), 55; Joséphin Péladan, Traité des antinomies: métaphysique (Paris:
Bibliothèque Charconal, 1901), 65, 253.
29
Péladan, L’art ochlocratique, 13, quoted and trans. in Dorra, Symbolist Art
Theories, 264: l’art s’élève ou déchoit, selon que les cœurs se rapprochent ou
s’éloignent de Dieu.”
30
G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford
University Press, 1975), 153-154.
31
Alphonse Germain, “L’idéal au Salon de la Rose+Croix,” L’Ermitage 1 (1892):
210, quoted in Marla H. Hand, “Carloz Schwabe’s Poster for the Salon de la
Rose+Croix: A Herald of the Ideal in Art,” Art Journal 44, no.2 (1984): 40.
32
The occult-cabalistic-Rosicrucian Brotherhood was founded in fifteenth-century
Germany and took the so-called “Rosy-Cross” as its symbol.
33
Hand, “Carloz Schwabe’s Poster,” 44.
34
John of Antioch, quoted in Jocelyn M. Woodward, Perseus, a Study in Greek
Art and Legend (Cambridge: The University Press, 1937), 23: “The Gorgon was a
lovely courtesan who, by her beauty, filled all who looked at her with amazement
so that they seemed to be turned to stone.”
35
Armand Point, “Florence. Botticelli. La Primavera,” Mercure de France, 17
(January 1896): 12-16, trans. in Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 272-275.
36
Ibid., 273.
37
G.-Albert Aurier, “Préface pour un livre de critique d'art (i),” Mercure de
France, December 1892, 331; reprinted in Œuvres posthumes (Paris: Mercure de
France, 1893), 201: “Le seul moyen de comprendre une œuvre d’art, c’est donc
d’en devenir l’amant.”
38
Aurier, Œuvres posthumes, 303-304, quoted and trans. in Marlais, Conservative
Echoes, 146: “Qui donc, je le demande, peut se vanter d’avoir vraiment compris la
Joconde ou le Saint Jean de Léonard, la Vierge glorieuse de l’Angelico ou celle de
Botticelli, avant d’avoir senti, devant ces êtres mystérieux et beaux, comme la
délicieuse fusion de son âme, à soi, en une autre âme, la leur?”
39
Point, “Florence. Botticelli. La Primavera,” 273.
40
John Keats, “27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse,” in John Keats: The
Major Works: Including Endymion, the Odes and Selected Letters, ed. Elizabeth
Cook (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2001), 419.
41
Point, “Florence. Botticelli. La Primavera,” 274.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Crépet (Paris: Connard,
1923) 1:17, quoted in Point, “Primitifs et Symbolistes,” 12: “La Nature est un
temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortis de confuses paroles; /
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles / Qui l’observent avec des
regards familiers.” English translation from Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 11.
45
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken,
1968), 156. For Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s spleen and idéal, see Nicole
Simek, “Baudelaire and the Problematic of the Reader in ‘Les Fleurs du mal,’”
Pacific Coast Philology 37 (2002): 44-47.
46
Point, “ Primitifs et Symbolistes,”13: “Les Artistes s’ingéniaient donc à trouver,
en observant la nature, les éléments nécessaires à créer des scènes vues par
l’Esprit.”
47
See, n.23.
48
Point, “Primitifs et Symbolistes,” 11: “L’Art, étant la plus claire manifestation
d’un individu comme d’une époque. … Il y eut des siècles et des peuples heureux,
où l’Artiste en parlant son pur langage était aisément compris. Les chefs-d’œuvre
que le temps nous a conservés témoignent de la splendeur des esprits lorsque la
pensée pouvait dresser sa flamme bien claire, librement, sous le ciel.”
49
Ibid.,12.
50
Paraphrased, ibid.: “L’Adam et L’Eve de Masolino, dans la chapelle del Carmine
à Florence, ressemblent le plus possible à un homme et à une femme: mais ce n’est
ni monsieur X charcutier, prenant son bain à la grenouillère, ni Mme Z concierge,
lavant sa nudité honteuse dans un tub.”
51
Ibid., 13: “Sous une influence panthéiste la Foi disparaît; un vent soufflé de la
Grèce, les Vénus, les Bacchus, surgissent de la terre … les artistes promènent leurs
fantaisies dans des bocages d’orangers où les Grâces s’entrelacent. … Vénus
blonde sous une pluie de roses, s’en vient au souffle des vents vers la Gaïa qui lui
présente le manteau royauté.”
52
Ibid.: “Et, partout, ce sont les éternels symboles, où l’humanité a généralisé les
grands sentiments qui l’agitent.”
53
Ibid., 16: “Étudiant les lois restreintes des apparences de la nature, nous
reconstituerons ainsi la vraie Tradition sans laquelle aucun art ne peut s’épanouir.”
54
Quoted and trans. E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs
in Western Medieval Christianity (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press,
90 Chapter Three
1990), xxiv-xxv: “Hortus conclusus soror mea sponsa / hortus conclusus, fons
signatus.”
55
Brian E. Daley, “The ‘Closed Garden’ and the ‘Sealed Fountain’: Song of Songs
4:12 in the Late Medieval Iconography of Mary,” in Medieval Gardens, ed.
Elizabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
and Collection, 1986).
56
Yvonne Sherratt, “Adorno’s aesthetic concept of aura,” Philosophy & Social
Criticism 33, no. 2 (2007): 172.
57
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations, 224.
58
For Benjamin’s notion of an appearance of distance as one element of Adorno’s
aura see Sherratt, “Adorno’s aesthetic concept of aura,” 157-159.
59
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 83.
60
Sherratt, “Adorno’s aesthetic concept of aura,” 165. For Adorno’s
characterization of aura as pointing beyond its givenness, see ibid., 159-165.
61
Ibid., 165.
62
Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 175. Adorno writes that “it counts among the most
profound insights of Hegel’s aesthetics that … it recognized … and located the
subjective success of the artwork in the disappearance of the subject in relation to
the artwork.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 57.
63
For Péladan’s scholarly work on Leonardo, see James E. Housefield, “The
Nineteenth-Century Renaissance and the Modern Facsimile: Leonardo da Vinci's
Notebooks, from Vavaisson-Mollien to Péladan and Duchamp,” The Renaissance
in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Yannick Portebois and Nicholas Terpstra (Toronto:
CRRS, 2003), 73-88.
64
Gabriel Séailles, Léonard de Vinci, 1452-1519: l’artiste & le savant: essai de
biographie psychologique (Paris: Perrin, 1892), 138: “[Leonardo] rendre tout ce
qui, sur un visage et dans un corps, peut apparaître de l’âme humaine.”
65
Paul Valéry, Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1894; Paris:
Gallimard, 1957), 11: “J’ai nommé homme et Léonard ce qui m’apparaissait alors
comme le pouvoir de l’esprit.”
66
Madeleine M. Smith, “Mallarmé and the Chimères,” in “Eros, Variations on an
Old Theme,” “special issue,” Yale French Studies 11 (1953), 68.
67
Sherratt, “Adorno’s aesthetic concept of aura,” 167.
68
Ibid., 168.
69
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 73.
70
71
Maurice Pujo, “Les artistes de l'âme: réponse à M. Octave Mirbeau,” L'art et la
vie (March 1896): 186-89, quoted in Jumeau-Lafond, Les peintres de l'âme, 21:
“La lumière diffuse n’existerait pas sans les yeux humains qui la reçoivent; elle ne
s’harmoniserait pas à travers le relief des objets sans l’esprit humain qui la dispose;
elle ne nous émouvrait pas sans le cœur humain qui l’anime.”
72
Gabriel Séailles, Les affirmations de la conscience moderne (Paris, 1903), 160,
quoted in Jumeau-Lafond, Les peintres de l'âme, 20: “Au lieu de regarder l’esprit
du point de vue de la chose, vous regardez la chose du point de vue de l’esprit.”
73
Stuart Merrill, “Armand Point et Haute-Claire,” Armand Point—La Plume: 19:
“correspond à toutes nos pensées, à tous nos sentiments; langage mystérieux qui se
dégage de toute matière.”
74
Paul and Victor Margueritte, “Hauteclaire,” Armand Point—La Plume: 114: “le
voyant de lois d’Harmonie.” The French reception of Burne-Jones’ linearity as
visual poetry may have influenced Point’s investment in line to reflect feeling.
Ruskin’s Ariadne Fiorentina (1892) locates the power of Botticelli’s line in its
expression of moral feeling. Through Merrill, Point may have known Pater’s
description of Botticelli as “before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm
of story … with the charm of line and color,” Walter Pater, The Renaissance:
Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888), 54.
75
76
Peter Cooke, unpublished conference abstract, “Gustave Moreau’s Les
Chimères,” for The Symbolist Movement: Its Origins and Its Consequences, April
22 - 25, 2009, Allerton Park, Monticello, Illinois.
77
Théophile Gautier, The Works of Théophile Gautier, ed. and trans. F. C. de
Sumichrast, vol. 24 (Cambridge, USA: University Press, 1903), 191.
78
Point, “Florence, Botticelli. La Primavera,” 273.
79
No person whose first or last name is Piazza has yet been connected to Point.
However, the possibility that this inscription may be an address of affection to
someone should not be ruled out.
80
Aristide Marie, La Forêt Symboliste; Esprits Et Visages (Paris: Firmin-Didot et
cie, 1936; reprint Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 33. Point also assisted in Mallarme’s
funeral, see Doré, Armand Point 1861-1932, 35. See also n. 10 for Point
association with Mallarmé in the early 1890s.
81
For other visitors, see Fanica, “A l’occasion du soixantième anniversaire de la
mort d’Armand Point,” 22-35.
82
M. Philippe Berthelot writes of Mallarmé and Point’s society at Marlotte in a
poem, ibid., 32: “On a toujours beaucoup aimé / Le bon Mallarmé.”
83
For Hegel in Mallarme’s work see Janine D. Langan, Hegel and Mallarmé
(Lanham: University Press of America, 1986).
84
D. J. Mossop, “Mallarmé’s ‘Quelle Soie. . .’ and ‘M’introduire dans ton
histoire’” The Modern Language Review 71, no. 4 (1976): 780.
85
Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected poems and other verse, trans. E.H. and A.M.
Blackmore (Oxford University Press, 2006), 77.
86
Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected poetry and prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York:
New Directions Publishing, 1982), 76.
87
How Point knew Leonardo’s Leda requires further research. He may have seen
the study (Fig. 3-8) directly, when he visited London. Two years after he created
Saint Cecilia the study was published (in reverse) in Eugène Muntz, /ponard de
Vinci l'artiste, le penseur, le savant (Paris: Hachette, 1898-99). He may also have
seen the famous copy in the Galleria Borghese, when he was in Rome.
92 Chapter Three
88
Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard,
2003), 2: 144: “une ligne quelque vibration.”
89
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J.
Payne (New York, 1969), 1:262.
90
Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories,11.
91
Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” in Baudelaire: Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude
Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-76) 2:425, quoted in Dorra, Symbolist Art
Theories, 3.
92
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, 185.
93
Ibid., 178.
94
Point quotes the passage in Italian in “Primitifs et Symbolistes,” 13: “E questa è
un’arte, che si chiama (dépignere) [Point omitted italics, replaced “i” with “é,” and
added parentheses] che conviene avere fantasia, e operazione di mano, (di trovare
cose non vedute, cacciandosi sotto ombra di naturali) [Point’s italics; Cennini’s
parentheses begin a few words later at “cacciandosi”] e formar con la mano dando
a dimostrare quello, che non é, sia [Point’s italics].” Point’s source was likely
Giuseppe Tambroni, Di Cennino Cennini Trattato della pittura messo in luce la
prima volta con annotazioni (Rome: P. Salviucci, 1821), 2. Point’s use of
“formar” rather than “fermarle”—which appears in a later edition based on a more
accurate manuscript by Gaetano and Carlo Milanesi (1859)—suggests his source
was Tambroni’s edition. The standard English translation of Il Libro dell’Arte
draws on the manuscript sources used for the Milanesi edition, see Cennino
d’Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook “Il Libro dell’Arte,” trans. Daniel
V. Thompson, Jr. (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 1: “And this is an
occupation known as painting, which calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in
order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural
objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not
exist.” In his French translation of Tambroni’s Italian passage quoted in his essay,
Point translates “di trovare cose non vedute” as “inventer et créer des choses
nouvelles,” stressing his interpretation of Cennini to mean the artist invents and
believes in new things hidden in the shadow of nature.
95
Pierre Leroux, “De la poésie de notre époque,” Revue encyclopédique 52 (1831):
404, quoted in Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 8.
96
For the science of Foucault’s Pendulum and its effect on popular and academic
culture, see William Tobin, The Life and Science of Léon Foucault : The Man Who
Proved the Earth Rotates (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
97
Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 8.
98
For these social projects, see Jumeau-Lafond, Painters of the Soul, 23-27.
99
Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 192.
100
The reading of Lyotard’s “city” as an arkheion comes from Sven Spieker, The
Big Archive.Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 4.
101
Merrill wrote on Morris in Société Nouvelle 14, no. 1 (1908), according to
Fanica, “A l’occasion du soixantième anniversaire de la mort d’Armand Point,” n.
25. For Point’s awareness of Morris, see Albert Métin, “Les Socialistes anglais: II.
De John Ruskin à William Morris,” Revue Blanche (January 1896): 22 et seq.
102
Jumeau-Lafond, Painters of the Soul, 24-25.
103
Benjamin, Illuminations, 187.
104
Ibid., 186.
105
Paul and Victor Margueritte, “Hauteclaire,” 118: “La Cité Future.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ABY WARBURG, DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI,
AND SANDRO BOTTICELLI:
THE SEARCH FOR SYMBOLIC FORM
DEBORAH H. CIBELLI
While Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) most tangible legacy to art history

was the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in 1926, an
institution that housed his personal library in Hamburg, Germany until the
collection of approximately 60,000 books was moved to London in 1933
where eleven years later it became the Warburg Institute of the University
of London, he had established his place among historians as early as 1893
with the publication of his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli.1 For Warburg
was among the eminent scholars, poets, and painters to rediscover the art
of Botticelli during the 19th century.2 Therefore, it is notable that Warburg
acknowledged the Symbolist poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-82) one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by
including Rossetti’s poem, “For Spring by Sandro Botticelli” in his thesis.
The reference suggests that Rossetti’s work informed Warburg’s close
reading of Botticelli’s Spring, the famous Primavera (Fig. 4-1).3 Indeed,
Fritz Saxl, the first director of the Warburg library, linked Warburg’s
scholarly agenda with the artistic mission of the Pre-Raphaelites. Saxl
noted the Pre-Raphaelites inspired Warburg to embark upon his study of
the Florentine Renaissance at the beginning of his career even before
Warburg began his dissertation.4 He found the Pre-Raphaelites, motivated
Warburg “to save the Quattrocento from sentimental gush.”5 This is a
charge that sounds much like the Pre-Raphaelite criticism of academic art
and signals Warburg’s mission to examine the nature of the viewer’s
experience of the art of the past. Thus, further study of the Pre-Raphaelites
will allow us to assess the impact of Rossetti’s symbolist art and poetry on
Warburg’s scholarship and further define what constituted a symbol for
Warburg, who entered the field of art history at the fin de siècle.
The Search for Symbolic Form 95
Fig. 4-1. Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera (Spring), 1477. Tempera on wood, 203 x
314 cm. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Uffizi, Florence,
Italy.
Rossetti’s interest in the painter was related to his study of the literary
work of Dante Alghieri.6 The son of a Dante scholar, Rossetti was named
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti until he translated the Vita nuova c. 1850
and so closely associated with the poetry, he called himself Dante Gabriel
Rossetti.7 For Rossetti, the Divina Commedia and the Vita nuova, the
poem Dante wrote about his youth, were significant because Dante
transformed Beatrice Portinari, who died in 1290, into a transcendent
figure.8 Deeply inspired by Dante throughout his career, Rossetti produced
images and writing about the visual arts that often required the presence of
a real loved one and conflated love and death. In an early sonnet, “The
Portrait” of 1847, about the artist setting out to paint his dead lover’s
picture, Rossetti expressed his sentiments on the way in which the artist
strived to surpass a superficial naturalism and combine body and spirit and
reality and symbol. In the verse the artist asks the “Lord of all
compassionate control” for assistance and strives “to show . . . her inner
self . . .so that he who seeks . . . may know . . . of her soul.” Rossetti
acknowledged the artist’s pivotal role when he noted, those who “would
look on her must come to me.”9
Such emotional content for Rossetti was as indebted to Botticelli’s
96 Chapter Four
painting as it was to Dante’s poetry. In England Botticelli’s Dante

drawings were well known, setting the stage for the controversial sale of a
manuscript with eighty-eight of Botticelli’s illustrations to the Divina
Commedia in 1882, the year of Rossetti’s death.10 Rossetti had also read in
Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, et architettori that
Botticelli’s drawings had been reproduced as engravings by Baccio
Baldini.11 Furthermore, although Rossetti never traveled to Italy, he first
viewed paintings by Botticelli in France and in 1867 he acquired a portrait
by Botticelli from c. 1471 of a female figure that is now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London (Fig. 4-2).12
Fig. 4-2. Sandro Botticelli, Smeralda Bandinelli, 1471. Tempera on panel, 65.7 x
41 cm. ¤ V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Although the painting of Smeralda Bandinelli had the sixteenth-

century inscription that may have been added to identify the sculptor
Baccio Bandinelli’s grandmother by name, Rossetti was convinced the
woman in the portrait had also served as the model for figures in
Botticelli’s other work. As he informed Jane Burden, wife of William
Morris, “The principal head in the Spring and several in other pictures–are
obviously the woman represented in that portrait I have got, and quite
different from the types of his wife and family which I judge are those of
his Holy Families and other subjects.”13
In 1879, Rossetti wrote to Jane Morris that he received photos Charles
Fairfax Murray had taken in Italy of the frescoes Lorenzo Tornabuoni
Presented by Grammar to Prudentia and the Other Liberal Arts and
Giovanna degli Albizzi Receiving a Gift of Flowers from Venus of c. 1486
from the Villa Lemmi and of Spring.14 However it was the portrait of
Smeralda Bandinelli that influenced the way in which Rossetti portrayed
Jane Morris, who was “the last great love” of his life.15 His portrait of
Morris titled, La Donna Della Finestra, from 1879 depicted Morris in the
guise of the woman at a window from the Vita nuova who consoled Dante
after the death of Beatrice (Fig. 4-3). Morris may have been portrayed in
this way because she comforted Rossetti after the death of his wife Lizzie
Siddal who died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, just two years after
Rossetti and Siddal were married.16
In the portrait, Morris functioned as both an historical figure and as a
symbol, as William Michael Rossetti observed in the following:
He contemplated the Donna as a real woman; but neither was her human
reality intended to be regarded as the essence of the pictorial presentment
—rather her personal reality subserving the purpose of poetic suggestion—
an emotion embodied in feminine form—a passion of which beautiful
flesh-and-blood constitutes the vesture. Humanly she is the Lady at the
Window; mentally she is the Lady of Pity. This interpretation of soul and
body—this sense of an equal and indefeasible reality of the thing
symbolized, and of the form which conveys the symbol–this externalism
and internalism—are constantly to be understood as the key-note of
Rossetti’s aim and performance in art.17
Thus, as an artist Rossetti emulated Dante’s poetry and Botticelli’s

painting and endeavored to portray not only Morris’ outward appearance
but also her inner spirit.
98 Chapter Four
Fig. 4-3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Donna Della Finestra, 1879. Oil on canvas.
100.65 x 73.98 cm. Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Grenville
L. Winthrop, 1943.200. Photo: Katya Kallsen ¤ President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
At least a decade before he painted La Donna Della Finestra, Rossetti

viewed Botticelli’s the Mystic Nativity when it was exhibited at Leeds in
1868, before it was sold to the National Gallery in 1878 by W. Fuller
Maitland (Fig. 4-4).18 Rossetti adapted elements from the Mystic Nativity
for The Blessed Damozel of 1871-78, a painting now at the Fogg Art
Museum of Harvard University that was based upon Rossetti’s poem from
1847 (Fig. 4-5).19 The embracing couples circling the female figure represent
lovers who have been reunited in heaven and reference the embracing men
and angels located in the foreground of the Mystic Nativity.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti had described the predella as “representing the
lover lying in an autumn landscape and looking upwards.”20 The
composition was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s To One in Paradise of
1834 in which the lover gazes up and yearns to join her in heaven. In
response Rossetti wrote that Poe, “had done the utmost it was possible to
do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse the
conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in
heaven.”21 Thus, the grief and longing expressed in the poem and the
painting titled The Blessed Damozel were integrally linked to Botticelli’s
painting of the Mystic Nativity and to the poetry of Poe and Dante.
The duality of the female figure as both real woman and expressive
allegorical figure that Rossetti saw crystallized in the art of Botticelli and
in poetry became the major focus of Warburg’s scholarship.22 Warburg
looked for dynamic figures in the art of Botticelli because he saw passions
such as terror and fear codified in classical antiquity and in poetry as part
of cultural memory. He may have focused upon the darker emotions
because of his own history of mental illness: Warburg was diagnosed as a
manic-depressive schizophrenic and institutionalized in 1918 for six
years.23 Such pathos survived in art of the Renaissance, for according to
Warburg:
The Quattrocento knew how to give artistic worth to the two-fold content
of the ancient pagan world. The artists of the Early Renaissance revered
antiquity, now restored, just as much for its lawful beauty as for the
mastery with which it lent expression to emotional pathos. The gestural
superlatives that had hitherto been scorned were thus the right aids in an
age wrestling for greater freedom of expression, in the literal and
superlative sense.24
In his dissertation chapter on Spring, Warburg addressed the role of

antiquity for the Renaissance and referred to the Hellenistic statue of the
dying Laocoön and his sons battling snakes that Gotthold Ephriam Lessing
used to compare art and poetry in his treatise from 1766.25 Warburg also
referenced other antique sources such as the relief depicting Achilles from
a sarcophagus at Woburn Abbey that had been in Santa Maria Araceli in
Rome as well as the statue of the female figure at the Uffizi in Florence he
identified as Pomona, the goddess who was wooed by Vertumnus, and was
associated with gardens and ripening fruit.26 Searching for literary glosses
on Botticelli’s paintings that showed an appreciation of symbolic imagery
100 Chapter Four
from his own age as well as from the past, Warburg selected the second
verse of Rossetti’s sonnet “For Spring by Sandro Botticelli.”27 He used
the last part of the final verse for the epigram so that the second chapter of
his dissertation began with the following questions:
Fig. 4-4. Sandro Botticelli, “Mystic Nativity,” 1500. Oil on canvas, 108.6 x 74.9
cm. Bought, 1878. (NG1034) ¤ National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY.
National Gallery, London, Great Britain.
Fig. 4-5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel, 1871-1878. Oil on canvas.
136.84 x 96.52 cm. Predella 35.2 x 96.2 cm. Framed 212.09 x 133.03 x 8.89 cm.
Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop,
1943.202. Photo: Imaging Department ¤ President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
… What mystery here is read

Of homage or of hope? But how command
Dead Springs to answer? And how question here
These mummers of that wind-withered New Year?28
For scholar Sandy Steyger, who has assessed Rossetti’s re-discovery of

Botticelli, the verse posed the fundamental question, “What happens to life
after death?”29 According to Steyger, Rossetti wrote the verse c. 1880 to
102 Chapter Four
honor Lizzie Siddal nearly twenty years after she died. This suggests the
sonnet was autobiographical, even though Rossetti made mortality central
to his art and poetry and admired the restraint and hope Dante expressed in
the face of death throughout his career.30
It is intriguing to think that Warburg was one of Rossetti’s
contemporaries who regarded the sonnet, “Spring” as an expression of
Rossetti’s grief written nearly two decades after Siddal’s death. Indeed,
Warburg used Rossetti’s verse from Spring to interpret Botticelli’s
painting as an image of bereavement. Warburg arrived at this reading by
making the assumption that the painting elicited the same feelings in
contemporary viewers that were experienced by viewers in the past. Thus,
Warburg asked similar questions as Rossetti when he explored the idea
that Botticelli’s Spring commemorated a deceased lover and proposed that
the figure of Spring was a portrait of Simonetta Cattaneo, “the beautiful
Genoese-born wife of the Florentine Marco Vespucci, who died of
consumption on 26 April [1476] at the age of twenty-three.”31
Warburg based his identification of Spring as Simonetta on poetry
citing four sonnets by Lorenzo de Medici dedicated to Simonetta and notes
by Angelo Poliziano that were inspired by Dante’s commentary for the
Vita nuova. As Warburg noted:
In the first sonnet, Lorenzo sees Simonetta in a bright star that he notices
one night while sunk in a grief-stricken reverie. In the second, he likens her
to the flower Clytië, waiting in vain for the Sun to return and restore her to
life. In the third, he bewails her death, which has robbed him of all joy;
Muses and Graces must help him to lament. The fourth sonnet is the
expression of deepest anguish. He sees no escape from racking pain but
death.32
The references to Dante’s Vita nuova in Poliziano made it possible for

Warburg to connect the painting to Rossetti’s poetry and to see the work
as a lamentation.
Warburg had established an important precedent for scholars when he
traced Spring to an historical figure. Even those art historians who have
challenged Warburg’s identification of Simonetta Vespucci have continued
to search for references to other notable figures. Ronald Lightbown, for
example, has argued Spring celebrated the marriage between Lorenzo di
Pierfrancesco and Semiramide d’Appiano in his research originally
published in 1978, selecting historical figures, long after Warburg had
made the identification of the central figure as Simonetta Vespucci.33
Warburg further supported the theory regarding Simonetta quoting a
poem by Bernardo Pulci in which Venus is asked to return Simonetta to
earth.34 In assessing this elegy, Warburg concluded:
It may be—and this is offered by way of hypothesis—that to Lorenzo and

his friends, the image of the personified Spring, the companion of Venus,
who recalls the earth to life, the consolatory personification of renewal,
represented the memory of “la bella Simonetta.”35
Warburg conflated the female figure in Botticelli’s Primavera or Spring

with Venus who presides over the other allegorical figures in the painting,
when he stated:
If we bear in mind that the Realm of Venus [Spring] had its origin in a sad
event, this makes the pose and bearing of Venus more readily
comprehensible: she gazes earnestly at the viewer, her head inclined
toward her right hand, which she raises in an admonitory gesture.36
The reference to Venus as a symbol of renewal, suggested by classical

literature and Renaissance poetry, can be found in other iconographic
studies.37 Such readings made the female figures archetypal.
Kurt W. Forster discussed the symbolic import of such female figures
as embodying human desire in his comments on Ernst Gombrich’s
intellectual biography of Warburg:
Under this quizzical gaze, the “nymph” is revealed as a late Victorian male
fantasy, an erotic wish fulfillment par excellence. Because the forms in
which she is represented largely deprive her of her own sexuality, the
nymph appears passive and receptive to fantasy projections. She owes her
“radiance” to her apparent “detachment”; she owes her freshness to a state
of androgyny. She herself is not necessarily “moved” but addresses the
beholder’s feelings through her “accessory forms in motion.”38
Gombrich found the accessory forms, referring to flowing hair and

billowing drapery, in John’s Ruskin’s 1874 copy of Botticelli’s Zipporah
from the central fresco of the Life of Moses in the Sistine Chapel and in
Marcel Proust’s novel in which Swann compared his lover to Jethro’s
daughter Zipporah from the same fresco to express his passion and
ambivalence.39
For Gombrich the female figures were iconic images during the late
Victorian period. He noted the women represented a type of pathos
formula or symbolic form for Warburg, who as a German art historian was
profoundly influenced by Lessing and Friedrich Nietzsche.40 Accordingly,
Botticelli’s figures elicited a core response from viewers. For as we have
seen, Warburg used the elegiac theme expressed in Rossetti’s sonnet to
104 Chapter Four
argue the female figure in Botticelli’s Spring commemorated Simonetta

Vespucci upon her death and to ask sweeping questions about mortality
and art.41
Warburg would spend the rest of his career studying astrology and
sympathetic magic for comparable symbols.42 He visited Arizona and New
Mexico in 1895-96 and observed rituals performed by the Pueblo and
Hopi Indians to produce rain. The dancers and serpents that symbolized
lightening reminded him of the writhing figures and snakes from the statue
of the Laocoön.43 Warburg attributed such forms to primal instincts that
seemed to have lost little efficacy in the modern world and directed his
efforts at documenting them in his last project, a picture atlas titled
Mnemosyne.44 Plate 39 of the memory book included images of Spring and
the Birth of Venus as well as other depictions of animated female figures
(Fig. 4-6).
Using the method of montage to juxtapose images from the history of
art and from popular culture, Warburg endeavored to show that the images
had lasting resonance.45
Warburg never abandoned his earlier ideas regarding empathy and
pathos that began with his appreciation of Dantean themes in Rossetti’s
poetry. Indeed, without Rossetti’s sonnet on Spring and his interpretation
of Botticelli’s painting as an image of bereavement there is some question
as to whether Warburg would have drafted the second chapter of his thesis
in quite the same way as he pursued his research on symbolic forms
surviving in culture. Had Warburg failed in his approach, it might have
changed the very discipline of art history, a field which has made the
search for classical models and other prototypes and sources that are both
visual and literary so central to iconology, a method Warburg’s colleague
Erwin Panofsky defined as a search for symbolic meaning.46
If we cast Warburg’s career in terms of the issues of fate and personal
destiny he explored in his other scholarship on Renaissance artists and
patrons such as Francesco Sassetti, the Florentine merchant who referred
to the goddess Fortuna in his personal emblems, we might say that it was
Warburg’s “fortune” to formulate his work, enriched by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti’s poetry, at an important juncture in the history of art and the
Symbolist movement.47
Fig. 4-6. Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne, Plate 39. (The Warburg Institute, Archive)
University of London.
Bibliography
Buchanan, Robert [Thomas Maitland]. “The Fleshy School of Poetry: Mr.
D. G. Rossetti.” Contemporary Review 18 (October 1871): 334–50.
Cheney, Liana De Girolami. Botticelli’s Neoplatonic Images. 1985.
Reprint, Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanista, 1993.
Clark, Kenneth. The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s Divine
Comedy After the Originals in the Berlin Museums and the Vatican.
1954. Reprint, New York; Hagerstown; San Francisco; London:
Harper & Row, 1976.
The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A
Hypermedia Research Archive. www.rossettiarchive.org/ (accessed
October 28, 2009).
Cropper, Elizabeth. “On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo,
and the Vernacular Style. ” Art Bulletin 58, no. 3 (Sept. 1976): 374–94.
106 Chapter Four
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris. Their Correspondence. Edited

by John Bryson in association with Janet Camp Troxell. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1976.
Davies, Martin. The Earlier Italian Schools. 1951. Reprint, London: The
National Gallery, 1986.
Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism.
Translated by Philip Mairet. 1961. Reprint, New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1969.
Faxon, Alicia Craig. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. New York: Abbeville Press,
1989.
—. “Rossetti’s Images of Botticelli.” Visual Resources 12 (1996): 53–62.
Ferretti, Silvia. Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and
History. Translated by Richard Pierce. 1984. Reprint, New Haven, CT
and London: Yale University Press, 1989.
Forster, Kurt W. “Introduction.” In Aby Warburg The Renewal of Pagan
Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European
Renaissance, 1-75. Translated by David Britt. Los Angeles: The Getty
Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999.
Gombrich, Ernst H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography with a
memoir on the History of the Library by F. Saxl. 1970. Reprint,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Horne, Herbert P. Botticelli, Painter of Florence. 1908. Reprint, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephriam. Laocoön An Essay on the Limits of Painting
and Poetry. 1766. Translated and edited by Edward Allen McCormick.
1962. Reprint, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984.
Levey, Michael. “Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England.” Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, nos. 3/4 (July-December
1960): 291–306.
Lightbown, Ronald. Sandro Botticelli Life and Work. 2nd ed. New York:
Abbeville, 1989.
Marmor, Max C. “From Purgatory to the ‘Primavera’: Some Observations
on Botticelli and Dante.” Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 199–
212.
Michaud, Philippe-Alain. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion.
Translated by Sophie Hawkes. New York: Zone Books, 2004.
Milbank, Alison. Dante and the Victorians. Manchester, UK and New
York: Manchester University Press, 1998.
Panofsky, Erwin. “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the
Study of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts, 26–54.
1955. Reprint, Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1974.

Prettejohn, Elizabeth. “Rossetti and the Fleshy School.” In Art for Art’s
Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, 201-31. New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 2007.
Rampley, Matthew. “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of
Art.” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (March 1997): 41–55.
—. “Mimesis and Allegory: On Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin.” In
Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects, 121–49. Edited
by Richard Woodfield. Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India,
Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Russia, Singapore,
Switzerland: G+B Arts International, 2001.
Rose, Andrea. The Pre-Raphaelites. 1977. Reprint, London: Phaidon,
1992.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti. Dante Gabriel
Rossetti: His Family–Letters. 2 vols. 1895. Reprint, New York: AMS
Press, 1970.
Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and
Writer. London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell, 1889.
—. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Harold Hartley. “Dante Rossetti and
Elizabeth Siddal.” Burlington Magazine 1, no. 3 (May 1903): 273–95.
Russell, Mark A. Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and
the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg, 1896-1918. New York;
Oxford: Berghahn, 2007.
Saxl, Fritz. “Das Warburg-Institut 1944.” In Porträt aus Büchern:
Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg, 1933, London,
129–31. Edited by Michael Diers. Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz
Verlag, 1993.
Schoell-Glass, Charlotte. “’Serious Issues’: The Last Plates of Warburg’s
Picture Atlas Mnemosyne.” In Art History as Cultural History:
Warburg’s Projects, 183–208. Edited by Richard Woodfield. Australia,
Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, The
Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland: G+B Arts International,
2001.
Steyger, Sandy May. “The ‘re-discovery’ of Botticelli in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. PhD diss., Keele University, 2001.
Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, et architettori
nelle redazioni del 1500 e 1568. Edited by Paola Barocchi and Rossana
Bettani, 6 vols. Sansoni: Florence, 1966-87.
Warburg, Aby. “The Entry of the Idealizing Classical Style in the
Paintings of the Early Renaissance.” In Art History as Cultural
History: Warburg’s Projects, 7-31. Edited by Richard Woodfield.
108 Chapter Four
Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Luxembourg,

Malaysia, The Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland: G+B Arts
International, 2001.
—. “Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunction to His Sons (1907).” In Aby
Warburg The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the
Cultural History of the European Renaissance, 223-62. Translated by
David Britt. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History
of Art and the Humanities, 1999.
—. Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling”: Eine
Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der
italienischen Frührenaissance. Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss,
1893.
—. “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America
(1923).” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 177-206, 538.
Edited by Donald Preziosi. Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
—. “Sandro Botticelli (1898).” In Aby Warburg The Renewal of Pagan
Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European
Renaissance, 157-64. Translated by David Britt. Los Angeles: The
Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities,
1999.
—. “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of
Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance (1893).” In Aby
Warburg The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the
Cultural History of the European Renaissance, 89-156. Translated by
David Britt. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History
of Art and the Humanities, 1999.
Watts, Barbara. “The Pre-Raphaelite and the International Competition
for Sandro Botticelli’s Dante Drawings Manuscript.” In Pre-
Raphaelite Art in its European Context, 81-99. Edited by Susan P.
Casteras and Alicia Craix Faxon. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses,
1995.
Weinberg, Gail S. “D. G. Rossetti’s ownership of Botticelli’s ‘Smeralda
Brandini’.” Burlington Magazine 146, no. 1210 (January 2004): 20–26.
Fig. 4-1. Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera (Spring), 1477. Tempera on
wood, 203 x 314 cm. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
Uffizi, Florence, Italy.
Fig. 4-2. Sandro Botticelli, Smeralda Bandinelli, 1471. Tempera on panel,

65.7 x 41 cm. ¤ V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Fig. 4-3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Donna Della Finestra, 1879. Oil on
canvas. 100.65 x 73.98 cm. Framed 137.16 x 111.13 x 8.98 cm. Harvard
Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop,
1943.200. Photo: Katya Kallsen ¤ President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
Fig. 4-4. Sandro Botticelli, “Mystic Nativity,” 1500. Oil on canvas, 108.6
x 74.9 cm. Bought, 1878. (NG1034) ¤ National Gallery, London / Art
Resource, NY. National Gallery, London, Great Britain.
Fig. 4-5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel, 1871-1878. Oil on
canvas. 136.84 x 96.52 cm. Predella 35.2 x 96.2 cm. Framed 212.09 x
133.03 x 8.89 cm. Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of
Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.202. Photo: Imaging Department ¤ President
and Fellows of Harvard College.
Fig. 4-6. Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne, Plate 39. (The Warburg Institute,
Archive) University of London.
Notes
1
Warburg’s dissertation was originally published as Sandro Botticellis “Geburt
der Venus” und “Frühling”: Eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der
Antike in der italienischen Frührenaissance (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss,
1893). A later edition, Aby Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike
Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance,
ed. Gertrude Bing, in association with Fritz Rougemont (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner
Verlag, 1932), has been translated from the Italian by Caroline Beamish and from
the Latin by Carol Lanham as “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring” in
Aby Warburg The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:Contributions to the Cultural
History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: The Getty
Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 89-156. For
information on the library see Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual
Biography with a memoir on the History of the Library by F. Saxl (1970; repr.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 15.
2
Michael Levey, “Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, nos. 3/4 (July-December 1960): 305-06.
3
Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 112.
110 Chapter Four
4
Fritz Saxl wrote, “Vielleicht waren es unter andern auch die Ideen der englischen
Präraphaeliten, die ihn anregten, die florentinische Renaissance, im besonderen
unter dem Gesichtspunkt der heidnischen Antike, zu untersuchen.” See “Porträt
aus Büchern: Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg, 1933 London,
ed., Michael Diers, (Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz Verlag, 1993), 130, cited in
Mark Russell, Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public
Purposes of Art in Hamburg, 1896-1918 New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), 59,
82n17.
5
Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 19, cited in Russell, 75.
6
See the letters written to Jane Morris in which Rossetti mentions that he must
return 5 of the 6 volumes of Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori,
scultori, et architettori first published in 1550 and revised in 1568. Rossetti also
discussed Vasari’s biography of Botticelli. See Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane
Morris. Their Correspondence, ed. John Bryson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976),
97, 110. See also Max C. Marmor, “From Purgatory to the ‘Primavera’: Some
Observations on Botticelli and Dante,” Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 200-
201.
7
William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer
(London, Paris, New York, and Melbourne: Cassell, 1889), 4. For Rossetti’s
poetry and imagery see, The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive, www.rossettiarchive.org/ (accessed
October 28, 2009).
8
Dante Gabriel Rossetti had research on Beatrice Portinari (1266-90), who married
the Florentine merchant Simone de’ Bardi before her untimely death. Rossetti
prepared the research for La Beatrice di Dante, a work he had privately printed in
1842. Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 1998), 102, 253n2.
9
Sandy May Steyger, “The ‘re-discovery’ of Botticelli in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries,” (Ph.D. diss., Keele University, 2001), 36. For the representation
of beauty, associated with Petrarch’s Laura as well as Dante’s Beatrice, see
Elizabeth Cropper, “On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the
Vernacular Style,” Art Bulletin 58, no. 3 (Sept. 1976): 388, 391-92.
10
For the manuscript in the libraries of the Duke of Hamilton of Britain that went
on sale in 1882, see Barbara Watts, “The Pre-Raphaelite and the International
Competition for Sandro Botticelli’s Dante Drawings Manuscript” in Pre-
Raphaelite Art in its European Context, eds. Susan P. Casteras and Alicia Craig
Faxon (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London:
Associated University Presses, 1995), 91.
11
See note 6. In his biography of Botticelli, Vasari referred to Botticelli’s drawings
for the Divina Commedia that were engraved by Baccio Baldini. See Le vite de’
più eccellenti pittori, scultori, et architettori nelle redazioni del 1500 e 1568, eds.
Paola Barrocchi and Rossana Bettani, 6 vols. (Florence: Sasoni, 1966-87), III: 516-
17. Nineteen copperplate engravings by Baldini were published in the 1481 edition
of the Divina Commedia with the commentary by Cristoforo Landino. See Kenneth
Clark, The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s Divine Comedy After the
Originals in the Berlin Museums and the Vatican (1954; repr., (New York;
Hagerstown; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row, 1976), 8.
12
Gabriel Weinberg, “D. G. Rossetti’s ownership of Botticelli’s Smeralda
Brandini,” Burlington Magazine 146, no. 1210 (January 2004): 20-26.
13
For the letter see, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris, 110.
14
Rossetti wrote to Morris in August of photographs Murray sent him in 1879,
stating:
I forgot whether I told you that I had got through Murray some wonderful
photos from Italy—especially 2 of Botticelli’s the original frescoes of
which were lately recovered from whitewash in an old villa. The subjects
are of a romantic kind full of lovely figures. Also a large one of his Spring.
(Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris, 110).
The frescoes from the Villa Lemmi commissioned by Lorenzo di Medici to
celebrate the marriage of Lorenzo Tornabuoni to Giovanna Albizzi in 1486 were
only uncovered in 1873. They are now in the Louvre. The photographs Murray
took of the frescoes from the Villa Lemmi that Rossetti mentioned were later lost.
See Lightbown, 172-75. Rossetti also wrote to Murray about Botticelli in letters
dated 4 January and 2 June 1880 that are now in the Harry Ranson Humanities
Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. The letters are cited by
Alicia Craig Faxon in “Rossetti’s Images of Botticelli,” Visual Resources 12
(1996): 55, 61n4.
15
Faxon, 60.
16
Faxon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 197.
17
Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer, 108, also quoted in Elizabeth
Prettejohn, “Rossetti and the Fleshy School,” in Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in
Victorian Painting (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007),
230.
18
W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer, 108. See also O.
Doughty and J. R. Wahl, eds., Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1861-1870,
(Oxford 1965-67), II, letter 786, 664-65, cited by Weinberg, 25. For the
provenance of the Mystic Nativity see Martin Davies, The Earlier Italian Schools,
(1951; repr., London: The National Gallery, 1986), 106
19
Alicia Craig Faxon made the comparison between the Mystic Nativity and The
Blessed Damozel in Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989),
209. See also Prettejohn, 204.
20
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris, 50.
21
Faxon, 37, cites To One in Paradise of 1834. Similarly, Andrea Rose, in The
Pre-Raphaelites (1977; repr., London: Phaidon, 1992), 118, notes the sonnet, “The
Blessed Damozel,” first published in 1847, was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe.
Rossetti’s poem states:
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
112 Chapter Four
And the stars in her hair were seven.
“I wish that he were come to me,

For he will come,” she said.
Have I not prayed in Heaven?–on earth
Lord, Lord, has he not pray’d?
Are not two prayers a perfect strength?
And shall I feel afraid?”
22
Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie
Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 27.
23
Russell, 22, 34, 40.
24
Warburg, “The Entry of the Idealizing Classical Style in the Paintings of the
Renaissance,” in Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects, ed. Richard
Woodfield. (Australia, Canada, France, German, India, Japan, Luxembourg,
Malaysia, The Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland: G+B Arts
International, 2001), 28.
25
See Gotthold Ephriam Lessing, Laocoön An Essay on the Limits of Painting and
Poetry. 1766, trans. and ed. Edward Allen McCormick, (1962; repr., Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 42 and Warburg, “Sandro
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 106.
26
See Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 127.
27
The sonnet was originally published in Ballads and Sonnets in 1881. See Watts,
97fn21.
28
Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 112, omitted the
following verse:
Birth-bare, not death-bare yet, the young stems stand
This lady’s temple-columns: o’er her head
love wings his shaft”
(Herbert Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence (1908; repr. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980), xviii).
29
Steyger, 228.
30
Among Rossetti’s contemporaries, Robert Buchanan wrote a negative review
titled, “The Fleshy School of Poetry” in which he noted there were those who
interpreted “Blessed Damozel” as a poem “of one actually lost to the writer”
although this could not be substantiated. See Robert Buchanan [Thomas Maitland],
“The Fleshy School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti,” Contemporary Review 18
(October 1871): 340.
“Blessed Damozel” was written in 1847 and was later revised in 1850, 1856,
1870, and 1881. Rose, 118. Thus, Rossetti was already concerned with the theme
of loss before he met Siddal.
W. M. Rossetti, in “Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal,” Burlington
Magazine 1, no. 3 (May 1903): 274, noted that his brother first learned of Siddal
around 1848 because she had modeled for Walter Howell Deverell. Upon viewing
Deverell’s work, he wanted to have her model for a painting of Dante’s Beatrice or
another subject. Rossetti then painted a watercolor of Siddal in 1850 and continued
to depict her in other work.

31
32
Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 137. In this essay on
Botticelli written in 1898, Warburg argued Angelo Poliziano’s Giostra was written
in honor of his friend Lorenzo de’ Medici’s brother, Giuliano and Simonetta
Vespucci, the woman both the Medici “had loved with all the chivalrous reverence
that Dante felt for Beatrice or Petrarch for Laura.” See Warburg, “Sandro
Botticelli,” 158.
33
Lightbown, 121, notes that the inventories of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and his
brother Giuliano show Spring was displayed on the wall in the room next to
Lorenzo’s bedroom in their residence in Florence.
34
Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 64 and Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus
and Spring,” 137-38.
35
36
37
For the iconographic tradition and the fashion for archetypes, see Mircea Eliade,
Images and Symbols Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet. (1961;
repr., New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), 132. W. Déonna’s, “Aphrodite à la
coquille” Revue Archéologique (November-December 1917), 312-416 cited in
Eliade, 132. Eliade discussed the imagery associated with Venus as follows:
Often, moreover, the dead woman is identified with Venus; she is often
represented upon the sarcophagus with the breast bared and the dove at her
feet; by thus identifying herself with the archetype of life in perpetual
renewal, the deceased woman is ensuring her own resurrection (132).
For the interpretations of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as referring to
Simonetta, see Liana De Girolami Cheney, Botticelli’s Neoplatonic Images
(1985, repr., Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanista, 1993), 114-15.
38
Kurt W. Forster, Introduction to Aby Warburg The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:
Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David
Britt (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1999), 19.
39
Forster, 19, includes Proust’s description:
As she stood there beside him [Swann], brushing his neck with the
loosened tresses of her hair, bending one knee in what was almost a
dancer’s pose, so that she could lean without tiring herself over the picture,
at which she was gazing, with bended head, out of those great
eyes,…Swann was struck by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah,
Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sixtine frescoes.
40
Warburg nonetheless differed from Lessing and Nietzsche in that he ascribed
more significance to the visual arts. For Lessing, in discussing the Laocoön, asked
“why it is legitimate for Virgil to describe the agonized screams of the suffering
priest, while the sculptor only permits him a sigh?” Gombrich, 24. Gombrich, vii,
also stated that Warburg departed from Nietzsche in that he focused upon the
Dionysiac elements in the art of antiquity while Nietzsche preferred music and
drama and presented the visual arts as Apollonian. For further discussion of
114 Chapter Four
Nietzsche’s influence on Warburg, see Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and

Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce (1984; repr. New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 2-5, 53-66.
41
Prettejohn, 231.
42
Matthew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of
Art,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (March 1997): 50. See also Rampley, “Mimesis and
Allegory: On Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin,” in Art History as Cultural
History: Warburg’s Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield, (Australia, Canada,
France, Germany, India, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, The Netherlands,
Russia, Singapore, Switzerland: G+B Arts International, 2001), 121.
43
Aby Warburg, “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America
(1923)” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi
(Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 196.
44
For Warburg’s books, see Michaud, 79. Rossetti produced an image of the Greek
goddess Mnemosyne. The painting was also called La Ricordanza or The Lamp of
Memory. See Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti His Family-Letters, vol. 1 (1895; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1970),
363.
45
Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “’Serious Issues’: The Last Plates of Warburg’s Picture
Atlas Mnemosyne,” in Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects, 189.
46
Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of
Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts, (1955; repr., Woodstock, NY:
The Overlook Press, 1974), 38.
47
Warburg, “Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunction to His Sons (1907),” in Aby
Warburg The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 240-44.
PART II:
SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT
CHAPTER FIVE
SYMBOLISM AND CRIME:
ARCHITECTURE OF THE VIENNA SECESSION
LARRY SHINER
Vienna is famous for its nineteenth century Ringstrasse lined with

massive public buildings in historicist styles, from the Gothic City Hall
and the Neo-Classical Parliament to many echoes of Baroque and
Renaissance styles, such as the Opera or the Academy of Fine Arts. Just
off the Ringstrasse and directly behind the Academy of Fine Arts stands a
small white art exhibition hall, built in 1898 and known today simply as
“the Secession.”1
The Secession building provoked intense controversy when it was
built, drawing such epithets as “a Mahdi tomb,” “an Assyrian outhouse,”
or simply “the Golden Cabbage” on account of its dome.2 Today,
historians tend to align it with either Art Nouveau on account of its leafy,
openwork dome or with early Modernism on account of its blocky, almost
bare front walls. But I think that there are also reasons to see it as a
Symbolist building. Part I of this paper will first consider the Secession
movement and its journal Ver Sacrum and then various aspects of the
building’s design. Part II will address the issue of whether the Secession
building should be considered a Symbolist work.
Part I: The Secession

1. The Secession Movement
The Secession movement began in 1897 when a group of artists led by
Gustave Klimt left the conservative Society of Viennese Artists, which
owned the only large exhibition hall for contemporary art. The Secession
had two main aims: 1) to open Vienna to newer developments in European
art and 2) to make exhibitions less commercial by awakening society to an
idealized view of art. Although the core group who founded the Secession
included many younger artists and architects who espoused Art Nouveau,
Symbolism and Crime: Architecture of the Vienna Secession 117
Fig. 5-1. The Secession Building in 2008
or Jugendstil, the movement did not focus on any particular stylistic

direction. Yet it is striking that the First Secessionist Exhibition, which
was held in rented quarters, was dominated by names that we now
associate with Symbolism: Fernand Khnopff, Arnold Böcklin, Franz von
Stuck, Max Klinger, Giovanni Segantini, Puvis de Chavannes, Auguste
Rodin. Khnopff alone exhibited nineteen paintings.3 Moreover, one can
see in Klimt’s own work at this time a turn toward Symbolist themes and
stylization. In the Second Secession Exhibit held in the new building in
1898, he showed a frontal Pallas Athena, and earlier that year he
published a Symbolist drawing, Nuda Vertas, in the new Secession journal
Ver Sacrum. The term Ver Sacrum was taken from the name of an ancient
Roman cult of sacrifice that involved the banishment of youth born in the
spring, who were to found a new city. Through this title, the Secession
symbolically identified itself as a movement of artists prepared to sacrifice
themselves for the renewal of society through art.4
118 Chapter Five
2. Design of the Secession Building

To carry out their ambitious program, the members of the Secession
movement needed to build their own exhibition hall. As it turned out, far
from being an embattled minority, the Secession found many friends in
high places; the city granted them a prominent plot of land, and a leading
industrialist, Karl Wittgenstein (father of the philosopher Ludwig)
supplied funds. Joseph Maria Olbrich, a young Secessionist protégé of
Vienna’s leading architect, Otto Wagner, was entrusted with designing the
building. Before entering Wagner’s firm, Olbrich had studied at the
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts with one of the designers of the great
Kunsthistorische Museum on the Ringstrasse.5
A. Influences
Some have seen the ascending entrance and dome of the Secession
building as a reduced-scale version of the Kunsthistorische Museum.
Others believe the Secession’s dome may owe something to the open work
crown on Otto Wagner’s unbuilt design for a new Academy of Fine Arts, a
design on which Olbrich worked as an assistant to Wagner.6 Yet the idea
of an ascending stairway and dome are so common that it makes more
sense to focus on Olbrich’s innovation in creating a dome that is also a
symbolic crown of a laurel tree, whose lace-like structure is made up of
3,000 gilded iron laurel leaves and 700 hundred berries. As for the look of
the Secession’s façade, people have seen some resemblance to Wagner’s
urban railway stations, especially those on the Karlsplatz across from the
Secession. But here again, Olbrich himself was the chief draftsman for the
station project in Wagner’s office, and many historians believe he was
responsible for a good deal of the Jugendstil ornament on them.7
However, the strongest influences on Olbrich were his Secession
colleagues, including fellow architect Josef Hoffmann, the designer Kolo
Moser, and Klimt himself, who drew a sketch that bore some resemblance
to the final project, although it called for murals on the front. Olbrich not
only generously involved his colleagues in the decoration of parts of the
building, but he also published working drawings in the magazine Der
Architekt, so that we can watch him move from an early stage that
involved a ceremonial entrance between two high pylons and an often
highly articulated and decorated façade, to later stages during which a
relatively blank façade emerges beneath an openwork dome nestled inside
four short pylons.8
B. The Plan
The final plan was that of a head and body, typical of many public
buildings. The entry hall has a Greek cross shape, with administrative
rooms to either side, and behind the entry hall is the large open plan
exhibition hall, which consists of a central square surrounded by three
rectangles. These rectangular spaces are only separated by six very thin
iron columns so that the exhibition hall is extremely flexible.
C. Elevation
Looking at the exterior elevation, the façade is composed of two large
horizontal blocks, unbroken except for shallow laurel tree reliefs at the
corners and the motto “Ver Sacrum” on one side (Fig. 5-1). They are
connected by a horizontal block over the recessed entryway that bears
another motto, taken from the art critic Ludwig Hevesi: “To the Time its
Art; To Art its Freedom” (Fig. 5-2). The entry area with its staircase is the
most ornamented part of the building; it includes more laurel trees, their
massed golden leaves forming a solid band linking the entry area and the
façade and, of course, the prominent heads of the three Gorgons with their
snake hair, each face representing one of the main visual arts: Painting,
Architecture, Sculpture.
Moving around to the side elevation we can easily distinguish the head
and body sections, with the dome over the entry hall and the tent-like glass
roofs over the exhibition hall (Fig. 5-1). Here again, the head part of the
building is articulated with low relief laurel trees that form an integral part
of the pilasters on either side of the windows, and the area beneath the
windows is decorated with Jugendstil reliefs. The body of the building is
not only marked by three large windows (usually blocked off), but it is
also articulated by a series of wide pilasters between them, the two outer
pilasters bearing three stylized owls and a laurel wreath. Across the back
of the exhibition hall there was originally a frieze, designed by Moser,
showing dancing maidens carrying laurel wreaths (Fig. 5-3)
D. Materials and Structure

The building was a simple, economically constructed form of brick
over-laid with white stucco. Although the geometrical, block-like forms of
the building have been cited by architecture historians as foreshadowing
the strict geometries of Modernism, during the major restoration of 1986 it
was discovered that there is an inward slope to the pylons as they rise and
that even the walls slope slightly in a way that is reminiscent of the
“refinements” to Classical Greek temples. Moreover, at a number of
120 Chapter Five
points, surfaces curve slightly outward or inward, resulting in a dialectic

between the rectilinear and organic that gives the building vitality.9
E. Interior
When we climb the stairway and enter the building’s reception hall, we
find an intimate space with half-hidden windows high up on the sides.
Originally, the large, semicircular side niches had murals of stylized trees
painted by one of the Secession artists (Fig. 5-4) Most dramatically, there
was originally a large circular window designed by Moser, depicting the
archangel of art, set over the triple doors leading to the exhibition hall.
The exhibition hall itself was undecorated, its space completely open
save for its slender pillars. An ingenious glass ceiling constructed beneath
the three tent-like glass roofs that rose above it gave the space a
wonderfully even light that was much commented on at the time. For each
of the early exhibitions, various architects and designers, including
Olbrich, Hoffmann, and Moser, would divide the space with curtains,
panels, or temporary walls. The most memorable exhibition focused on
Max Klinger’s Beethoven statue and included a Symbolist frieze by Klimt
that was loosely based on the Ode to Joy of the Ninth Symphony.10
The Secession building was clearly the site of much Symbolist art, but
was it itself a Symbolist work?

122 Chapter Five
Part II: The Secession as Symbolist Architecture

1. Some Characteristics of Symbolism
I will not argue for a particular definition of Symbolism, but rather
simply list a few of the most oft mentioned characteristics. First,
Symbolism was not a style, but a spiritual outlook that aimed to express
deeper truths by suggesting ideas and feelings rather than depicting them.
Second, Symbolist works generally sought a synthesis of image, ideas, and
feelings, which usually took a subjective and sometimes highly personal
form. Finally, Symbolist themes tended to cluster around two poles, one of
spirit, soul, and dream, the other of evil, death and sexuality (including
woman as danger).11 Robert Goldwater has suggested that these
characteristics can be understood in both a wider and narrower sense.
Goldwater argues that true Symbolist works are purely evocative,
compared to what he calls the “painting of ideas,” which involves a kind
of allegorical realism. Furthermore, Goldwater continues, true Symbolist
art uses line in a way that reflects an intensely personal struggle for
expression as compared to the typical line of Art Nouveau, which is

graceful and self-sufficient.12
2. Aspects of a Symbolist Architecture

At first glance, Goldwater’s strict definition might make one think that
few works of architecture could be Symbolist. Architecture, after all, not
only involves structural engineering, but it must also respond to both
functional and environmental concerns that would seem to preclude a
purely subjective expression of inner states. Yet architecture also has both
a formal and an expressive dimension, and the expressive dimension can
take the form of an “evocative symbolism.” That is, even if a building
lacks any specific symbols, the design of the building as a whole may
suggest certain ideas, associations, or feelings. Integrating this notion of
the evocative dimension of architecture with the general characteristics of
Symbolism, I believe we can begin to answer the question of whether the
Secession building is an instance of Symbolism in architecture.
3. Olbrich’s Testimony
Consider first the issue of subjectivity. As Olbrich says, he did not try
to invent a “new style,” but rather to hear his “own sensation” . . . “the
subjective, my beauty, my building.” Indeed, Olbrich’s entire statement
about his intentions in designing the Secession building is full of late
Romantic effusions about the joy of giving “birth,” of designing “from the
heart,” and so on.13 Secondly, if Olbrich shares the Symbolists’ penchant
for subjectivity and intensely expressed feelings, he also shares their
exalted spiritual aims. The building, he says, was to be “white and shining,
sacred and chaste,” full of “solemn dignity.”14
4. Symbols and Symbolism

But what about Goldwater’s claim that true Symbolist art merely
suggests or evokes? The situation here is ambiguous. On the one hand, the
gleaming white walls, the massive blocks of the facade, the ascending
stairs, the golden dome, seem to merely evoke some kind of archaic
temple. In fact, the Secession’s hostile critics were so irritated at the
building’s lack of stylistic specificity that some derisively mocked it as a
incoherent mixture of Assyrian, Egyptian, and Indian elements. But what
are we to make of the more specific archaic and classical symbols—the
sacred laurel tree, the snakes, the owls, the Gorgons? On the one hand,
124 Chapter Five
these could be seen merely as part of a general evocation of sacred origins

and mysteries. On the other hand, someone like Goldwater might think
them too tangible, making the Secession building fail his test of genuine
Symbolist art.15
Let’s consider some of these symbols more closely. The central
symbol, of course, is the laurel tree. It gives us the dome and the trees that
decorate the façade and are integrated into the pilasters on the sides, as
well as the laurel wreaths incised behind the owls. The laurel is an archaic
symbol associated with Apollo and most familiarly used to signify victory
in the ancient world and, since the Renaissance, to crown poets and artists.
As such, it was an obvious choice to express the Secession’s Romantic
idea of the sacredness of Art. But the laurel could also signify renewal, as
was made manifest on the cover of the first issue of Ver Sacrum, where the
laurel tree’s roots burst its container.16 The snake has also been a symbol
of rebirth since ancient times and, in addition to the snake hair of the
Gorgons, the snake-like forms above the Secession motto, “To the Time
its Art; To Art its Freedom,” seem to writhe out of their container in a vital
expression of the power of Nature. If we accept a wider definition of
Symbolist art, the deployment of so many symbols would strongly suggest
that the Secession building should be considered Symbolist, but if we take
Goldwater’s stricter view, these same symbols make the building a more
marginal instance of Symbolism.
Finally, if we turn to the themes of Symbolism, the building certainly

evokes notions of spirit, origins, and renewal. On the other hand, there is
little of the darker side of Symbolist preoccupations—evil, death,
sexuality. Nor is there any evidence of the Symbolist preoccupation with
woman as temptress and threat. The Gorgon’s chthonic powers here
signify the creativity of painting, architecture, and sculpture, and the
dancing maidens of Moser, rather than suggesting dangerous Dionysian
forces, carry the crowing laurel wreaths for the artists in a most orderly
procession. Nor does the building reflect the Symbolist tendency to turn
away from ideas of progress, science, and technology. On the contrary, in
the design of the exhibition hall, the use of glass and iron and the
determination to serve function most efficiently manifest a rational
embrace of technology and modernism. It is also worth noting that, at
night, the most important symbolic aspect of the building, the laurel dome,
was illuminated from within by electric lights!
5. Symbolism and Function:

Contradiction or Creative Tension?
The Secession building is clearly an ambivalent design, simultaneously
archaic/symbolic and modern/functional. In fact, when it opened, the most
prevalent criticism was that the building contradicted itself. One critic
mocked it as an attempt to combine a temple with a blast furnace. Another
complained that the symbol-laden front part of the building was simply
juxtaposed with the materialist back part, which, moreover, lacked any
artistic form.17 Even a sympathetic recent study of the Secession has
pointed out that the building’s two mottos gesture in opposite directions:
Ver Sacrum invokes an archaic past and ideas of rebirth, whereas “To the
Time its Art: To Art its Freedom” invokes the future and ideals of
modernity.18 Does the Secession building contradict itself, or do its two
aspects stand in creative tension?
To argue for creative tension, we need to identify something that
unifies the two aspects of the building. At the time, sympathetic critics like
Ludwig Hevesi and Hermann Bahr certainly saw the building as unified.
Bahr wrote: “Nothing can be taken away or added . . . everything is
necessary and self-evident,” suggesting that it was Olbrich’s subjective
creativity that gave the building unity.19 Today, the juxtaposition of the
“modern” glass pyramids behind the “archaic” golden laurel crown may
seem less incongruous than it appeared in 1898; after all, both are simple
geometric forms. More concretely, one could point to the overall unity
achieved by the whitewashed stucco and the creative unity of reliefs and
incisions, whether the omnipresent laurel trees, the Jugendstil lines, or the
many geometric textile-like motifs.20 Finally, one could argue, as Leslie
Tropp has done, that what gives the building its deeper unity, despite the
obvious tension between its symbolic and functional aspects, is that it
reflects the Secession group’s desire to have a modern exhibition hall
while also giving rhetorical expression to the hallowed ideal of artistic
freedom.21 In its attempt to express the Secession’s romantic conception of
the sacrality of Art, the building deploys a complex of archaic symbols
that were accessible to an educated late nineteenth-century public,
however quaint they may seem us looking back on them after a hundred
years of stripped down modernism.22
Today, of course, most historians and theorists of architecture who
look back to late nineteenth-century Vienna are not likely to pay much
attention to Olbrich and the Secession building, but rather to focus on
Adolf Loos, whom they rightly regard as central to the development of
modernism. Given Loos’ attitude toward ornament as expressed in his
126 Chapter Five
celebrated essay, “Ornament and Crime,” one might have expected him to
be among the critics who publically attacked the Secession building. Yet
Loos not only published articles in Ver Sacrum, he even asked to design
one of the administrative rooms off the Secession’s entry hall.23 On the
other hand, given the Secession’s use of Jugendstil ornament, and given
Loos’s vehement attacks on both Jugendstil and on applied art generally,
from a strictly Loosian perspective, the Symbolist aspects of the Secession
building have to be considered a “crime.”
Love it or hate it, the Secession building remains an important
transitional work in the history of modern architecture. It stands as a
gleaming late romantic presence that still seems a bit over the top, and
whose pioneering exhibition hall is still, after a hundred and ten years, a
major venue in Vienna for showing contemporary art.
Fig. 5-1. The Secession Building in 2008.
Notes
1
All illustrations are from photographs I took in Vienna in June 2008.
Unfortunately the urns, which were, in any case, a later addition, happened to be
encased in plywood the days I was there.
2
Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna: 1898-1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and their
Contemporaries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 26-30.
3
Ibid., p. 34.
4
Gottfried Fliedl, “The Secession as Sacred Center,” in Secession: The Vienna
Secession from Temple of Art to Exhibition Hall (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany:
Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998), 64-67.
5
For a review of Olbrich’s career in general, see Ian Latham, Joseph Maria
Olbrich (New York: Rizzoli, 1980) and Peter Haiko, Caterina Lezzi, and Renate
Ulmer, Joseph Maria Olbrich: Secession Wien—Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt,
Ausstsellungsarchitsektur um 1900 (Darmstadt: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006). It is
useful to consider Olbrich’s work in the larger context of middle European culture
of the time. See Ákos Morasvánszy, Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and
Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867-1918 (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1998)
6
Otto Kapfinger, “Olbrich’s Dream of the Temple of Art,” in Secession: The
Vienna Secession from Temple of Art to Exhibition Hall (Ostsfildem-Ruit,
Germany: Verlag Gerd Jatje, 1998), 93-94.
7
Otto Kapfinger and Adolf Krischanitz, Die Wiener Secession: Das Haus:
Entstehung, Geschichte, Erneurung (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus, 1986), 15-24.
8
Ibid., 41-56.
9
Ibid., 62.
10
Vergo, Art in Vienna, 67-77.
11
The Symbolist “tendency,” “outlook,” “attitude,” or “movement” has been
notoriously difficult to define outside of literature. Although it is a recognized
phenomenon in surveys of the history of painting and has its more or less
canonical list of artists, very little has been written about either sculpture or
architecture. A classic discussion of Symbolist painting is Edward Lucie-Smith’s
Symbolist Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972). More recent attempts at a
delineation of Symbolist characteristics include catalogue essays written in
connection with exhibitions such as Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe (Montreal:
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995) or Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in
Germany, 1870-1920 (Munich: Prestel, 2000) The relevant theoretical texts from
the late nineteenth century have been usefully gathered in Charles Harrison and
Paul Wood with Jason Gaiger, ed., Art in Theory 1815-1900: An Anthology of
Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 999-1066.
12
Robert Goldwater, Symbolism (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979) 1-
72.
13
Leslie Tropp, Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51-52.
14
Ibid., 50. See Kapfinger and Krischanitz, Die Wiener Secession, 24-26 for the
German text.
15
Goldwater’s contrast between the line of true Symbolist art and the line of Art
Nouveau makes the application of the term “Symbolist” to architecture particularly
questionable since the few mentions of a Symbolist tendency in the history of
architecture usually single out figures who are more often associated with Art
Nouveau, such as Mackintosh and Gaudi. One of the more perceptive comments
on the Symbolist tendencies in Gaudi and in Olbrich’s Secession building can be
found in Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1992), 66-67, 79-80.
16
Fliedl, “Secession as Sacred Center,” 59-60.
17
Kapfinger and Krischanitz, Die Wiener Secession, 35-36.
18
Tropp, Architecture and Truth, 28.
19
Ibid., 59.
20
Kapfinger and Krischanitz, Die Wiener Secession, 68.
21
Tropp, Architecture and Truth, 29.
22
Ibid., 30 and 59.
128 Chapter Five
23
Kapfinger and Krischanitz, Die Wiener Secession, 23. Hoffmann’s rejection of
Loos’s request sealed the enmity between the two men.
CHAPTER SIX
JEAN DELVILLE AND THE BELGIAN
AVANT-GARDE:
ANTI-MATERIALIST POLEMICS FOR “UN ART
ANNONCIATEUR DES SPIRITUALITES FUTURES”
BRENDAN COLE
In an article surveying modern trends in painting published in La Ligue

Artistique in 1895, a confident and combative Jean Delville launched a
scathing attack against the art of the contemporary avant-garde in Belgium.
He wrote,
At the present time it is salutary to shout imperiously an indictment against

the deleterious tendencies of contemporary art, where a triumphal and
rampant epidemic rages, the most damaging doctrine with which an artist
could be associated, L’Esthétique Libre.1
Further, in a reference to the predecessor of La Libre Esthétique, the

avant-garde exhibition society Les XX, he jibed that Belgian art was
degraded by “ochlocrats and pyrochtechnicians of vingtisme.”2 Delville
targeted what he saw as the predominance of Naturalism and Impressionism
in the works displayed at La Libre Esthétique exhibitions as well as the
commercial and materialist ethos that it engendered; in a typically
mocking tone, he wrote,
I try to respond with the limited resources at my disposal against the

impoverishing impact of this contagious and cumbersome nonsense of
painters preoccupied with landscapes, … daubs, distortions … and
accessories; against this entire army of unscrupulous businessmen without
ideals, unconcerned with beauty, unconcerned with art.’3
Fin-de-siècle art was controlled by what he referred to as “the pictorial

130 Chapter Six
incoherencies of some impotent snobs.”4 For him, therefore, this materialist

tendency was symptomatic of a fundamental decadence in contemporary
painting that struck “Modern Art right to the depths of its vitality.”5
Delville’s polemical articles against modern art were not just the
standard subjectivist, anti-materialist diatribe against naturalism; rather,
they went further, striking a daring, and very specific, blow against this
powerful and influential avant-garde organisation in Belgium, the liberal
exhibition society La Libre Esthétique. La Libre Esthétique, the heir to its
no less influential predecessor Les XX, was dominated by the lawyer
Octave Maus, whose direction of Les XX (1884-1893) and almost
autocratic control over La Libre Esthétique (1894-1914) defined the shape
and development of avant-garde art during the fin-de-siècle in Belgium.6
Both of these influential avant-garde exhibition societies, as is well
known, contributed to a widespread recognition of new artistic styles and
trends that are now unquestioningly acknowledged as part of the canonical
fin-de-siècle avant-garde: realism, impressionism, pointillism, and
Symbolism. In doing so, they conveniently served the conventional
narratives of the ‘heroic’ avant-garde (now heavily criticized in the
literature) insomuch as they were instrumental in successfully challenging
the oligarchy of the Belgian Academy of Fine Arts, with its proscriptive
and exclusivist artistic doctrines propagated through the Belgian Triennial
Salons.7
But what exactly was Delville attempting to achieve in attacking this
formidable nerve centre of avant-garde art (and by implication its
impresarios, like Maus), which controlled, almost dictated, contemporary
artistic tends? His polemics did not result from the fact that he had never
been invited to show his work at the Les XX or La Libre Esthetique
exhibitions, or that he was somehow too reactionary to tolerate these
contemporary artistic manifestations. On the contrary, his polemical
articles in La Ligue Artistique coincided with his plan to launch his own
exhibition society—the Salon d’Art Idéaliste—which was born out of his
commitment to an idealist aesthetic that he developed during the late
1880s and early 1890s. He was, in other words, attempting to ‘break into’
the avant-garde, from which he had been hitherto excluded, in order to
establish a new artistic tradition that he saw as entirely absent from
contemporary art. It was nothing less than a self-conscious effort to initiate
a movement that sought to convey inward, spiritual ideas derived from
contemporary theosophy, especially Helena Blavatsky and Papus, as well
as the hermetic and esoteric tradition including Eliphas Levi, Hoerne
Wronski, St Yves D’Alveydre, Joséphin Péladan, and others.
As well as being widely read, Delville was a gifted and articulate
Jean Delville and the Belgian Avant-Garde 131
writer, and in the same year he had already published his extensive treatise
on the occult, Dialogue entre nous (1895). He would subsequently
augment this treatise with numerous articles on idealist and occult
aesthetics, which culminated in his La mission de l’art: Etude d’esthétique
idéaliste (1900), prefaced by the influential occult writer Edouard Schuré.
Delville became a prolific contributor to contemporary reviews and art
journals, and his polemical articles were a natural vehicle through which
he could express the urgency of his ideas.
Delville therefore saw his Salons as an instrument that would initiate a
rebirth of idealism in art, thereby countering, as he saw it, the
predominantly naturalist, realist, and impressionist art that was created in
response to modernity—as well as the egalitarian socialist agenda that was
the mainstay of the contemporary avant-garde propagated through La
Libre Esthétique. Delville wrote:
The Salons of Idealist Art [Salons d'Art Idealist] aim to lead a Renaissance
in Belgium aesthetics. [The Salon] will gather together in an annual group
all the disparate tendencies of artistic idealism, that is to say, works of art
sharing the same trend toward Beauty.
Seeking to react against decadence, against the confusion of schools
called realist, impressionist or libristes, all degenerate forms of Art, the
Salons d'Art Idealist display as eternal principles of Perfection in the work
of art: Thought, Style, and Technique. The only ‘freedom’ in Aesthetics
which we recognize is the freedom of the creative Personality.8

For Delville, whose interest was in a transcendent art of spiritual ideas,
this was not just a polemic against an error of artistic style or choice of
subject matter; it was for him, rather, a reflection of an endemic spiritual
vacuity in contemporary culture. He certainly felt that his artistic direction
was new and unique, but his attack immediately raises questions about
artists who were already seen as part of this tradition, namely Symbolism—
including artists such as Mellery, Khnopff, Degouve de Nuncques, and
others whose Symbolist works were already well known by that time. All
these artists were, incidentally, associated with Les XX and La Libre
Esthétique. As will be seen further on, his attack against contemporary art
did not emerge out of ignorance, but rather from the unique historical
circumstances that gave rise not only to the avant-gardein Belgium, but to
Symbolism itself.
Delville’s bullying and intransigent stance were shock tactics, typically
avant-garde devices used deliberately to stir up controversy in the press;
these devices were already well tried and tested. Ironically, Delville’s
strategies recapitulate similar strategies used by Maus and his co-
132 Chapter Six
impresario of the avant-garde, the lawyer Edmond Picard, to successfully

launch Les XX eleven years earlier. At that time, Picard published a series
of articles in L’Art Moderne (which he edited) entitled “L’Exposition des
XX. L’Art Jeune,” which were effectively a manifesto for the new group.
In this manifesto, Picard launched Les XX as a young and revolutionary
enterprise, energetically combating the lethargy and decadence of the
bourgeois academic tradition:
Glory can be achieved only by ascension and forceful intrusion … Those

who have not been artistic revolutionaries have never survived … The man
of genius always disturbs convention and his task is to scandalize those to
whom he has appeared for the first time. He must pierce prejudices like a
bullet.9
He predicated the new tendency on three fundamental principles: that art

should reflect modern life; that this interpretation should be individual to
the artist; and that it should be articulated through a proficient technique.
In other words, echoing Baudelaire and Courbet, he wrote that this new art
would be “the study and direct interpretation of contemporary reality
interpreted freely through the artist’s recourse to his own temperament and
mastery of a thorough technique.”10
Both Picard and Maus were passionate, volatile, and extremely combative
personalities. They never backed down or missed a chance to take on the
establishment in the name of their left-wing avant-garde cause for artistic
freedom and social renovation. Maus saw Les XX as the ideal vehicle to
bring about this revolution. In a characteristic statement, he exposed his
belligerence in declaring, “It is a proud and independent art they wish to
create, and, as it’s a matter of turning everything upside down and doing
battle, I’m for it.”11 Picard was no less eager to battle it out with any
opponents of the new artistic movement he helped to nurture. In an article
written in response to criticism from one of his detractors, Picard threw
down the gauntlet with proud provocation, declaring, “You ask for a fight
Sir, then a fight it will be; nothing would be more enjoyable for me.”12
In their determination to proselytize an avant-garde aesthetic in L’Art
Moderne and the exhibitions of Les XX and La Libre Esthétique, Maus
and Picard were instrumental in asserting an almost autocratic control over
the production, distribution, and evaluation of the work of avant-garde
artists as well as stamping a unique identity on the new trend as a
revolutionary and original manifestation of contemporary art.13
Delville’s self-assured temerity in taking on these formidable
personalities is typical of his audacity in his battle to establish a place for
his own artistic movement. In doing so, he self-consciously adopted a
similar combative posture, declaring rather affectedly: “If it is to be proud

to lead a battle and run the risk of receiving enemy bullets, then yes, I'm
the proudest of the proud.”14
This battlefield rhetoric was, of course, already commonplace amongst
the French avant-garde and was also played out in realist and impressionist
circles earlier in that century. The avant-garde artists’ self-conscious
construction of themselves as innovative, rebellious, independent, and
celebratory of both individual temperament and ‘otherness’ became an
essential self-promoting strategy during the fin-de-siècle.15 There is little
doubt that Picard, and Delville following him, were well versed in these
avant-garde protocols in their efforts to assert the importance of their own
artistic efforts. Therefore, the mechanisms and language of avant-garde
self-definition are shared between Delville and his antagonists, at least to
some degree, even though the ideologies and technical practices are so
different—which is a typical paradox of the avant-gardetradition.16
However, Delville stands apart from his peers in exactly this sense.
Whereas the contemporary avant-garde in Belgium was constructed,
manufactured even, by bourgeois professionals acting as impresarios—
such as Maus and Picard, who had little if any artistic training—Delville
was alone, as an artist, who tried to bring about a revolution for the sake of
his own idealist aesthetic and artistic cause. Furthermore, while most
contemporary Belgian Symbolists operated under the banner of Les XX
and La Libre Esthétique (William Degouves de Nuncques, Fernand
Khnopff, James Ensor, Xavier Mellery and Félicien Rops, among others)
and were seen, in consequence, to be part of a larger avant-garde ethos
rather than as a distinct movement, Delville operated independently in the
1890s, first among the Pour L’Art group that he co-founded in 1892 (with
Albert Ciamberlani and others) and then at the Salons D’art Idéaliste,
which he also founded, in 1895. Delville, as already indicated, never
exhibited at La Libre Esthétique during this time and was only once
invited to show his work there in 1900. It is evident, therefore, that the
origins of Symbolism in Belgium were complex and emerged out of a
variety of intellectual perceptions and positions. The first generation of
Symbolist painters emerging during the 1880s who were part of this
‘official’ avant-garde—particularly Fernand Khnopff, Xavier Mellery, and
Degouve de Nuncques—largely defined the nature of visual Symbolism
with its air of ambiguity, interiority, suggestiveness, and allusion. But
these were aspects that allied their work closely to the literary Symbolists,
and their ideals were by and large represented and codified by
contemporary writers themselves. Verhaeren’s articles on Khnopff in
L’Art Moderne, which seem to have been written to co-opt Khnopff’s art
134 Chapter Six
into the larger literary Symbolist cause, are a good case in point.17 In other
words, the status of Belgian Symbolism in painting as a self-contained
entity—or an actual movement—is ambiguous. One could go as far as to
ask whether it could truly be conceived of as a distinct movement at all. It
is well known that the anti-formalism of literary Symbolism was also
understood to act as a provocation against the literary status quo;
therefore, the philosophies behind literary Symbolism were easily
assimilated into Picard’s socialist and anarchist tendencies, which formed
an important intellectual backdrop to Les XX and L’Art Moderne. In this
regard, they served as a useful political foil against artistic officialdom.
But whether the artists associated with these groups actually subscribed to
these tendencies or integrated them into their artistic raison d’être is still
up for debate, and these questions probably need to be carefully re-
examined.18
Delville’s variant of anti-naturalist art had an entirely different
objective. His relation to other so-called Symbolist painters is also
ambivalent and, apart from their mutual participation in Péladan’s Salons
de la Rose+Crox, he had little formal association with the Les XX
Symbolists. Delville, who distinguished himself from this coterie, also
frequently criticised and rejected artists who are now nominally associated
with Symbolism as somewhat barbaric. This is evident in an article written
in 1895, where he attacked the Vingtistes Gauguin, George Minne, and
Jan Toorop:
these poor degenerates, these powerless virtuosos of caricature, these

demented imaginings that go under the illogical label of "mystical" and
"symbolist" demonstrating the proof of their folly. Far from being mystical
and symbolist, two words that have noble connotations, they present rather
another face of decadence. Theirs is the art of the insane asylum, it must be
said loudly, which has no connection with the rebirth of idealism of which
I speak here! There must be no mistake! There is an abyss between the
naivety of a pathological Toorop, the monstrous platitudes of a Gauguin,
the harrowing deformations of a Minne—that the esthetivores of
l’esthétique libre unconsciously panegyrise—and of true Symbolism, as
conceived by the Masters.19
In fact, Delville saw little difference between the art of the impressionists,
which he disdained, and many Symbolists; he believed that both were
examples of the expression of la laideur (ugliness), which he saw as
opposed to the artistic goal of his Esthétique Idéaliste, namely, the
expression of Spiritual Beauty.20 Although this assertion of difference and
‘otherness’ is a fundamental strategy of avant-garde formations, his
position clearly raises historical questions about the unity of purpose of

non-realist or subjectivist artists, as well as reinforcing my suggestion that
visual Symbolism, as a unified, organized ‘movement’ during this period
in Belgium, needs to be re-configured. It also suggests that a more
nuanced, or textured, reading of the aesthetic differences in their art needs
to be reclaimed in order to understand the diverse nature of this tendency
more accurately in terms of its historical prevalence and emergence.21
Another key factor that isolated (and distinguished) Delville from his
avant-garde contemporaries is economic in nature. Delville struggled to
support himself financially during his formative years. From the 1890s
onwards, he worked as an independent painter propagating a marginal
aesthetic, and as such he struggled to cultivate a market for his
theosophical works, which left him in a dire and impecunious state during
his developing years. He appears not to have worked through a dealer,
managing his career independently of commercial support. Despite his
enormous skill and talent, which he could have channeled into producing
highly saleable art, he avoided painting for the unique purpose of selling
his work.22 Delville participated in the Prix de Rome in 1894—when his
financial resources were at their most meagre—in an attempt to benefit
from the substantial prize money that was awarded to the winner. His
participation, however, stirred up significant controversy in the art journals
of the time, which questioned Delville’s motives as an avant-garde artist in
view of his involvement with this despised symbol of the Artistic
Establishment. Delville defended his participation in a published
confession in which he declared that he had entered on the basis of
financial necessity. In this document, published in La Ligue Artistique, he
gave a piteous and frank description of his impoverished life as one of
“excruciating and torturing poverty” in which his family was forced to live
in a barn..23
Delville’s apparent lack of any commercial ambitions or mercantile
connections did not help his chronic financial insecurity, which was
linked, however, to a much more critical disadvantage that inhibited his
professional and artistic progress, referred to by Ciamberlani as “la
modestie de ses origines” (the modesty of his origins). As an illegitimate
son of a canal worker’s daughter, he certainly did not enjoy the advantages
of the privileged bourgeois upbringing personified by Maus and Picard—a
background that was necessary for success in fin-de-siècle Belgium. It is
well known that the avant-garde of that epoch, including many leading
Symbolists (Khnopff in particular), was lead by a large number of highly
educated middle-class artists, writers, and cultural entrepreneurs whose
influence was instrumental in the creation of new cultural formations and
136 Chapter Six
artistic movements during that time. Delville would certainly have felt
like an outsider, separated from this elite, educated, professional,
bourgeois clique—and this undoubtedly influenced the way he went about
building his reputation in the 1890s in the early phases of his career.
Delville’s indigence, working-class upbringing, and professional isolation
certainly provided motivation for the hostility he expressed towards his
fellow artists when he launched his attack against the contemporary avant-
garde. This is evident in an article he published in La Ligue Artistique,
where he wrote,
Modern artists, mostly the sons of the bourgeoisie, who are without
intellectual culture, without metaphysical concepts, without purity, without
elevation of the soul, struck by the fatal seal of their unvanquished
atavisms, no longer work towards the ardent and enormous vision of the
Ideal, but are obsessed rather with wealth or the desired baubles granted to
them by a banal government.26
The way the Belgian avant-garde was sold and marketed, alluded to here
by Delville, is an area that demands study in greater depth. There is little
doubt that the success of the avant-garde formations during this time,
particularly Les XX and La Libre Esthétique (which included disaffected
middle-class Symbolist painters) was contingent upon the success of its
marketing and the institutions of contemporary capitalism upon which it
depended. Ironically, it was the rejection of the culture of commoditization
of art—exemplified in the practices associated with the sale of Academic
art as well as the art of early secessionist movements such as L’Essor
(from which the original artists of Les XX broke free)—that formed the
basis of Maus and Picard’s raison d’être for the new avant-garde art
showcased in Les XX and La Libre Esthétique.27 But their financial
ambitions cannot be overlooked, and by the 1890s their avant-garde
enterprise was commercially successful as well as highly influential in the
artistic sphere.28 The group’s emphasis on the work of art as a special
object with high commodity value could be seen in the high-profile
publicity of their exhibitions, the entry fee charged, and their habit of
displaying works individually, allowing one to focus on each work as a
separate entity and thereby ‘transfiguring’ the art object—heightening its
aura of uniqueness and hence its value. The commodity value of the work
of art was also emphasized by the frequent listings in L’Art Moderne of
the buyers of the works sold at Les XX and La Libre Esthetique.29 The
paradox of Picard’s socialist, ostensibly anti-bourgeois, agenda and this
obvious commoditization of avant-gardeart deserve their own study.
As already indicated, Delville’s relation to contemporary trends in

marketing the new art is obscure, but there is a case to made that his
evidently aloof stance vis-à-vis contemporary marketing and institutional
networks (dealers, collectors, impresariosm and high profile exhibitions)
did little to ensure his place in the canon.
Delville’s anti-commercial and anti-materialist vision of the purpose of
art, which can be compared to Kandinsky’s vision later on, lay at the heart
of his aesthetic mission, which was, ultimately, to transform society and
the individual by redeeming the function of art from its sensual and
material aspects as well as its vulgarization as a result of the subversion of
Art to commodity culture:
The immediate mission of art is to purify man. If one were to take away
this purpose of art, it would be nothing more than a series of sterile images
capable only of being interesting to the puerile mind of a bored dilettante
or the commercial instinct of speculators, who see art as merely a
commodity that panders to their base thirst for profit.30
For Delville, moreover, this purification is spiritual in nature and functions

not only as a bulwark against a society corrupted by materialism and
commercialism, but also as a formative influence in transforming society
itself. This re-engagement of art with society distinguishes Delville from
many of his subjectivist and Symbolist contemporaries: “In general,” he
wrote
there will be nothing to prevent art increasingly to become an educative

force in society, conscious of its mission. It is time to penetrate society
with art, with the ideal and with beauty. Today's society tends to fall
increasingly into instinct. It is saturated with materialism, sensualism and
. . . commercialism’.31
This passage echoes Kandinsky’s later lament that European culture had
become a “degraded life . . . used exclusively for materialist ends.”32
This was the basis of Delville’s hermetic idealism, which was an
assertive reaction against thesetrends. For Delville, hermeticism provided
a basis for the re-spiritualization of art and society. He also continually
asserted, dogmatically at times, that true art can only be ideal art and that
hermetic idealism would bring about this ‘spiritualisation de l’art.33 In a
significant passage in his serialised essay “L’Esthétique Idéaliste,”
Delville stated comprehensively his view of the importance of Idealism for
artistic practise as well as its role in society as a form of salvation from the
morbidity of contemporary materialism (again echoing Kandinsky):
138 Chapter Six
Idealism … has a universalizing educational and social impact … Idealism

sees humanity in terms of the immense vitality of his ideal future. In order
for the artist to become aware of this, it is necessary for him to purify and
elevate himself … The role of modern idealism will be to draw the artistic
temperament away from the deadly epidemics of materialism … and
finally to guide him towards the purified regions of an art that is the
harbinger of future spirituality.34
In close alignment, therefore, with contemporary occultists, and as a

practicing theosophist himself, his thought was rooted in an apocalyptic
optimism derived from the hermetic tradition:
We have forgotten that Divine Thought radiates ideas on Forms and

returns forms back to thought. … Now the Kabbalah, magic, Hermeticism,
are the three major ancient sciences that form this perfect triangle of
human knowledge, … And the time has come when a few men—guardians
of the initiatory shrines whose premonitions of the apocalyptic
catastrophes to come—go, little by little, in proportion to the need of the
hour, and lift the veil to let a few rays of Eternal Truth irradiate on this
mass of darkness, where the great, disintegrating and corrupting, errors of
the epoch swarm.35
Conclusion
Delville’s idealism, or art of the Absolute—unlike the art of many of
his subjectivist contemporaries—was not a fearful retreat from the
disenchantment of modernity, nor was he attempting to set up an
alternative ‘religion of art’ to compensate for the increasing secularization
and commoditization of culture; rather, he was attempting to achieve a
synthesis between the material reality of everyday life, of modernity, with
the transcendental faculties he believed were the true inheritance of
humanity.36 Therefore, on the surface his aesthetic is a combination of
several seemingly diverse influences that give his work a unique historical
character; these influences include classicism, occultism, and romantic
individualism. What he attempted ultimately to achieve in his painting was
a synthesis of two opposing tendencies; on the one hand, the controlled
technique of the classical tradition with its emphasis on line, form,
harmony, and beauty and, on the other hand, the self-expressive heroic
individualism of the Romantic tradition with its emphasis on the
subjectivity of the inner life of feelings, affective states, and spiritual
experience conveyed through expressive colour and compositional
dynamism. The classical heroes of Academic art were supplanted in
Delville’s painting by the heroism of the initiate’s attempt to overcome the

illusions of matter and reach a state of spiritual transcendence.
In this regard, he could be viewed as a pre-eminent pre-Modernist in
his attempt to somehow marry two opposing forces that dominated
nineteenth-century aesthetics, which were personified in the artistic
polarisation originally encountered between Delacroix and Ingres earlier in
the century. In the final analysis, the style and content of his works were
uniquely his own and, coupled with an extraordinarily powerful and
vigorous imagination, his paintings are not easily reducible to a specific
style or school. This is why categorising him even as a ‘Symbolist’ is, for
the most part, a limitation. In his mature work of the 1890s, Delville’s
idealist aesthetic clearly expressed the desire to reconcile the aesthetically
aloof tendencies of l’art pour l’art with a sense of art’s mission to bring
about change in society through spiritual values. His efforts, therefore,
cannot easily be placed in either of the main contemporary avant-garde
camps (l’art pour l’art or l’art social). The scale of his artistic interests,
with their grounding in hermetic philosophy is, moreover, unique among
contemporary Symbolist trends in Belgium, but largely avoided by his
mainstream avant-garde peers. He also operated independently from
mainstream avant-garde formations. Perhaps for these reasons, as well as
his social and economic exclusion from avant-garde markets, his unique
position resulted in his exclusion from conventional narratives relating to
the avant-garde in Belgium, not only in this own time, but also for many
years to follow. (Rodolphe Rapetti’s recent work on Symbolism does not
even mention Delville.)37 This is one of the central issues relating to this
key artist of the fin-de-siècle regarding his place in the Symbolist canon,
despite the fact that he contributed with such vigour, skill and artistic
imagination to the art of his epoch.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Rosina Neginsky, Liana Cheney and Cassandra
Sciortino for their support and interest in this paper. I should also like to
express my gratitude to Faith Binckes for helping to refine certain aspects
of the argument of this work. This article is based around ideas expressed
in greater detail in my forthcoming book to be published by Ashgate
Publications on Delville: Jean Delville’s Idealist Art and Writings: Art
Between Nature and the Absolute.
140 Chapter Six
Notes
1
Jean Delville, “A propos de nos expositions,” La Ligue Artistique 7 (April
1895): 1. “A l’heure présente où sévit triomphale et épidémique, la plus
néfaste doctrine que puisse épouser l’artiste, l’Esthétique libre, il est salutaire
de crier impérieusement un réquisitoire contre les tendances délétères de l’Art
contemporaine.”
2
Ibid. “Les ochlocrates et les pyrochtechniciens du vingtisme.”
3
Delville, “Causerie Esthétique,” La Ligue Artistique 13 (July 1895): 1. “Je tente
de réagir avec les faibles moyens dont je dispose contre l’appauvrissant influence
de ce contagieux et encombrant déballage de sottises qu’on appelle les paysageux,
les bibelotiers, les fleuristes, les tachistes, les déformistes, les caricaturistes, les
animaliers, les accessoiristes, enfin toute l’armée des tripoteurs sans idéal, sans
souci de beauté, sans souci d’un peu d’art.”
4
Delville, “A propos de nos expositions,” 1. “Incohérences picturales de quelques
impuissants snobs,” “flagrantes aberrations des héros de l’esthétique libre.”
5
Ibid. “L’aberration est à sa comble. Nos expositions, je n’en excepte aucune, sont
les flagrantes manifestes d’une décadence honteuse, il faut l’avouer: C’est
l’inévitable résultat qui devrait frapper l’Art moderne jusque dans les profondeurs
de sa vitalité.”
6
Maus saw himself as an autocrat of La Libre Esthétique, stating once that
“During the anarchic period, the exhibitors fought amongst themselves, all the
while exchanging blows with the public; under the autocrat that I became, they
only fought against the incomprehension of the crowds. It was altogether an
improvement.” Maus in Revue des Belles Lettres, 210. Quoted in Jane Block, Les
XX and Belgian Avant-Gardism 1868-1894 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press,
1984) and “Belgium’s Laboratory for New Ideas: Les XX and La Libre
Esthétique,” La Libre Esthétique: Impressionism and Symbolism, the Belgian
Avant-garde 1880-1900 (London: Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 1994), 50.
7
See Philip Nord. Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the
Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1 for a summary of criticisms
against traditional ‘heroic’ narratives of the avant-garde in general and the
Impressionists in particular.
8
Delville, “Salons d’Art Idéaliste,” La Ligue Artistique 23 (December 1895): 6.
The manifesto is worth quoting in its entirety:
Les Salons d’Art Idéaliste ont pour but de provoquer en Belgique une
Renaissance esthétique. Ils rassemblent, en une groupement annuel, tous
les éléments épars d’idéalisme artistique, c’est-à-dire les œuvres de même
tendance vers la Beauté.
Voulant par là réagir contre la décadence, contre la confusion des
écoles dites réalistes, impressionnistes ou libristes, formes dégénérescentes
de l’Art, les Salons d’Art Idéaliste arborent comme principes éternels de la
Perfection dans l’œuvre:
La Pensée, Le Style, La Technie.
Ils ne reconnaissent de libre, en Esthétique, que la Personnalité
créatrice de l’artiste et affirment, au nom de l’Harmonie, que nulle œuvre
n’est susceptible d’art véritable que si elle se compose des trois termes
absolus, à savoir:
La Beauté Spirituelle, La Beauté Plastique, La Beauté Technique.
Analogues, si pas identiques aux Salons de la Rose+Croix créés à Paris
par le Sar Joséphin Péladan et au Mouvement Préraphaélite de Londres les
Salons d’Art Idéaliste prétendent vouloir continuer, à travers les évolutions
modernes, la grande Tradition de l’Art Idéaliste, depuis les Maîtres anciens
jusqu’aux Maîtres contemporaines.
Ils bannissent rigoureusement: la peinture d’histoire, à moins qu’elle
soit synthétique, la peinture militaire; toute représentation de la vie
contemporaine privée ou publique; le portrait, s’il n’est pas iconique, les
paysanneries, les marines, les paysages; l’humorisme, l’orientalisme
pittoresque; l’animal domestique ou de sport; les tableaux de fleurs, de
fruits et d’accessoires. . . . . Tout artiste, peintre, sculpteur, dessinateur, etc.
sera admis à exposer, pourvu que ses œuvres, par ses tendances et ses
aspirations, répondent le plus possible à celle exposées ci-dessus, dans le
Manifeste.
The statement also indicated further points regarding the organization of the
Salons:
Les artistes exposantes ne payent aucune espèce de cotisation. Les frais
d’envoi et de retour des œuvres qu’ils exposent aux Salons d’Art Idéaliste
son a leur charge . . . Avec les bénéfices, les Salons d’Art Idéalistes
achètent les plus riches reproductions des chef-d’Oeuvres, anciens ou
modernes, ainsi que les plus grandes œuvres, soit littéraires,
philosophiques, métaphysiques, scientifiques et esthétiques. Le partage de
ces œuvres devra se faire par un Tirage au sort effectué entre tous les
exposants, indistinctement et entre les Membres Protecteurs.
Sont admis à adhérer aux Salons d’Art Idéaliste à titre de Membre
Protecteurs—exposants ou non—ceux qui verseront une cotisation
annuelle dont le minimum sera de 5 francs.
Cette cotisation donnera droit à l’entrée du Salon pendant toutes la
durée de l’exposition. Les Membres Protecteurs pourront assister
personnellement aux Conférences, Concerts, enfin à toutes les Gestes d’Art
des Salons d’Art Idéalistes.
The manifesto was reproduced as the introduction to the catalogue of the
exhibition: Vide Catalogue, Salons d’Art Idéaliste. 1ère Geste, Salle Saint-Luc, rue
des Financiers, 10, Bruxelles, 11 January 1896. The tripartite division of Delville’s
approach to an idealist aesthetic outlined in this manifesto became the foundation
of his exposition of Idealism in art in his La Mission de L’Art.
The proscriptive tone of the announcement echoes, if not overtly imitates,
Péladan’s manifesto, printed in his Salon de la Rose+Croix, Règle et Monitoire,
published in 1891 and on several occasions subsequently, outlining the intentions
of his Salons in Paris. Vide Joseph Péladan, Salon de la Rose+Croix, Règle et
Monitoire. (Paris: Dentu, 1891).
142 Chapter Six
9
See Edmond Picard, “L’Exposition des XX. L’Art Jeune. Première article,” L’Art
Moderne 6 (February 10, 1884): 42-43. “On ne pénètre dans la gloire que par
escalade et effraction. . . . Ceux qui n’ont pas révolutionné l’art, n’ont jamais
survécu. . . . Le génie dérange toujours les habitudes et son propre est de
scandaliser ceux à qui il apparaît pour la première fois. Il faut entrer dans les
préjugés comme un boulet.”
10
Picard, “L’Exposition des XX. L’Art Jeune. Seconde article,” L’Art Moderne 7
(February 17, 1884), 49. “L’étude et l’interprétation directe de la réalité
contemporaine par artiste se laissant aller librement à son tempérament et maître
d'une technique approfondie.” Italics in original.
11
Maus to E Boch, Brussels, 1 November 1883 (Brussels: Archives d’Art
Contemporaine, Fonds Bouquelle, 3900). Quoted in Block, “Belgium’s Laboratory
for new ideas: Les XX and La Libre Esthétique,” 42.
12
Picard, “La Guerre Des XX, A Monsieur Gustave Lagye, une des directeurs de
la Fédération Artistique,” L’Art Moderne 2 (March 1884): p. 67. “Vous demandez
bataille, Monsieur, bataille il y aura. Rien ne m’est plus agréable.”
13
Similar strategies were employed by later Modernist avant-garde groups; see
Walter Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to
Commodity Culture in Europe. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2007), 32.
14
Delville, “Causerie Esthétique,” La Ligue Artistique 13 (July 1895): 1. “Si, dans
un combat, c’est être orgueilleux que d’aller en avant et courir le péril de recevoir
les balles ennemies, oui, je suis le plus orgueilleux des orgueilleux.”
15
See Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 81.
16
I am grateful to Dr Faith Binckes for clarifying aspects of this discussion,
undertaken through private correspondence. See also Faith Binckes, Modernism,
Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910-1914 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
17
Emile Verhaeren, “Un peintre symboliste,” L’Art Moderne (April 24, 1887):
129-131.
18
See Block, Les XX and Belgian Avant-Gardism 1868-1894, 38.
19
Delville, “La fin du Réalisme et la Renaissance Idéaliste,” La Ligue Artistique.
19 (October 1895): 2. “Ces pauvres dégénérés, ces virtuoses impuissantes de la
caricature, ces imaginations démentes qui vont, sous l’étiquette illogique de
“mystique” et de “symbolistes” montrant le preuve de leur folie. Loin d’être
mystiques et symbolistes, deux mots qui signifient de nobles choses, ceux-là
présentent une autre face de la décadence. Leur art de clinique n’a aucun rapport, il
faut le dire bien haut, avec la renaissance idéaliste dont je parle ici! Il s’agit de ne
pas de méprendre! Entre les naïvetés pathologiques d’un Toorop, les monstrueuses
banalités d’un Gauguin, les navrantes déformations d’un Minne, que les
esthétivores de l’esthétique libre panégyrisent inconsciemment et le Symbolisme
véritable, tel que le concevaient les Maîtres.”
20
Delville, “L’Esthétique Idéaliste,” (III) L’Art Moderne 24 (June 11, 1899), 198-
199. “Le but évident de l’art idéaliste est la purification de l’art. Le mouvement
artistique moderne, s’il veut prendre le large vers les horizons clairs de l’idée, doit
lutter contre les multiples empiètements de la laideur, n’importe sous quel masque
cette dernière se cache; que ce soit sous l’hypocrite prétexte de symbolisme, de
caractérisme, de l’impressionnisme ou de réalisme, ces inférieurs moyens
d’expression pas lesquels se sont fourvoyés ceux qui s’y attardèrent.”
21
This was already evident to Emile Verhaeren when he wrote, “Déjà les années
précédentes, des tendances vers la littérature s'affirmaient chez certains peintres
aux XX. Aujourd'hui; elles se sont généralisées au point qu'elles y dominent. Au
reste, depuis cinq ans, dans tous les arts, mais surtout en peinture, l'idéalisme a
reconquis une place énorme, qu'il s'appelle symbolisme, intellectualisme ou
ésotérisme.” [In previous years, literary tendencies were already detected in certain
Vingtistes. Today they are so prevalent as to dominate. Moreover, for the past five
years (in all the arts-but especially in painting), Idealism has regained an enormous
position-whether it be called Symbolism, Intellectualism or Esotericism.]. Emile
Verhaeren, “Les XX,” La Nation (February 15, 1892). Quoted in Block, Les XX
and Belgian Avant-Gardism 1868-1894, 72. One wonders whether these
differences are not perhaps also motivated my differences in ethnic background.
Khnopff, Mine, Mellery (and Rodenbach) were all Flemish and sought at one point
or another to revive the Flemish ideal of a Golden Age; Delville was French, i.e.,
Walloon.
22
Delville’s son Olivier noted in his memoire of his father that “Jean Delville, il
faut le dire … avait une très haute conception de la mission de l'art, du rôle que
l'artiste peintre doit jouer pour instruire, éclairer et inspirer les foules. Avec cette
fougue et cette franchise qui le caractérisaient, il déclarait que le paysage, la nature
morte et le portrait étaient à ses yeux des arts inférieurs. … Quand aux portraits,
Delville en a fait de merveilleux, surtout pendant ses séjours prolongés en Ecosse
et en Angleterre. Je crois d'ailleurs que mon père aurait pu faire fortune dans le
domaine du portrait, s'il l'avait voulu … Mais avec cette rigueur qu'il avait envers
lui-même et envers son art, il refusait obstinément de peindre le portrait de
quelqu'un ou de quelqu'une dont la personnalité ne l'intéressait pas. … je crois
pouvoir dire que mon père, fidèle à une ligne de conduite très stricte, n'a jamais
peint dans l'unique but de vendre. Mieux, il lui est arrivé plus d'une fois de faire
don à l'Etat ou à une ville, ou à une commune d' œuvres importantes, car les
pouvoirs publics ont toujours été avares de leurs deniers en Belgique pour les
choses de l'art.” Olivier Delville, Jean Delville, Peintre, 1867-1953 (Brussels:
Editions Laconté, 1984) 9.
23
Jean Delville, “Documents à Conserver,” La Ligue Artistique 23 (December 4,
1895): 4. The passage is worth recording in full: “La plupart de ses rédacteurs –
j’en connais presque tous, personnellement – savaient fort bien à quelle implacable
nécessité matérielle j’ai dû céder en faisant l “Concours de Rome.” Ils me savaient,
là-bas, à Forest, embarrassé dans les plus terribles lazzos de la misère, habitant –
puisqu’il faut tout dire! – avec ma femme et mes deux enfants, dans un vieux
grenier de grange! Certain d’entr’eux, … put constater , mieux que personne, dans
quel état ma petite famille et moi nous subsistons! … Ainsi, voilà donc
l’inqualifiable conduite des muscadins démocrates de l’Art Moderne! Par
144 Chapter Six
vengeance, par dépit, par une animosité idiote et perverse, essayer de jeter la
dérision sur l’acte d’un artiste pauvre, acte logique puisqu’en l’accomplissant, il
faisait son devoir d’époux et de père et lui donnait l’espoir de ne pas toujours
devoir peiner sous le joug brutal d’une vie d’atroce et torturante pauvreté.”
24
Ciamberlani, “Notice sur Jean Delville,” Académie Royale de Belgique,
Annuaire pour 1954, CXX (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1954), 181.
25
See Paul Aron, Les Écrivains belges et le Socialisme (1880-1913): L’expérience
de l’art social d’Edmond Picard à Emile Verhaeren (Bruxelles: Archives du Futur,
Éditions Labor, 1985), 142-151.
26
Jean Delville, “A propos de nos expositions” (I), La Ligue Artistique 7 (April 7,
1895): 2. “Les artistes modernes, la plupart, fils de bourgeois, sans culture
intellectuelle, sans notions métaphysiques, sans pureté, sans élévation d’âme,
frappés du sceau fatal de leurs atavismes invaincus, n’œuvrent plus avec l’ardente
et énorme vision de l’Idéal, mais avec l’obsession d’une fortune espérée ou des
hochets qu’un gouvernement banal leur octroyer.”
27
See Susan M. Canning, “’Soyons Nous’: Les XX and the Cultural Discourse of
the Belgian Avant-garde,” in Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde, Prints,
Drawings and Books ca. 1800, ed. S. H. Goddard (Lawrence, KS: Spencer
Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1992), 35. Canning clearly outlines the
sophisticated mechanisms for publicity of the Les XX exhibitions in posters and
sales catalogues, arguing that the reputation for selling works was actually a draw
card for artists to exhibit their work there. The public was also charged an entry
fee; therefore, the exhibitions were accessible only to those who could afford to
pay, i.e. the bourgeoisie—a paradox given the democratic and socialist agenda of
the group). The first Salon made 580 francs, which had increased to 50,000 francs
at the final Salon in 1893, when the group was dissolved. This was clearly not an
organisation for, by, or about the working classes, but just another elite
organisation that controlled cultural production in many ways identical to the
institution it purported to stand against, i.e. the Academy and the Salons.
28
Ibid., 28, 35, 45.
29
I have in mind here Benjamin’s analysis of art’s response to nineteenth century
commodity culture. See Walter Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth
Century,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 7. This is also discussed in
Walter Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes, 32. See Canning, “Soyons Nous,” 35
for a detailed description of the marketing and publicity of Les XX.
Sales and prices were detailed in the “Petite Chronique” of L’Art Moderne. See
for example, “Petite Chronique,” L’Art Moderne (February 25, 1894): 63 and
(April 1, 1894):105.
30
Delville, La Mission de L’Art: Étude d’Esthétique Idéaliste, preface Édouard
Schuré (Brussels: Georges Balat, 1900), 98. “La mission immédiate de l’Art est de
purifier l’homme. Otez à l’art cette mission, il ne reste de lui qu’un imagerie
stérile, capable seulement d’intéresser l’âme puérile d’un dilettante ennuyé ou
l’instinct mercantile de spéculateurs, trouvant dans la marchandise artistique de
quoi satisfait leurs basses soifs d’or.”
31
Delville, “Le Principe Social de l’Art,” La Belgique Artistique et Littéraire, vol.
7 (April- Juin 1907), 39. “Rien ne saura empêcher que l’art, en général, ne prenne
de plus en plus dans la société le rôle d’une force éducative, consciente de sa
mission. L’heure est venue de pénétrer la société d’art, d’idéal, de beauté. La
société d’aujourd’hui tend trop à tomber dans l’instinct. On l’a saturée de
matérialisme, de sensualisme et de … mercantilisme.” His approach is an
interesting foil to Burger’s “historical avant-garde” or “neo-avant-garde”
engagement between art and life.”
Delville also asserts that “L’idéalisme tire à lui la vie, toute la vie, en la
spiritualisant, en projetant ses formes et ses couleurs dans les splendeurs du monde
spirituel, dont l’artiste a la divination intérieure.” Delville, La Mission de L’Art,
177. Moreover, he states, “Le but évident de l’art idéaliste est la purification de
l’art." Ibid., 178.
32
Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (1912), now in Kandinsky: Complete
Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo,
1994), 135.
33
Delville, La Mission de L’Art, 10-11. Emphasis in original.
34
Delville, “L’Esthétique Idéaliste,” (II) L’Art Moderne 21 (May 21, 1899), 176-
177. Emphasis in original.
L’idéalisme … a une portée éducatrice et sociale universalisant, loin de
toute sociologie particulière. Pour lui, il ne saurait y avoir, par exemple,
une aristocratie ni une démocratie. Il voit l’humanité dans l’immense
vitalité de son devenir idéal. Pour que l’artiste devienne conscient de cela,
il est nécessaire que sa personnalité s’épure et s’élève. Sa vie, elle aussi, il
doit savoir l’harmoniser d’après les correspondances naturelles et occultes
qui relient les sens à l’âme, l’âme à l’esprit.
Le rôle de l’idéalisme moderne sera d’arracher le tempérament
artistique aux mortelles épidémies du matérialisme, de sauver la
personnalité des fatalités inhérentes au culte de la matière incomprise, de le
détourner des dégradantes suggestions de la laideur, afin de l’orienter
définitivement, vers les régions purifiées d’un art annonciateur des
spiritualités futures. Il le peut, il le doit, sans pour cela devoir recourir à
des raffinements de rêves maladifs à la superficiel à tous les misérables
hermaphroditismes de la morbidesse, de tous ces délétères éthérismes
cérébraux, honte et misère de l’art.
35
Delville, Dialogue Entre Nous: Argumentation Kabbalistique, Occultiste,
Idéaliste (Bruges: Daveluy Frères, 1895), 7.
On a oublié que la Pensée Divine rayonne des Idées sur les Formes et
remonte des formes à la pensée. … Or la Kabbale, la Magie, l’Hermétisme,
les trois grandes sciences anciennes, forment ce triangle parfait du savoir
humain, … Et l’heure est venue où de rares hommes, gardiens des
Sanctuaires Initiatiques et prévoyant les catastrophes finales vont, peu à
peu, dans la proportion de la nécessité de l’heure, soulever la voile pour
laisser irradier quelques rayons des Vérités Eternelles sur l’amas de
146 Chapter Six
ténèbres où grouillent, désagrégeantes et corruptrices, les grandes erreurs

du temps
36
Adamson discusses some of these issues in relation to modernist avant-gardes in
Embattled Avant-Gardes, especially in the introduction.
37
Rodolphe Rapetti, Symbolism (Paris: Flammarion, 2005).
CHAPTER SEVEN
SYMBOLISM AND “SOCIAL ART:”
THE UTILITY OF THE SENSUAL IN FERNAND
KHNOPFF’S AFTER FLAUBERT
LEAH C. BOSTON
In February 1884, Fernand Khnopff exhibited After Flaubert (1883) in

the inaugural salon of Les XX, a group of some twenty, mostly Belgian,
artists organizing international shows of contemporary art between 1884
and 1893 in Brussels. The painting, measuring 85 x 85 cm, is an oil and
charcoal on paper. The critic Lucien Solvay, following the literary
reference suggested by the title, recognized in the painting a scene from
Gustave Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony: the moment when Saint
Anthony stares into the face of the beautiful Queen of Sheba, the
embodiment of his temptation. Critics of the 1884 salon also perceived in
After Flaubert the influence of Gustave Moreau, especially his Apparition
(or Salomé) of 1876.1
While these influences, both textual and formal, are important to
understanding the iconography of After Flaubert, Khnopff in his art was
rarely so straightforwardly literary or referential. In fact, Solvay suggested
that Khnopff’s rendering of the encounter between the saint and his vision
merely confused the public in 1884.2 Even to contemporary eyes, the
luminous appearance of the Queen of Sheba threatens to subordinate
narrative and iconography to painterly effect. Equally, the terrifying
quality of the Queen of Sheba which, as Flaubert described it, would leave
Anthony “more rigid than a stake, more pallid than a corpse,” seems not to
have interested Khnopff at all. Instead, the figure of Saint Anthony in
After Flaubert stands transfixed, looking directly and intently into the eyes
of the luminous figure before him.3
After Flaubert, though dating to 1883, exhibited qualities that would
come to be associated with Symbolist expression in the visual arts:
meaning is evoked through the materiality of the medium, in this case the
oil paint and charcoal which form the ethereal light surrounding the figure
148 Chapter Seven
of the Queen of Sheba; the silence of the figures subordinates language to

the ineffable, what lies beyond expression; what the figure of Saint
Anthony sees before him is not a figure who occupies the material world;
instead, she is an image formed of the clarity of his own inner vision;
above all, After Flaubert is ambiguous and multivalent as an image.
Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony was an inspiration for the imagery,
but there is little in the iconography, as Solvay observed in 1884, that
relates it specifically to the story.
Assuming Flaubert as an indirect inspiration for the painting casts the
iconography in less specific terms. The male figure is able to see by force
of his imagination an embodiment of beauty that is not of the material
world. Yet if it is a vision that his desire has summoned forth, it is a
sensual experience; even if imagined, it is an experience of the body.
Suggested by the subject matter is the relationship of sensory to bodily
effect. Saint Anthony does not touch, but he sees, and what he sees is
inseparable from, indeed enabled by, what he feels. Yet Khnopff means to
exploit the complexity of processes of vision (or “envisioning”). We, the
viewer, see what the male figure is looking at (rare in Khnopff’s work),
though not necessarily what he sees. The halo of radiance surrounding the
female figure occludes our perception of her; in other words, whether or
not we are privileged by the same clarity of vision is not assured.
Presumably, the beautiful image before the male figure is a product of his
mind’s eye, known only to him.
Khnopff exhibited After Flaubert in the inaugural salon of Les XX in
1884. At the same time, as part of a conference associated with Les XX,
Edmond Picard, a prolific attorney and advocate for Les XX, called for a
style of art that would seem the antithesis of Khnopff’s After Flaubert.
Picard admonished artists to pursue a Courbet-like realism:
First of all, the study and interpretation of contemporary reality…In the

choice of subject, no more conceptions of sheer imagination, no more
conventional scenes from history…all elements must be taken from the
real world; reality must provide the models.4
This seeming contradiction between two very different tendencies for

modern art was launched against a claim made for the group by L’Art
moderne, its primary literary organ, associating the program of Les XX
with avant-garde goals. In 1884, Picard’s full conference paper was
published as an article in L’Art moderne. There he described the program
of Les XX in military terms: “Les Vingt are employing remaining forces
for attack and for resistance. They are united where precursors were
isolated; their movement coincides with those analogous upsurges present
The Utility of the Sensual in Khnopff’s After Flaubert 149
wherever art exists; they are carried by historical and social progress.”5
Among the more outspoken supporters of Les XX, the most revolutionary
quality of modern art was the contribution it could make toward historical
progress. This was articulated through a language of evolution. I suggest
that Khnopff’s After Flaubert anticipates a debate that would take shape in
these salons over the relationship of modern art to the evolution of the
senses.
The tension between the early claims for modern art stipulated by
Picard and the ultimately very different direction that the art of Les XX
would take evolved from a conviction that realism in the visual arts—
understood in 1884 to be the representation of “contemporary reality” as
Picard described—was no longer affecting the consciousness of its viewer.
That such a discourse could develop around a particular style of art is not
surprising. The nineteenth century saw an overwhelming amount of
research and publication addressed to the nature of sense experience and
consciousness.6 How such a phenomenon informed a relationship
perceived between art and ideas about social revolution is at present still
best understood in relation to the goals of the Neo-Impressionists.7 Yet it
is my assertion here that the salons of Les XX are equally critical to our
understanding of these historical intersections. Considering After Flaubert
in relation to the institutional dynamics of Les XX restores to the history
of Les XX the centrality of sensual experience as the means by which art
might contribute to the progressive evolution of society. In turn, it restores
to the history of Symbolism the association with social progress that
supporters of Les XX came to believe its form represented.
Les XX
Although the membership of Les XX comprised at any time during its
ten-year organization around twenty artists, it was the practice of the
group to invite other artists from all over Europe to exhibit with them.
L’Art moderne was the principal literary organ for the group throughout its
existence, and where much of the theory about the program of Les XX
may be found. However ambivalent the artists of Les XX may have
appeared about the opinions of L’Art moderne, as Jane Block suggests, the
relationship between the two was reciprocal.8 In effect, the art of Les XX
embodied to the editorial staff of L’Art moderne its ideas about “modern
art,” hence its support for the organization throughout its ten-year tenure.
The principal editors for L’Art moderne included Edmond Picard and later
Emile Verhaeren, both figures committed to the socialist movement in
150 Chapter Seven
Belgium, as well as Octave Maus, an attorney like Picard who also

organized the musical programs of Les XX.
The association of Les XX with revolutionary social change was a role
ascribed to it early in its existence by Edmond Picard, a prominent
attorney and later Belgian statesman. Picard was always allied with a
commitment to realism in art, though his conception of the form this
relationship should assume changed through the course of his involvement
with Les XX. Ultimately for Picard, realism would be less about the
choice of subject. Instead, realism would be evident in art when it
demanded and in turn represented the artist’s conscious engagement with
the world. Critically, Picard’s description in 1884 of Les XX as an
organization “carried by social and historical progress” implied his
understanding of a relationship of art to history, and a belief in the
historical agency of art. An intellectual legacy of the nineteenth century
was the recognition that as individuals, our consciousness is shaped by the
historical circumstances that we have lived or experienced. Yet for Picard,
this did not foreclose the possibility for freedom. We were fully capable of
assessing our situation objectively. Hence Picard’s elderly judge in La
Forge Roussel, illustrated in Khnopff’s The Hermit on the Terrace (1884),
a work on paper that the artist exhibited in the 1885 salon of Les XX,
could declare that there was no such thing as natural law.9 Instead, the law
was born from the reason of human minds. This was the call made by
Picard to artists in 1884: to approach their world critically, fully conscious
of the social realities of their day.
From Realism to the Sensual

By 1885, L’Art moderne was advocating that modern art divorce itself
from concerns with subject matter, especially subject matter depicting the
peasant or laboring classes in art. Its writers despaired the effects of
painting in a realist mode, for realist and naturalist artists (terms used
interchangeably during the period) were themselves “suffering, unhappy,
agitated, and [possessed] in themselves the disquietudes and sadness of
our society.”10 Underlying this criticism was a conviction that the
psychological response to life and the psychological response to art,
whether between the work of art and the artist, or between the work of art
and its viewer, were related.
In March 1886, following the third salon of Les XX, L’Art moderne
went so far as to imply that art had raised the social consciousness of a
particular class of people:
Since Millet the tragic ways of the peasant have struck those who
encounter them in the fields. The beggars are viewed differently by those
familiar with the work of DeGroux. Henceforth the miner will be
differently understood, thanks to Meunier.11
The artists cited were each known for taking as the subject matter of their
art the lower classes. From there, however, a very different direction was
advocated for modern art. The writer explained:
If this view of miseries to which industrial life has submitted all ages and
all sexes is of a nature to inspire the desire for reform, the painter has done
enough in reproducing the customs of the artisans, their fatigues and their
hardships. It is up to others to deduce the consequences and bring about the
remedies.12
The writer assumed a relationship between art and life, such that the
former could create an awareness that change was needed. Yet he had an
evident distaste for the “view of miseries” in art to which the public was
continuing to be subjected.
Camille Lemonnier likewise expressed his hopes for a new form of art
in terms of the effect it could have on the mind of the viewer. In an article
entitled “New Art,” published in L’Art moderne in March 1887,
Lemonnier anticipated the new art’s “defiance of our memories” which he
believed “frighteningly surcharged by received sensations and impressions
accepted.”13 Lemonnier’s fear of a passive subject was echoed in a March
1888 article published by Max Sulzberger in La Société Nouvelle, a
socialist periodical with circulation in France and Belgium. Sulzberger
declared the principal aim of a “socialist” art was to present “new form” to
its viewers. Criticizing the work of Courbet, Millet, and DeGroux as more
adaptive than creative, he implied that innovation would guide the artist
working toward a socialist society.14 Echoing Lemonnier’s hope for an art
that might “defy” the memory, Sulzberger likewise identified the memory
as that part of the mind where art could intervene. In a statement
interesting for the primacy given to visual art, Sulzburger argued that the
impact of the image upon the memory was more powerful than the word.
He likened it to a “spark” that once in the mind, stayed there.15
Inflecting the ideas expressed by Lemonnier and Sulzberger were
contemporary scientific theories about the nature of the conscious mind. In
his 1875 study of sensibility, Léon Dumont had recognized the seeming
intransigence of perceptions, noting that “perceptions” were the “facts”
that imposed themselves on our thoughts with the greatest force.16 Jean
Remy Leopold DelBoeuf, a Belgian scientist and professor at the
152 Chapter Seven
University of Liège, expressed in 1883 a similar concern for states of mind

that foreclosed the possibility for critical thought. In a publication entitled
Elements of Psychophysics, he suggested that the shortcoming of the
intellect was its risk through instinct and force of habit to render the
otherwise thoughtful individual an automaton. Asserting that it was habit
or instinct that “explained the majority of illusions of which we were
frequently victims,”17 DelBoeuf explained that the passage from a
“conscious” to an “unconscious” state happened every day, citing as his
example the inability of his daughter when questioned to explicate her
answer to a problem of multiplication. She had simply memorized the
multiplication tables, a response rendering the intellectual exercise behind
it automatic, in his opinion, rather than thoughtful.18 For DelBoeuf,
understanding what made us conscious of ourselves as subjects in the
world began with accepting the role of sensory experience in facilitating
that knowledge:
[The sense organ], once born, plays a principal role. Not only is it
indispensable to rendering distinct sensation, but it is through it that
impressions are associated and that individuality constitutes itself; it is the
instrument of experience and the preservation instinct, the origin for
progress in the individual as much as in the species.19
DelBoeuf related sensory experience, in highly evolved species, to

subjectivity and the conditions for critical thought. Our ability to reason
was in fact evidence of our sensibility; intelligence was a matter of the
intellect working in tandem with lived experience, which was channeled
through the senses and felt through the emotions.
In October 1886, in an article addressing the work of Fernand Khnopff,
Emile Verhaeren observed:
To sketch what one sees exactly, skillfully, is pure illustration. The modern
is more in the spirit than in the subject.20
The criticism leveled at a process of sketching “what one sees exactly,

skillfully” represented in late 1886 a clear refutation by Verhaeren of
realism. But his directive to modern artists to emphasize “spirit” over
“subject” was vague. He clarified: “In a certain way, it is impossible not to
be modern because it is impossible to sense beyond the time and period in
which we live.”21
Verhaeren understood “spirit” in relation to a process of “sensing” the
world. Because this “sensing” of the external environment was tied to
historical conditions, “the time and period in which we live,” the awareness
of the world Verhaeren described was akin to historical consciousness.

This qualified the senses very specifically. Functioning at the threshold of
consciousness, the senses had developed in relation to needs posed by
socio-historical conditions. Hence the senses were not merely passive
receptors of data from the external world. They served to mediate between
the material world and thought processes informed by experience.
Consciousness, then, as an active and ongoing exchange between self and
world, constituted a process of mediation enabled first through sensual
experience.
After Flaubert was but one example among many of the fascination
that Flaubert’s tale held for visual artists in the closing decades of the
nineteenth century. James Ensor, Odilon Redon, and Félicien Rops all
created versions of the legend based on Flaubert’s narrative. Yet none was
so focused as Khnopff’s on the relationship of vision to emotion and the
bodily experience of beauty. For example, at the same inaugural salon of
Les XX, Félicien Rops exhibited his Temptation of Saint Anthony (1878),
an image whose flagrant caricature of the saint was hardly surprising
within an oeuvre tending to satire and biting criticism of Belgium’s
historically Catholic sympathies. For Rops, Saint Anthony’s religious
convictions had condemned him to an abhorrent, if beautiful, vision of
desire.
Khnopff’s by comparison was more mysterious and less precise in its
allusions to its literary source.22 Although the gaunt, bare upper body of
the male figure reflected a monk’s asceticism, nothing else in the image
suggested an experience of religious meditation. Khnopff isolated
Flaubert’s protagonists, deleting all details from the scene save the
moment of encounter, when Saint Anthony stared into the eyes of his
temptress. The source of the subject matter was secondary to the interest
by Khnopff to convey a sensual experience of beauty.
The centrality of the visual encounter to the subject matter of the image
was an effective foil to another painting by Khnopff of similar dimensions
also exhibited in the 1884 salon. In The Guard Who Waits (1883),
Khnopff depicts a guardsman, or forest official standing in stiff profile,
much like Khnopff’s Saint Anthony, but surrounded by the material world
of nature. Unlike the two figures in After Flaubert, the object of the
guardsman’s gaze is not visible in the painting. Presumably he is focused
on nothing in particular; his sensual response to the world has become,
borrowing Delboeuf’s terms, automatic rather than thoughtful.
Other paintings of the period further confirm Khnopff’s preoccupation
with the sensual. The eerie quality of the social dynamic evident in
Memories (Lawn Tennis) (Fig 7-1), exhibited in the 1888 salon, lay with
154 Chapter Seven
its subject. Though organized as a group, these female figures seem

neither to see nor touch each other. They appear as automatons, existing in
but not conscious of the world around them. In 1886, the artist exhibited
Listening to Music by Schumann (1883). Although the central figure
covers her eyes, as Michel Draguet suggests, the gesture reinforces her
utter absorption by means of the music that she hears.23 The painting also
engages its viewer in an exercise of correspondences: we hear the music of
Schumann by means of what we see, hence through our ability to imagine
it.24
Figure 7-1. Fernand Khnopff, Memories (Lawn Tennis), 1889. ©Royal Museums
of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
The Evolution of the Senses

In 1889, L’Art moderne published from Guillaume de Greef’s
Introduction to Sociology an excerpt entitled “The Senses and Historical
Evolution.” The article opened with an assertion by De Greef that our
aesthetic capacity was inherited, like all other psychological and psychic
qualities. The eye was itself the product of a series of accumulated organic
transformations, transmitted by inheritance and successively developed
and improved.25 In tying the senses to historical evolution, he implied a
relationship between the senses and historical progress.
The notion that modern art might assist in the evolution of the senses
toward a more nuanced perception of the material world underlay the
description in 1887 by Camille Lemonnier of the “new art.” Although he
believed the “new art” was still in its embryonic period, he believed that
the eye was an organ that might be gradually and constantly educated.26
As early as 1883, L’Art moderne had praised Edouard Manet as an artist
who had taught a generation “to open their eyes, disengaging multiple
details from the simple elements of color and line making an
impression.”27 In July 1885, an article on Renoir described Impressionism
as a style of painting demanding an “adaptation of the eye organ” to be
understood. For this reason, the writer concluded, paintings rendered in an
Impressionist style were not immediately understood by the majority of
persons.28 In 1886, when Odilon Redon was invited to exhibit with Les
XX, L’Art moderne observed that through its “particularly suggestive
sensation,” Redon’s imagery could awaken in its viewer “a world of
doubts and unsettling interrogations.”29
If the subject matter of realism—the monumentalizing of the peasant
or the industrial worker in art—was believed by 1885 outmoded because
too familiar and no longer shocking to its viewer, After Flaubert
anticipated a direction for art that would appeal, through its engagement of
the sensual, to the most primitive means of conscious awareness. It is a
reminder of the centrality of the art to the historical dynamic of these
salons. But if the support for the sensual in art was born from a conviction
that art could contribute to the sharpening of the senses and the
progressive evolution of society, it is interesting to note that Khnopff
represented a sensual experience that was inconclusive as to its liberating
effect. In fact, by 1888, another debate and stylistic evolution was
underway in the salons of Les XX. It concerned the means by which art
might teach the viewer to perceive harmony, as the support for Neo-
Impressionism implied. At stake was the tedious and formulaic nature of
Neo-Impressionism, which in contrast to Symbolism and the freedom of
association its ambiguity made available to its viewer, risked a response
from the viewer that was merely emotionally engineered rather than free.30
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Fulbright
Commission and the Belgian American Educational Foundation, which
provided grants supporting the research for this paper. The author also
wishes to acknowledge the gracious assistance provided by the Archives
156 Chapter Seven
de l’art contemporain of the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique

during the same research period.
Figure 7-1. Fernand Khnopff, Memories (Lawn Tennis), 1889. Pastel on
paper mounted on canvas, 127 X 200 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of
Belgium, Brussels.
Notes
1
The comparison by contemporary critics to Moreau is long acknowledged in
scholarship on the painting. For evidence in the primary literature, see Mecoenas,
“L’Exposition des ‘XX,’” La Chronique (February 17, 1884).
2
Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French are the author’s own.
Lucien Solvay, for example, noted: “Si ce fusain intrigue le public, c’est que le
public n’a sans doute pas su ce qu’il signifiait…” See Lucien Solvay, “Les Vingt,”
Sarette (February 11,1884). Yves Didier likewise observed: “Le dessin D’Après
Flaubert, qui s’est dressé comme un point d’interrogation aux yeux du public
ébahi…” See Yves Didier, “La Lutte pour l’Art. L’Exposition des XX,” deuxième
article, National Belge (March 23, 1884).
3
Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Trans. Lafcadio Hern (New
York: The Modern Library, 2001), 38.
4
“D’abord, l’étude et l’interprétation de la réalité contemporaine…..Dans le choix
du sujet : Donc plus de conceptions de pure imagination, plus de scènes historiques
de convention . . . Si quelques-uns d’entre eux composent quelque sujet en dehors
de ce qu’ils peuvent voir par eux-mêmes, encore veulent-ils que tous les éléments
soient pris dans la réalité, que celle-ci seule fournisse les modèles.” Edmond
Picard, “L’exposition des XX. L’Art jeune,” L’Art moderne 7 (February 17, 1884):
49.
5
“L’Exposition des XX,” L’Art moderne 6 (February 10, 1884): 42. “Les XX
disposent du reste de forces réelles pour l’attaque et pour la résistance. Ils sont
réunis là où l’art existe ; ils sont portés par un progrès historique et social.”
6
The earliest scholarship acknowledging this history in relation to the visual arts is
José Argüelles, Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychophysical Aesthetic
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 20. This history has also
informed the direction of Jonathan Crary’s work, most recently, his Suspensions of
Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2001).
7
The best study to date of this relationship remains John G. Hutton, Neo-
Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground. Art, Science, and Anarchism in
Fin-de-Siècle France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).
8
Jane Block, Les XX and Belgian Avant-Gardism (Ann Arbor : UMI Research
Press, 1984), 32. Block offers an excellent institutional study focused on the group
dynamics of Les XX and its place within the larger context of “Belgian avant-
gardism” during the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
9
Edmond Picard, La Forge Roussel (Brussels: Felix Callewaert), 127.
10
“Le Laid dans l’art,” L’Art moderne 9 (March 1, 1885): 67.
11
“C’est depuis Millet que les côtés dramatiques du paysan frappent ceux qui le
rencontrent dans les champs. Les mendiants sont vus d’une autre façon par celui
qui connaît l’œuvre de Degroux. Désormais le mineur sera autrement compris,
grâce à Meunier.” “Constantin Meunier,” L’Art moderne 10 (March 7, 1886): 74.
12
“Si la vue des misères auxquelles la vie industrielle soumet tous les âges et tous
les sexes est de nature à inspirer le désir des réformes, le peintre fait assez en
reproduisant les mœurs des artisans, leurs fatigues et leurs privations. A d’autres à
déduire les conséquences et à provoquer les remèdes.” Ibid.
13
Camille Lemonnier, “L’Art nouveau,” L’Art moderne 11 (March 13, 1887): 85.
14
Max Sulzberger, “La Démocratie et l’Art,” La Société Nouvelle XXXIX (March
1888): 256.
15
Ibid., 259.
16
Léon Dumont, Théorie Scientifique de la Sensibilité (Paris : Librairie Germer
Baillière, 1875), 2. “Ce sont véritablement les faits régulateurs avec lesquels toutes
les autres notions, sous peine d’être exclues comme fausses, sont tenues de se
mettre directement ou indirectement d’accord. Aucune idée ne peut prévaloir
contre la force d’une perception, chez celui du moins qui en est actuellement le
sujet.”
17
J. Delboeuf, Elements de Psychophysique (Paris: Librairie Germer Baillière &
Co., 1883), 236.
18
Ibid., 239-40.
19
Ibid., 148. “L’organe, une fois né, joue le rôle principal. Non-seulement il est
indispensable pour qu’il y ait sensation distincte, mais c’est par lui que les
impressions s’associent et que l’individualité se constitue ; il est l’instrument de
l’expérience et de l’instinct de conservation, l’origine des progrès tant de
l’individu que l’espèce.”
20
Emile Verhaeren, “Silhouettes d’Artistes. Fernand Khnopff,” L’Art moderne 41
(October 10, 1886): 322. “Croquer ce que l’on rencontre exactement, habiliment,
c’est de l’illustration pure. Le moderne existe bien plus dans l’esprit dans le sujet.”
21
Ibid. “En un certain sens, il est impossible de n’être point moderne puisqu’il est
impossible de sentir en dehors du temps et de l’époque où l’on vit.” Also quoted in
Sharon Hirsh, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge : Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 59.
22
This comparison is discussed in greater length by Michel Draguet in his Khnopff
ou l’ambigu poétique (Brussels: Crédit Communal, Flammarion, 1995), 262-63.
23
Ibid., 61-2.
24
This interpretation is also suggested in the catalogue entry accompanying the
most recent retrospective of Khnopff’s work: Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)
(Brussels: Royal Museum for Fine Arts of Belgium, 2003), 74.
25
Guillaume De Greef, “Les Sens et L’Evolution Historique,” L’Art moderne 9
(February 24, 1889): 60.
158 Chapter Seven
26
Lemonnier, “L’Art nouveau,” 85.
27
“Edouard Manet,” L’Art moderne 20 (May 20, 1883): 157.
28
“Les Impressionistes français,” L’Art moderne 29 (July 19, 1885): 232.
29
“Odilon Redon,” L’Art moderne 12 (March 21, 1886): 92.
30
This observation on the potentially inhibitory effect of Neo-Impressionism on
the viewer is offered by Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention,
Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 175.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“SOMETHING INCOMPREHENSIBLE”:
FORMALIST MODERNISM AND THE REAL
IN THE LANDSCAPES OF FERNAND KHNOPFF
ANDREW MARVICK
It’s understandable that critical consensus about the landscape art of

Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), both during his lifetime and today, has
placed it within the genre of art generally called Symbolist, by which it is
sometimes meant that art that seeks, in more or less strict application of
ideas and aesthetics proposed by writers of the fin-de-siècle, to suggest a
withdrawal from the modern world through a concerted evocation of what
one biographer called the “soul,” or at least, the “inner mystery,” of a
subject, in order to resist the restrictions set by the academy, on the one
hand, and by both naturalism and realism, dominant forces in modern art
during this period, on the other. This paper argues, however, that Khnopff’s
landscapes, unlike his narrative and figurative subjects, served as outlets
for the expression of purely formal interests.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, writing about the art of James Whistler in L’Art
moderne, explicitly grouped Khnopff with the American model in
“revealing himself, far from everything, closer perhaps to the art of
Baudelaire and of Edgar Poe than to the art of painting, properly
described.”1 Viewed in this way, Khnopff’s production functions in
sympathy with the theatrical rather than the poetic aspects of both writers’
work.
In line with this judgment during our own time is Khnopff’s
biographer Michel Draguet, who refers to the landscape paintings as the
artist’s “transformation of nature into a state of soul”—‘un état d’âme’—
“charged with symbolic meanings,"2 creating what he terms a "pictorial
logogriph [of landscape].”3
Such an assessment is understandable, yet I would suggest that
differences between Khnopff’s primary (and more famous) oeuvre—of
which, say, Mon coeur pleure d’autrefois (My Heart Weeps for Days of
160 Chapter Eight
Yore)4 is typical—and his smaller group of Ardennes landscape scenes are

great enough that the temptation to see in the latter the same hallmarks of
Symbolism found in the former should be resisted. Briefly put, Khnopff’s
landscapes are primarily formalist experiments. Four arguments support
this view.
First, the number and dating of Khnopff’s landscape works differ from
those of his other genres, which may be neatly grouped according to
subject, literary influence and medium. (Witness the tidy organization, by
subject and literary allusion, of the massive retrospective exhibition
mounted by the Musée d’Art Moderne in Brussels in 2004 and retained in
the exhibition catalogue of the same year.)5 By contrast, the landscapes
were produced at more or less regular intervals, on an annual or bi-annual
basis, mainly during the summer months, from 1880 through at least 1916.
Second, whether executed in oils on canvas or on panel, in pastel on
paper or on paper mounted on canvas, or in colored pencil on tinted paper,
the formal features of these landscapes remain more or less constant and
their sources in every case extra-literary. Khnopff was drawn to the site
not only by nostalgia, but also by its particular visual character, which he
described as “a silent landscape of moors and extensive forests on
elongated hills.”6
Third, they share the same content: the hilltop meadows, shaded
valleys and modest rustic structures surrounding the Khnopff family
property outside the Ardennes village of Fosset. The artist’s constancy
with regard to landscape subject is in keeping with his lifelong attraction
to a theme of resistance to the incursions of modern life into his quotidian
experience. (Although he featured a hushed, monastic image of the city in
numerous well-known works, Khnopff resisted visits to the city of Bruges
as an adult; and when circumstances once required his presence there, the
story goes that he insisted on walking through its streets blindfolded, lest
the new, external sighting damage the old, internalized one.7) As such, I
suggest, even more than the figure paintings, many of which feature
idealized representations of his sister Marguerite, the small landscapes are
a means of containing and preserving past experience.
Unlike Bruges, of course, the tiny community of Fosset suffered only
mildly the vicissitudes of the machine age during Khnopff’s lifetime. In
his paintings of this terrain the artist was able therefore over many years to
set down and fix in visible form, so to speak, the essential features of the
landscape of his childhood summers. Their titles refer in most cases to the
vegetation, the weather, the light and the season, noting those aspects that
distinguish one image most memorably from the others. In marked
contrast to his figurative oeuvre, there is nothing in any of the landscapes’
Formalist Modernism and the Real in the Landscapes of Fernand Khnopff 161
titles that might suggest a literary, dramatic, poetic, musical or intellectual

association or reference.
A fourth argument in favor of a healthy skepticism of such pro-
Symbolist analysis with respect to the landscapes appears to have come
from Khnopff himself. There is direct (though anecdotal) evidence that he
had no intention of making of his Ardennes forests a thicket of Symbolist
aesthetics.
In 1898 Khnopff contributed twenty-one works to the first Vienna
Secession exhibition—among them his best-known landscape in oils,
Stilles Wasser (Motionless Water) of 1894—and he paid a visit to the city
to oversee their installation. While there he spent time in the company of
Gustav Klimt and his circle, which included the then 20-year-old Alma
Schindler, the devoted stepdaughter of the painter Carl Moll, who was
already passionately concerned with progressive trends in the Vienna art
world.
It should be noted that recent scholarship has lessened Alma
Schindler's credibility with regard to accounts she gave of her later
married life with the composer Gustav Mahler.8 If we nevertheless accept
as substantially true her account of her meeting with Khnopff in 1898, we
may find in it a revealing insight into the creative process of one of the
leading Symbolist painters of his day. She writes:
At the time, we were walking in the Prater, and he told me: “It’s strange.
When I put something incomprehensible into a picture, it’s usually because
the form and color interest me and because it just happens to fit in. Then
my friends come along: ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ And they rack
their brains for an interpretation, finding so many ingenious explanations
that I feel quite proud of all the unarticulated ideas concealed in my
pictures.”
Schindler’s concluding diary comment: “Symbolism!?”9 The lack of any

predicate in support of this final outburst leaves us unable to interpret
whether her final exclamation indicated consternation or actual disbelief.
Khnopff’s confidence to Alma that his procedure was motivated largely,
even exclusively, by formal instincts is remarkable in itself, particularly for
a style which was perhaps more reliant for its effects on literary, narrative,
and thematic models than any other visual-arts movement of the fin-de-
siècle. He goes further, however, by minimizing, even gently mocking, the
public’s (or critics’) ready ascription of such models to his works.
It is impossible to lay eyes on such an image as Une Cigarette (Fig. 8-
1) without dwelling on its charged subject and its attendant literary and
other cultural and social referents.
162 Chapter Eight
Fig 8-1. Fernand Khnopff, Une Cigarette.
These may be ignored, however, in the contemplation of a landscape like

In Fosset: Grass (Fig. 8-2).10 The painting offers only a limited number of
visible features for consideration: color, or more accurately a tint-based
tonality centered around a nearly desaturated cold green; plane (as
opposed to contour line which, confined to implicit status throughout most
of the picture, serves only to set out the perimeters of otherwise scarcely
differentiated planes of bled-out color); and texture, which itself, though
matte and restrained to the point of indistinctness, still succeeds in making
felt the painstaking application of the painter to his task and the application
of his super-refined aesthetic of stroke to his panel. Unless one is
determined to cling to topographical details, which are just sufficiently
identifiable to enable a translation of this recondite collection of fields of
paint into the mundane specifics of a cropped field and meadow, a tree, a
clump of stones, a bush—virtually nothing else distracts the viewer from
the appreciation of color and plane in tenuous, self-consciously exquisite
balance.
A telling example of Khnopff’s formal operations with regard to large-
scale pictorial composition may be found in his famous painting of 1891, I
Lock My Door Upon Myself. The bi-structural apparatus underpinning this
finely wrought, polished figurative painting consists in a representational
organization of objects—what I will call here a theatrical organization—
and a purely formal organization of the picture plane. In the first organization,
Fig. 8-2. Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: Grass.
we see a lateral foreground array of quite specific content: three lilies on

their stalks. In the middle ground a young woman is seated at a broad
table, her elbows resting on its ledge, her hands lightly supporting her chin
and her head tilted to the left, suggesting that she is distracted from her
work by a thought or memory. Apparently she has been making a dress, or
cape, from a fine deep blue velvet and a pale blue, beaded organza or
satin. Behind her, in the near background, is the wall of the room, on
which we see a small ledge supporting a bust of Pallas Athena executed in
white marble, and a fourth flower, a single rose perhaps, of darker reddish
hue. At the right end of this near background space a window just reveals
a more distant exterior scene of a solitary, quasi-monastic figure walking
past the wall of an austere, possibly Romanesque, building. Each of these
elements of the composition is clearly displayed by the artist’s placement:
virtually no part of any of these objects obscures the spectator’s view of
any of the others; they may be read from left to right and from foreground
to extreme background. They constitute the narrative and thematic
elements of the composition, and because they are both intrinsically
mysterious and literarily encumbered, they have naturally claimed most of
the critical attention, particularly in recent years. One can draw a loose
parallel to the relegation of foreground, middle ground and background to
164 Chapter Eight
discrete scrim-like planes of action which characterize so much Asian

landscape art from the tenth century on, and with which Khnopff had
become familiar at least by the time of his association with his Paris-based
patron, the collector-dealer Siegfried Bing, at the Maison d’Art Nouveau
in Paris during the mid-1890s.
Simultaneously, however, an organization of a quite different kind fills
the dimensions of the panel. This is a sort of patchwork of rectangles and
lozenges; it moves exclusively but vitally within the single flat plane of the
canvas proper—borrowing equally from each scrim of the former
collection, yet inhabiting none of them. The formal life of the painting
flourishes within this plane, communicating entirely through the elements
and principles of design, in virtually complete independence from the
picture’s narrative, or thematic, group of planes, which make up the
theatrical stage work of the painting.
So, within an ascetic palette of blue, gray and ochre, the formal plane
alternates with extraordinary finesse between cold and warm temperatures,
never permitting (for example) the traditional devices of confining warmer
colors to the foreground while collecting the cooler ones in the back, but
instead allowing for the poetic interchange of temperatures across the
panel from edge to edge, never meeting the expectations set by the
stagecraft of the narrative planes. And, just as the painting dances with
temperatures, so too does it play, lovingly, with values. Consider, for
example, the utterly unconventional commonality of value among the
planes of (gray-)blue and (gray-)ochre which surrounds and includes the
view into the street.
The effect is to underscore the artificiality of the exterior scene, of
course; but beyond this comment which Khnopff’s gradations of value
make on the narrative content, those gradations indulge what I can only
see as a purely formalist/modernist sensibility. With the sole exception of
Whistler after 1862, no other artist of this period was able to work out so
uncompromisingly the demands which paint, color, line and plane set for
him, while still satisfying his public’s—and his own—predilection for the
keenly observed, even fetishistically detailed, representation of Symbolist/
Decadent iconography. Once we recognize the curious, even confusing
interplay between the theatrical, illusionistic planes and the single, flat,
formal plane in I Lock My Door, the painting’s persistent hold on the
imagination can be more easily understood.
Conversely, the Fosset landscapes, In Fosset: Twilight (Fig. 8-3, ca.
1890-1895) and In Fosset: A Stream (Fig. 8-4, 1897) serve as additional
representative examples here. They are unique in their nearly total
exclusion of that theatrical system of narrative and thematic content that
obtains in all of Khnopff’s other works. Only in the Fosset pictures can we
find a single-minded exploration of the subtle gradations of value, texture,
tone and tint which underpin I Lock My Door but which here present
themselves unfettered by narrative, unobscured by spectacle. That exclusive
focus may explain these pictures’ continuing neglect by both the critical
community and the public. Yet, for all their modesty—in terms of scale,
subject matter, dramatic power, even purely formal incident—these small,
insinuating images stand together, I believe, as one of formalist modern
abstraction’s first, bravest and—perhaps ironically—most sophisticated
and consistently realized experiments.
Fig. 8-3. Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: Twilight.
One sign of the achievement they represent may be found in such

pictures as Le Chef d’orchestre (1955, private collection), by Khnopff’s
Surrealist compatriot of several generations later, René Magritte, which
Philippe Roberts-Jones first identified as a Surrealist allusion to Khnopff’s
In Fosset: Under the Fir Trees in 1972.11 An affectionately humorous
pastiche,12 Magritte’s painting revisits Khnopff’s haunting Fosset site,
albeit in the Surrealist artist’s characteristically clumpy, anti-Khnopfflike
facture, affixing to it, in defiantly flattening centrality relative to the
implicit linear convergence of the fir trees’ trunks, the cartoonish figure of
a squirrel balancing itself tenuously in mid-air on the tilted surface of a
wooden plank. Magritte’s painting, an enigmatic satire of the modernist
principle of asserted flatness, suggests that in spite of Khnopff’s unassuming
language of color-field formalist abstraction, the Fosset pictures may still
166 Chapter Eight
occupy a vital plane on the stage of early modernist painting.
Fig. 8-4. Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: A Stream.

Fig. 8-1. Fernand Khnopff, Une cigarette, ca. 1912 (pastel and charcoal on
paper, diam. 15.8 cm., 38 x 21.5 cm. overall; private collection).
Fig. 8-2. Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: Grass (oil on panel, 20.4 x 30 cm.,
1893, private collection).
Fig. 8-3.Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: Twilight (oil on panel, 37.8 x 66.5

cm., ca. 1890-1895, private collection).
Fig. 8-4. Fernand Khnopff, In Fosset: A Stream (oil on canvas, 40 x 32

cm., 1897, Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts).
Notes
1
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, “L’Art de Whistler,” L’Art moderne, 4, no 26 (Paris: June
29, 1884): 213. The translation is mine.
2
Draguet, Michel, Fernand Khnopff, ou l'ambigu poétique (Brussels: Crédit
communal, 1995), 31.
3
Ibid., 38.
4
The version to which I refer here from 1889 (50 x 29.5 cm., private collection), is
probably the best known of at least seven versions of the subject painted by the
artist. See Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque’s catalogue entry in Fernand Khnopff (1858-
1921), trans. Irene Schaudies, Ruth Harland, Valerie Carroll, and Peter King
(Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Art, 2004), 220.
5
Frederik Leen, Dominique Marechal and Sophie Van Vliet, Fernand Khnopff
(1858-1921), exhibition catalogue (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Art, 2004).
6
Letter to Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Feb. 1899, published in Robert L. Delevoy,
Catherine de Croës and Gisèle Olllinger-Zinque, Fernand Khnopff (Brussels:
Cosmos Monographies, Lebeer, Hossmann, 1979; 2nd ed. 1987), 26-27.
7
Léon Tombu, Peintres et sculpteurs à l’aube du XXe siècle (Liège: A. Bénard,
1907), 93-94. The story may well be apocryphal, as it is implicitly contradicted by
other reports that the artist never returned to the city after his family’s relocation in
1866.
8
In fact, several caveats must be made regarding Mahler-Werfel’s account: a) the
“Alma problem”—recent confirmation of myriad re-writings of personal history by
Alma Mahler—can be traced back to her earliest diaries; b) Alma’s earlier account
of this particular encounter had Khnopff at great pains communicating in German,
so that we must assume that she is recounting a conversation that was originally
conducted in French, which was not Mahler-Werfel’s native language; c) she made
no mention of such substantive conversation in that earlier account; and d)
Khnopff might well have been trivializing his aesthetic principles in this
168 Chapter Eight
conversation with a charming and famously beautiful girl of twenty during his visit
to Vienna at the invitation of the Secession.
9
Alma Mahler-Werfel, Diaries 1898-1902, ed. by Antony Beaumont and trans. by
Susanne Rodebreymann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), Suite 12
[Monday, 17 July 1899], 164.
10
Reproduced in Delevoy, de Croës and Ollinger-Zinque, Fernand Khnopff, 473.
11
Philippe Roberts-Jones, in From Realism to Surrealism: Painting in Belgium
from Joseph Stevens to Paul Delvaux (Paris: Laconti, 1972), Fig. 21 is referring to
the painting of 1894, in the collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of
Belgium, Brussels (inv. no. 12086), reproduced in Leen, Marechal and Van Vliet,
Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), Plate 35.
12
Sylvester, David, René Magritte, The Silence of the World (Houston: Menil
Foundation, 1992), 130.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BELGIAN SYMBOLIST NOVEL
IN THE CONTEXT OF FRENCH-SPEAKING
LITERATURE
JANA NAPRSTKOVA-DRATVOVA
The act of bringing together the concepts “Symbolist” and “novel”

could have been seen by many authors of the Symbolist period as a
contradiction, and it remains a problem for many literary critics. This
seeming contradiction comes from the fact that the Symbolist movement
in literature and its theories claim to be exclusively poetic. The inclination
we have to classify literary works within traditional categories and to mark
a clear distance between prose and poetry, without considering their
apparent continuity and fusions at the border of genres, contributes to
deepen the idea of two opposite literary conceptions, the narrative one on
the one hand, and the lyric one on the other hand.
The concept of the Symbolist novel usually arouses discussion about
literary genres. This short article, which represents a sketch of a larger
work I am preparing, does not offer enough space to elucidate this
complicated matter. Nevertheless, a quick analysis of the main points of
this question is necessary in order to understand the specifics of Belgian
Symbolist literary work through my approach from a purely literary point
of view.1 Let us consider the points of view of some artists and theorists at
the end of the nineteenth century to understand the reason why the novel,
traditionally considered a narrative genre written in prose, should be
incompatible with the Symbolist philosophy based on expression through
lyricism.
When considering literary genres, in the extreme position we find the
leader of the French Symbolist movement, Stéphane Mallarmé, who
entirely denies the existence of prose with an artistic intention. As Jules
Huret quotes in his book of interviews:
170 Chapter Nine
The verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm . . . In the genre

called prose, there are verses, sometimes admirable verses, of every
rhythm. Yet, as a matter of fact, there is no prose: there is the alphabet and
there are verses, more or less tight, more or less diffuse. Every time there is
an effort to bring style, there is versification.2
Speaking of course mainly about the rhythm of a text and about the
particular significations of its special prosody, Mallarmé considers every
literary form with an artistic intention as poetry. This opinion results from
the duality in the vision of the language whose predominant
communicative function of everyday speech based on a direct referentiality
between words and real objects has nothing in common with artistic
expression, which is directly linked to the artist’s subconscious mind that
influences and modifies by a series of analogies every single element
taken from “objective reality.”3 This way the artist communicates a
particular and authentic vision of the world implicitly contained in the
symbolic elements of his text, which are expressed by juxtaposition
coming from a continuous flow of language liberated from lexical and
syntactic constraints of a communicative language. Therefore, Mallarmé
would not have shared Albert Mockel’s opinion, when he refers to André
Gide’s very Symbolist Traité du Narcisse as “delicious prose.”4
The word “prose” is despised not only by Mallarmé, but also by other
artists and theorists of Symbolism. One can see that the author of
Manifeste du symbolisme, Jean Moréas, a somewhat puristic Symbolist
theorist, shares this opinion, saying that: “A poem by Ronsard or Hugo is
pure art; a novel, even by Stendhal or Balzac, is half art.”5 This opinion
derives from confusion about how to consider the novel, a curious genre in
between those two categories of language, the artistic one and the one
whose only function is an everyday transmission of messages containing
information of a practical nature. The novel is situated on the border firstly
because of its form, which reminds us of the communicative function of
language, and secondly because of the fictionality of the world created by
the novel, which cuts it clear from an everyday communication and makes
it belong to the category of artistic expression. This problem is even more
present in the novel of the Symbolist period as the form of a traditional
novel is here barely respected. The classical conceptions of time, space,
characters, narrativity, and referentiality are perturbed in depth, which
makes theorists and artists hesitate about how to designate a work written
in a rhythmic prose, with vocabulary situated within the confines of
reference and intuition, and with a narrative line that seems disrupted by
many evocative and descriptive passages.
The Belgian Symbolist Novel 171
Even if the artists and literary critics kept during this period a very
remote, or should we say a literally negative relation towards the novel,
the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of
literary works which are very close to the concept of Symbolism, but
which have been perceived by the public as novels. Let us consider
Villiers de lÍsle-Adam, Remy de Gourmont, Francis Poictevin, Marcel
Schwob, André Gide, Maurice Barrès, and the Belgians Georges
Rodenbach, Eugène Demolder, Albert Giraud, and Arnold Goffin. Each of
them has published at least one literary work that has contributed to the
wide disarray concerning the definition of the novel. The afflux of lyricism
to the originally prosaic expression has brought many new forms to
literature, many of which had been rarely or never seen before: for
instance, the vers libre, or the poème en prose and the prose poétique. The
mere existence of these extreme forms justifies the question about the
continuity between the poem and prose, and therefore between prose and
lyricism.
In order to outline an answer to this question, let us consider the
elements of which the fictional world of a literary work, especially of the
Symbolist one, is made. This questioning will also help us see which
features in the Belgian conception of Symbolist thought are specific and
differing from the French view.
The approach through the theory of fictional worlds6 takes out the
question of the referentiality, and with it the problem of truth and untruth
in the constitutive elements. According to this theory, the application of
which to the Symbolist novel will be elucidated in the thesis I am
preparing, a work of art is considered a parallel, ontologically independent
system that is created by the author’s individual vision of the world. The
reference of this system to objective reality is individual for each work and
varies depending on many objective and subjective factors, such as the
general style of a period, special rules for a specific genre, and the author’s
personal means of expression.
There is no longer any need to pinpoint, regarding Symbolism, the
importance of the very individual perception and its expression influenced
by a vast system of analogies. The Symbolist fictional world is built
through elements such as description, characters, dialogue between them,
actions, and the narrator’s or characters’ reflections. These elements are
rarely to be understood on the direct referential level of representation.
The Symbolist world is also built on gaps, spaces that the reader is
supposed to fill himself with his own experience of the real world. As a
result, the reader is directly implicated in the creation of the space of the
fiction. He is active and participates in everything that takes place there,
172 Chapter Nine
not only regarding the action, but regarding the philosophical reflection
that comes from it. This process is not exclusively Symbolist and can be
seen in any artistic expression, but it becomes extremely important in
Symbolism, and later on, in other artistic movements in the twentieth
century, because of the incomparable quantity of these non-dits.
The reader is therefore invited not only to translate the elements
directly from what he reads (or sees, or hears), but he feels more and more
compelled to look for the links between these elements. In other words,
the reader translates the silence, every time the poet falls silent. The reader
looks for the causal system that links one element to another and wonders
more and more not which element is coming up (that is to say: how the
story will unfold), but why this element has been chosen and placed by the
author. Instead of wondering, “What is he saying?” he wonders, “Why
does he say this?”
I am sure that every reader has asked himself this question while trying
to grasp the meaning of Mallarmé’s poetry. Even in his lifetime there were
only a few supporters and admirers of his work, able to accept and
understand it, because Mallarmé dreamed of a very intellectually
demanding art, addressing the elite instead of a public who would discredit
it. This shows that the poet has intentionally written for a specific
audience. He intended to create poetry in order not to please the public but
to address a limited number of readers capable of understanding it. About
this, Albert Mockel says the following:
There are certain periods, or so it seems, when thinking descends or
slumbers; they do not care anymore about poetry, or they welcome only its
less noble forms. At such times, the poet chooses more mysterious words,
so that he is not tempted to depreciate his art. But to all those who can
understand him, he will entrust the secret of a heroic soul and the seeds of
the glories to come.7
The lack of understanding of Mallarmé’s lectures in Belgium in 1890 can

illustrate that he has accomplished his intention. When he decided to
accept the invitation of his close friend Rodenbach and toured Belgium to
give a series of conferences about Villiers de lÍsle-Adam in Brussels,
Ghent, and Bruges, the public fell silent when Mallarmé spoke, not out of
wonder but out of incomprehension8.
The public was distracted, even scornful towards the work of Villiers
de l’Isle-Adam, another genius of Symbolism, not only in poetry but in the
novel as well. The very accurate scientific descriptions and philosophical
theories require an important intellectual capacity from the reader,
especially at the moment when these seemingly objective elements leave
the area of representing and pass, without mentioning it, onto the side of
evocating, as is the case especially in his LÉve future or Axël. Another
exponent of symbolism, Remy de Gourmont, chose as a subtitle for his
novel Sixtine, “Roman de la vie cérébrale.” The succession of elements
that build up the universe of the text—a text made of allusions, evocations,
observations and reflections—is unified by a chain of thoughts that passes
through all these elements in order to string them as pearls to make a
necklace. However, for a non-initiated reader it may be difficult to grasp
this unifying idea and the text can appear scattered.
The elements creating a French Symbolist work are rarely to be
understood on the first, explicit level. That is to say, the constitutive
elements of these fictional worlds are filled with objects which need to be
deciphered and translated by what Jacques Rivière qualified, twenty years
after the climax of Symbolist creation, as “art of extreme consciousness,”9
as an “art of people who terribly know what they think, what they want,
what they do,” and accredited this fact to the traditional French way of
thinking, to the deep psychology and rationalism that guide the “spirit that
can see everything, an intelligence going directly to the aim.” He asks:
“How to imagine a Mallarmé who would not be French?” André Gide has
brought this philosophy to its culmination in Paludes by meeting, in a
way, Mallarmé’s ideal of the purification of the book. It means
purification from any substance that would only help to facilitate the
complicated task of following the chain of ideas and other elements of
intellectual nature in the novel.
However, for the great Belgian theorist Albert Mockel, there is a
necessity to add a certain number of clues to a literary work, so that it
should be understandable:
To clarify an idea is to mark it off, and this already means to take away,
from the poem which contains this idea, that unlimited pulse which brings
a work of art. Of course, a poem or a picture needs to be understood, by a
few people at least. But we leave it to the artists’ tact to draw their thought
until it is easily understandable, in its main outlines, without restricting it
to one particular idea.10
This already sketches the differences in the approach of Belgians in

dealing with the Symbolist inspiration in literature. The French artist, who
inherited the concepts of an ubiquitous and omnipotent conscience, builds
the world in his work with elements of an intellectual nature, while the
Belgian poets and novelists build their worlds of their imagination with
pictures.
174 Chapter Nine
The pictorial imagination of Belgian artists has often been related to

the artistic past of Flanders. Belgian Symbolists had gotten closer to this
past, a past full of great painters with a very particular Germanic and
Nordic fantasy. They contributed to the creation of a new form of national
literature. The young writers from 1880 had to face this difficult task: to
find, for the benefit of their young country’s literature, a form of
expression both artistic and genuine, which could at the same time move
away from limited regionalism and quit the habit of following the literary
trends of the neighboring country, which spoke the same language.
Even if Mallarmé and Rodenbach were close friends, and Rodenbach
became one of the assiduous mardistes, their vision of the public was not
at all the same. While Mallarmé addresses a restricted, intellectually
aristocratic elite, Rodenbach wishes to deliver his poetic message to more
people. The effort of Rodenbach and other Belgian writers, like Eugène
Demolder, Arnold Goffin, Albert Giraud or Pierre Olin, was thus more
“democratic” by the fact they have tried to turn to broader audiences.
The success of this effort is shown, for instance, by the warm welcome
that readers gave Bruges-la-Morte, which can be considered as the
quintessence of the Belgian Symbolist novel. The success of this short
novel was enormous, even to the greater public, certainly also thanks in
part to a series of photographs of Bruges in its first edition, which made
the novel a sort of Baedeker that attracted many tourists to the dead town.
Yet paradoxically, the crowds of enthusiastic readers of the novel came to
visit Bruges and contributed to the loss of its cachet of the dead, solitary
and forgotten town.
I shall now consider what are the reasons for this enthusiasm, not only
in Belgium, but even in France?
On the one hand, it is certainly due to the choice of the form. To
choose the form of a novel is to make, as we say today, an excellent
marketing strategy. For the general public novel was a more accessible
form. The work which succeeded in putting together an accessible form
and the dreamy, silent and mistful Symbolist aesthetic became very
attractive. This aesthetic was developed in Rodenbach’s whole poetic
work, especially in his collection of poems published in 1891, Le Règne
du Silence. Nevertheless, for the broad public, he remains known
particularly for his novels.
However attractive this form was for a greater audience, it does not
change anything to the quality of this work, extremely appreciated by
Mallarmé himself. Rodenbach succeeded in creating a text with multiple
layers of understanding. Bruges-la-Morte can be read as a novel with an
interesting narrative storyline reminding one of a traditional novel
composition. It is appealing also because of its imagination, which was felt

as exotic due to the hint of Germanic aesthetics and spiritualism. For a
reader able to find and interpret symbolic elements of the novel, this
imagination opens at the same time to a broader interpretation that leads to
a higher level of eternal questioning on our human condition. The fictional
world created by Rodenbach is built on versatile elements that, at first
glance, appear to be put together with obvious causal links, as in realism.
These elements, when grasped on a more abstract level, can cancel those
univocal links and can set gaps, silences, and spaces between the
constitutive elements of the fictional world. Through this process, they
invite the reader to begin the philosophical reflection in itself, a reflection
that is stripped away little by little by the narrator-author. This is closely
linked to the second main characteristic of Belgian symbolism, that is to
say the nature of these constitutive elements of the fictional world.
While Mallarmé and, for the case of the novel, Gourmont, use a very
restricted number of elements that are of a complicated intellectual nature,
the Belgian artist fills his fictional world with other elements, more related
to the real world, that seem to refer more than they suggest. This is only
the first impression before discovering the deep reflection that the exact
constellation of these elements invokes. That is why even an uninitiated
reader is more able to approach the text and is not discouraged at first
glance by the complexity of the suggestion.
Let us consider again Bruges-la-Morte. Reading it for the first time, we
only meet four main characters: Hugues, Jane, Barbe, and the spectre of
the deceased wife. Then, there is Bruges. The narrator takes us around the
streets, canals, and banks; we are shown the churches in Bruges, and the
Hans Memling museum, where we are given analyses, more emotional
than objective, on the works of art of this fascinating artist. Until now, the
storyline does not seem to differ from a traditional narrative layout, but
those elements start gradually to take a more profound significance. Little
by little, the reader begins to understand that the main character of the
novel is in fact not Hugues Viane but the town, which is descriptive and
evocative in its detail. It brings the town a life and soul that correspond, in
an analogy, to the mood of the human character. The lyric metaphor fills
the space, the same space that was originally designed as narrative.
Through the way Rodenbach describes it, the town is given real human
characteristics. At the same time, the human characters begin to disappear
in the mist and the grey streets of Bruges, and they become inseparable
and intertwined. Rodenbach uses the juxtaposition of scenes, as might be
found the in the curation of an art gallery. In between each picture, readers
are forced into spaces of short silences intended for their own reflections.
176 Chapter Nine
Until now, I have debated the way the Symbolist artist builds the
fictional world in his work and the characteristics of the modeling of
space, in the Belgian context. While the French artist chooses direct,
intellectual, and suggestive elements, the Belgian poet gladly uses every
day objects and puts them one after the other in a series of pictures. The
poet’s choice regarding these objects and their place gives them a
symbolic meaning, with multiple layers of interpretation.
The Belgian artist remains more understandable for his reader, too. His
choice can be explained by a sort of Germanic mood, which is more prone
to result in an expression of emotion towards other people, whereas the
French turn rather to the value of reason, inherited from Cartesianism. The
objective of this paper was not to explain these choices, but to report the
differences between French and Belgian symbolism and to analyze and try
to explain them through the theory of the fictional worlds. Through this
theory, the complicated question of genres becomes less important
because the focus is only on the artistic creation itself, as a concept of a
certain vision of the world, regardless of the form of expression. This is
precisely what brings together the efforts of the Symbolist artists; the
gathering of genres, the fusion of artistic branches that leads towards the
universalism of artistic expressions, the famous Wagnerian Art total.
Notes
1
Many excellent analyses on this subject, written by authors such as Paul Aron,
Marc Quaghebeur or Michel Décaudin, exist already, but their mainly sociological
approach does not pinpoint enough the specificities of Belgian literature from the
properly artistic point of view, without being foremost part of another domain of
human studies, as here is the case of sociology. The aim of my approach is to give
an analysis of a literary phenomenon primarily on a basis of the main material
proper to this kind of artistic creation, that is to say language. Other effects of
literary creation, as for example its interaction with the society or its role in
(literary) history should only be taken on a secondary scope, as a commentary of
its position, not as an explanation of the interior structure of a literary work.
2
Jules Huret, Enquête sur l´évolution littéraire (Paris: Charpentier, 1891), 57.
3
This duality was noticed for example by Paul Adam in his article “La Presse et le
Symbolisme,” which defended the positions of the symbolist movement in Le
Symboliste, October 7, 1886. Léon Daudet shares his point of view in the essay
“Le Style et la Syntaxe” published in Études et milieux littéraires (Paris: Grasset,
1927), 72-103, and the same position can also be found in the introduction to the
Tzvetan Todorov´s Poétique de la prose (Paris: Seuil, 1971).
4
Albert Mockel, Esthétique du Symbolisme (Bruxelles: Palais des Académies,
1962), 85.
5
Jean Moréas, “Le Manifeste du Symbolisme,” Le Figaro, September 18, 1886.
6
Concerning the theory of fictional worlds, I am referring to works dealing
primarily with this subject, mainly Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and
Possible Worlds (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), Thomas Pavel,
Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) and from a more
theoretical point of view, Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung (Stuttgart:
Ernst Klett Verlag, 1957). Even if these theorists are more or less observing the
problem of fictional worlds only in narrative literature, that is to say the novel, my
approach stems from the hypothesis that literary work, both lyric and narrative,
creates fictional worlds, according to René Wellek´s Theory of Literature (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1942) and Miroslav ýervenka´s Fikþní svČty lyriky (Prague:
Paseka, 2003).
7
Mockel, Esthétique du Symbolisme, 180.
8
See Émile Verhaeren´s article “Conférence de Stéphane Mallarmé” in LÁrt
Moderne, February 16, 1890.
9
Jacques Rivière, “Le Roman dáventure,” in La Nouvelle revue française, May
1913.
10
Mockel, Esthétique du Symbolisme, 92.
CHAPTER TEN
LITERARY AND CRITICAL RECEPTIONS
OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTERS
IN THE FRENCH FIN-DE-SIÈCLE ERA
MIREILLE DOTTIN-ORSINI
It is mainly through the views of men of letters turned art critics that
the French could get an idea of what Pre-Raphaelitism was about and form
their opinions of this painting. Indeed, in those days, men of letters such as
Theophile Gautier, Jules Laforgue, Edmond de Goncourt, Marcel Proust
and many others (including Robert de Montesquiou, Paul Adam, and
André Gide) believed that their gifts as poets or novelists entitled them to
talk and write about painting. All of them were regular contributors to the
famous Gazette des Beaux-Arts.
A Late Discovery
During the World’s Fair of 1855, John Everett Millais’ Ophelia
attracted considerable attention, and Parisians became aware of the
existence of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (sometimes called Préraphaélistes
or Préraphaéliques in France) despite the fact that the original Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood no longer existed. Théophile Gautier gave a
comical description of Ophelia as “une poupée qui se noie dans une
cuvette” (A doll drowning in a wash basin), 1 but he added more seriously
that one should have a closer look and immerse oneself in the details of
the picture. He nearly made an “art-transposition” by accumulating
botanical terms to correspond to Millais’ meticulous floral painting. He
also played with the sounds of the French name Ophélie by writing of “la
folle Ophélie” (mad Ophelia) and “ainsi le fait Ophélie avec l’enfantine
confiance de la folie” (as does Ophelia with the childish confidence of
madness).
In the very same year, the French painter Gustave Courbet had his own
“Pavillon du Réalisme” (Pavilion of Realism) built in front of the Exhibition
Literary and Critical Receptions of the Pre-Raphaelite Painters 179
site and declared, in the Catalogue, “la peinture est un art essentiellement
concret et ne peut consister que dans la représentation de choses réelles et
existantes” (painting is essentially a concrete art and only consists in
representing real, existing things).
After this Exhibition, Charles Baudelaire intended to write an article
on English painters, but just a few lines are to be found in his Salon de
1859. He mentions the names of William Holman Hunt and of Millais, “ce
poète si minutieux” (Millais, this so meticulous poet).2 But, in his
posthumous notes, Baudelaire gave his own definition of Modern Beauty
by describing “une tête séduisante et belle, une tête de femme, veux-je
dire”—a head which might have been painted by Rossetti or Burne-Jones:
C’est une tête qui fait rêver à la fois, —mais d’une manière confuse, —de
volupté et de tristesse ; qui comporte une idée de mélancolie, de lassitude,
… amertume refluante, comme venant de privation ou de désespérance. Le
mystère, le regret sont aussi des caractères du Beau.3
[A beautiful, attractive head, I mean a woman’s head which makes you

dream both of voluptuous delight and sadness, —but in a confused way; a
head which entails an idea of melancholy, of weariness … a kind of
bitterness stemming from deprivation and despair. Mystery and regret are
also two characteristics of Beauty.]
The first articles on the Pre-Raphaelites emphasized their “anglicité”

(Englishness), insularity, and exoticism; they were considered “very
English” and, with traditional xenophobia, the French critics thought that
they were proudly standing apart from the rest of Europe; the Pre-
Raphaelites looked very quaint to the French onlookers. “Quaint, strange,
singular” were recurrent adjectives. They were said to reflect “the Soul of
the North”—a mysterious and tortuous soul—as opposed to the “clear
Latin genius.” They were talked about with humorous condescension, but
they also aroused intellectual curiosity. Traces of this type of reaction
could still be found at the end of the century; in 1894, for instance, Robert
de la Sizeranne described the Pre-Raphaelites as “une erreur, la plus noble
qui fût jamais” (A mistake, the noblest ever), and he concluded with the
following words: “Les peintres anglais sont de grands tentateurs;
admirons-les, ne les suivons pas” (They are great tempters; let’s admire
them, but not imitate them).4
Their quaintness lay particularly in the proliferation of minute details,
of which Millais’ Ophelia was the best example. “Colored photographs”
and “gigantic miniatures” were recurrent phrases used to describe these
paintings. Their obsession with detail to the detriment of the whole was
deemed a nuisance, since the French liked to get straight to the point and
180 Chapter Ten
were mostly interested in the composition of a picture. The Pre-Raphaelites

seemed not to submit to the laws governing French painting. Their colors
were deemed garish, loud, in bad taste, and Edmond de Goncourt would
later describe them as “effroyables couleurs esthètes” (frightfully aesthetic
colors).5 In 1872, Taine wrote that the English fog was responsible for this
style: in reaction against it, he said, English painters developed a taste for
vivid colors and minute details.6
But, finally, the French public had a poor knowledge of the Pre-
Raphaelites. Rossetti stopped exhibiting in 1851 and died in 1882, but, for
the French, he became a legend in his own lifetime. As Paul Bourget
relates,7 the morbid history of how Rossetti exhumed his young dead wife
in order to take back the manuscript of his poems he had buried with her
seven years earlier inspired Marcel Schwob, who wrote a tale called
“Lilith” (1891) in the style of Edgar Allen Poe. This exhumation theme
would appear in many poems and novels. The French often merged
Elizabeth Siddal (Rossetti’s wife) and Jane Morris (another of Rossetti’s
models) because they preferred to read the Siddal-Rossetti story as the
story of a unique and absolute love between a painter and his model.
The Pre-Raphaelites were only truly appreciated in France between
1880 and 1895, and this delay explains why they were mistaken for the
English “Aesthetes” of the years 1870-1880 (Oscar Wilde, in Paris, was
their well-known representative), and why, consequently, the French
forgot about the social concerns and the religious convictions of the Pre-
Raphaelite movement in its early days. For instance, Georges Rodenbach
introduces Robert de Montesquiou as “esthète . . . dans le sens originel et
anglais de ce beau mot du temps des préraphaélistes, c’est-à-dire un
homme qui réalise de l’art partout autour de lui” (an aesthete in the
original English meaning of this fine word in the Pre-Raphaelites’ days,
that is to say, a man who creates art wherever he goes).8
The Pre-Raphaelite Fashion

In 1877, the famous opening exhibition held at the Grosvenor Gallery
in London displayed Gustave Moreau’s watercolor The Apparition besides
eight pictures by Burne-Jones. In 1878, the World’s Fair in Paris
reproduced that exhibition and once again showed Moreau’s Salomés,
which had drawn attention in 1876. The World’s Fair also displayed quite
a collection of Pre-Raphaelite pictures (the most important ever) and, more
specifically, The Beguiling of Merlin by Burne-Jones, which had been a
triumphant success in London. In this moment, the appeal of the Pre-
Raphaelite woman became clear to everyone, and the Pre-Raphaelite
pictures were looked upon as painted poems. In the Gazette des Beaux-
Arts of October 1878, Charles Blanc described Burne-Jones’ picture as “la
plus étonnante peinture qui nous soit venue de Londres … une
quintessence d’idéal, une poésie sublimée” (the most striking painting ever
come from London … a quintessential ideal, a sublime poetry), and he
added, “la Vivien9 du peintre semble évoquée par une sorte d’incantation”
(the painter’s Vivien seems to have been conjured up by some kind of
incantation).
From then on, Léonce Bénédite, Duranty and Gustave Kahn felt bound
to draw a parallel between Moreau and Burne-Jones, and the latter became
“the English Gustave Moreau.” Moreau’s painting, like Puvis de
Chavannes’, greatly contributed to the appraisal of the Pre-Raphaelites in
France.
In 1883, Paul Bourget, who often stayed in England, published a short
novel, L’Irréparable; in it, one of Rossetti’s pupils, an exceedingly
disturbing character on account of his exclusive worship of Beauty and
Purity, breaks the heart of a young lady who is the symbol, in his eyes, of
the ideal woman.
One year later, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A rebours (Against Nature)—the
“Bible of Decadence” according to Arthur Symons—devoted a paragraph
to the Pre-Raphaelites. He mentioned Millais’ The Eve of Saint Agnes,
with its “silver green” tones “bathed in moonlight,” and Watt’s pictures,
which he had seen at the Georges Petit Gallery in Paris in 1881 and 1883.
This painter, whom the French regarded as a Pre-Raphaelite, was, in his
eyes, the incarnation of “la personnalité tout à la fois quintessenciée et
brute d’un Anglais docte et rêveur, tourmenté par des hantises de tons
atroces” (an Englishman’s nature, at once sublime and brutish, an
Englishman haunted by atrocious tones).10 Significantly, the hero of the
novel, Jean des Esseintes, gives up the idea of going to England and
having a look at the original pictures.
At the Exhibition of 1889, only one of Burne-Jones’ paintings, King
Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (already famous in England), was highly
praised and rewarded with a Gold Medal. The painter was deemed worthy
to be made a member of the Legion of Honour, thanks to the
recommendation of Moreau, who had a great liking for him. The Gustave
Moreau Museum in Paris still has in its possession a framed photograph of
Days of the Creation by Burne-Jones, which the English painter had sent
to Moreau by way of thanks.
From then on, Burne-Jones was to be the Pre-Raphaelite, and he made
the French forget all others. King Cophetua inspired a tale by Jean Lorrain, a
play by Iwan Gilkin, poems by Henri de Régnier and André Fontainas,
182 Chapter Ten
and a piece of poetic prose by Jean Lahor.11 Huysmans contemplated

writing an article on English painting and took notes on King Cophetua, as
Paul Bourget had reproached him with not mentioning Rossetti and Burne-
Jones in A rebours. In those notes, Huysmans confessed that he liked
Cophetua’s Beggar Maid better than Moreau’s Galatée, which he had
praised so ardently in 1880; he now found her “mastoc” (hefty).12
Between 1884 and 1895, several French art critics, who were writers as
well and had visited England, including Gabriel Sarrazin, Ernest
Chesneau, La Sizeranne, and Gabriel Mourey, presented to their readers
the ideas of the Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood, with photographs or engravings
of the main pictures.
The writers who appreciated their pictures were those who were fond
of “literary painting.” In those days, the phrase was often pejorative; it
meant painting that was not just painting—except when men of letters
used it. In one way, it referred to those paintings inspired by literary
subjects, which was often true of the Pre-Raphaelites, who drew their
subjects from King Arthur’s legends and from the works of Shakespeare,
Keats, and Tennyson. But, above all, “literary painting” led to literature
and offered “a mine of words,” to quote Huysmans.
However, like Moreau, the Pre-Raphaelites could be praised by French
writers like Huysmans or Jules Laforgue, who also defended the
Impressionists. Huysmans and Laforgue defended the Impressionists as
representations of avant-garde painting who were strongly attacked by the
traditionalists. But, at the same time, both the Pre-Raphaelites and Moreau
appealed to the writers and inspired their texts. It is as if, theoretically,
Huysmans and the others defended Impressionism, and yet the writers in
them were fascinated by the other type of painting. Art critics like
Duranty, Burty, and Léonce Bénédite and men of letters like Gustave
Kahn and Edouard Rod were able to defend Impressionism and show a
liking for the Pre-Raphaelites as well.
These paintings were in fashion at the precise moment when the
Symbolist movement was blooming. There was a “period of expectation”
for the Pre-Raphaelites, who provided a middle course between Realism
and Impressionism on the one hand and official academism on the other,
all of which were equally disliked. Joséphin Péladan, Zola’s greater
enemy, dreamed of displaying the Pre-Raphaelites in his Rose+Croix
exhibitions between 1895 and 1897, but he could only exhibit their
followers.
The Pre-Raphaelite dream had a feminine face for the French public.
Their painted women, like Elizabeth Siddal or Jane Morris, weren’t naked,
unlike those painted by Moreau. But eroticism was detected in their faces,
their pensive eyes and, above all, in their very sensual mouths. These
painters were looked upon as painters of the soul, “abstract” painters in
Moreau’s sense, while the concrete beauty of their painted women
remained quite attractive to French eyes. Because they painted the same
woman over and over again (in picture after picture and within the same
picture as well), this type of woman eventually became imperative, and the
power of her fascination increased.
From then on, the recurrent words used to describe Pre-Raphaelite
painting were “strangeness, dream, silence, regrets, melancholy, nostalgia,
sickly, slowness, pensiveness, twilight, mystery.” Paradoxically, the
slowness and the silence of these paintings were emphasized. Burne-
Jones’ pictures called for silence and ecstasy, and talking about them
would have been a sacrilege (and yet everyone did it, of course). The
French discourse on the Pre-Raphaelites was full of paralipsis; the pictures
were said to be ineffable, requiring “unknown words” and “silent
applause.” The texts abound in ellipses, a temporary materialization of
silence.
Black and White Photographs

Photographs and engravings were not only the means of preserving the
memories of the exhibitions; they also made the Pre-Raphaelites known in
France. It was by examining engravings that, in 1849, the Pre-Raphaelites
had discovered the Early Italian painters, their first models. In Belgium,
huge framed photographs of the Pre-Raphaelites’ pictures were
displayed.13 The men of letters of that time used to collect reproductions of
their favourite paintings: Huysmans, Mallarmé, and Laforgue describe
these collections in their letters. In chapter 5 of A rebours, Huysmans uses
a photograph and an engraving as reference points in his description of
Moreau’s two Salomés, since he had not seen the actual pictures for
several years. Likewise, the Cuban poet Julian del Casal could write
poems based on Moreau paintings that he had never seen because he had
photographs of these paintings. And in 1896, Paul Verlaine used a
photograph to write a commissioned poem about Rossetti’s Monna Rosa.
As a matter of fact, black and white photography could be viewed as the
link between literature and paintings; the subject of the picture seemed
more important than the actual picture, and the drawing more important
than the color.
In London, Gabriel Mourey spent a whole day at Hollier’s (Hollier was
the Pre-Raphaelites’ photographer) to look on his collection, and he wrote,
184 Chapter Ten
Dépouillée de l’artifice des couleurs, dans cette monochromie, la pensée

maîtresse de telles œuvres ne resplendit-elle pas plus radieuse, plus
séductrice, plus irrésistiblement enivrante? Et n’est-ce pas encore un
prestige de [les] retrouver là, côte à côte, sans le voisinage et la
promiscuité fatale des musées ou des collections? 14
[In the monochrome reproductions, without the artifice of colors, isn’t the
governing idea of these pieces more dazzling, more radiant, more
seductive, more irresistibly intoxicating? And isn’t there another advantage
to find [them] here, side by side, on their own, without the deadly
crowding of the museums?]
These photographs were preferred to the works themselves; like books,

they allowed a close relationship with the paintings. And literature could
emerge from the shadowy picture that is a photograph: a picture divested
of its materiality, remote and consequently more mysterious and deprived
of color (which was better since English colors were not really
appreciated). The Symbolist’s rejection of materiality could lead to the
rejection of the picture itself. Camille Mauclair and Edouard Rod
expressed the same preference for photographs.15
Reveries about the photographs of the paintings could explain
reactions such as Paul Valery’s on again seeing Moreau’s The Apparition
after reading A rebours: the watercolour seemed, he said, “grise et terne
comme un trottoir ” (as gray and dull as a pavement).16 Revisiting the Tate
Gallery after many years, Henri de Regnier reacted in a similar way upon
looking again at the original pictures, of which he had been fond:
Je cours aux préraphaélites … Quelle désillusion! Certes, leur art est

intelligent, noble et subtil … mais que ses réalisations sont décevantes!
Quelle froideur et quelle pauvreté! Quelle misère et quelle prétention dans
la couleur ! Quel bric-à-brac que toute cette littérature picturale!17
[I rush to the Pre-Raphaelites’ Department. What disillusion! Their art is

certainly intelligent, noble and subtle … but how disappointing their
realizations are! So cold and so cheap! Such wretchedness and conceit in
the choice of colors! … That pictorial literature is a mere bric-a-brac!]
Negative Reactions to the Pre-Raphaelites

In articles written in 1895 and 1896, Emile Zola and Octave Mirbeau
protested against the Pre-Raphaelite fashion. Zola made fun of “the
puzzle-like” aspect of English pictures. Both protested in the name of
vigour and life: Pre-Raphaelitism was seen as a sick art, and Zola wanted a
“strong art” and Mirbeau “a really healthy art.” “Le beau maladif et
charmant des mélancoliques tableaux de Burne-Jones” (The sickly and
charming Beauty of Burne-Jones’s melancholy pictures), so much admired
by Jules Claretie in 1881, became despised by Zola and others. According
to Zola, Pre-Raphaelite art was a challenge to Nature, it was the
expression of “a hatred for flesh and sunlight.” But they mainly attacked
the French followers of the English painters, particularly Armand Point,
Alexandre Séon, Carlos Schwabe, and Alphonse Osbert.
They were bound to hate them, since they rejected Moreau (whom they
considered archaic), but they also attacked the Pre-Raphaelites in the name
of nearly Victorian standards; Zola denounced the unhealthy exoticism
and the lack of differentiation between their characters’ sexes:
Ces vierges insexuées qui n’ont ni seins ni hanches, ces filles qui sont
presque des garçons, ces garçons qui sont presque des filles … ah! le vilain
monde, cela tourne au dégoût et au vomissement!18
[Those sexless virgins with neither breasts nor hips, those girls who are
nearly boys, and those boys who are nearly girls … Oh! what a wicked
world! So disgusting that one feels like vomiting!]
Mirbeau, who, as early as 1886, had written that the lilies held by
Rossetti’s ladies were “l’interprétation hagiographique du parapluie” (the
hagiographic representation of an umbrella),19 was again sniggering about
Burne-Jones ten years later: “[Il] donne aux femmes des apparences de
jeunes garçons ; aux jeunes garçons des apparences de femmes” ([He]
gives women the appearance of young boys, and young boys those of
women). He wrote that an Englishman told him that he found in these
pictures “d’émerveillantes et profondes obscénités!” (an underlying
lewdness which filled him with wonder).20 Mirbeau went on:
Ah! leurs princesses avec des corps en échalas … qui passent sur des
escaliers de nuages, en robes de tôle galvanisée ! … Et leurs héros puent la
sodomie, la névrose et la syphilis!21
[Ah! Their princesses with their spindly bodies, … climbing cloud-like

stairs in their enamelled-iron dresses … As for their heroes, they stink of
sodomy, neurosis and syphilis!]
In opposition to Pre-Raphaelites, these writers extolled the vigour and

healthy virility of Rodin, Manet, Monet, and Corot.
Without knowing it, Zola and Mirbeau were repeating the invective the
English critic Buchanan had flung at Rossetti in 1871 when he accused
186 Chapter Ten
him of a “morbid deviation from healthy forms of life … Nothing virile,

nothing completely sane.”22
At the time when debates were taking place about the role of “pure”
painting, which jeopardized the supremacy of literature by giving up
subject matter, Pre-Raphaelite painting acted as a mainstay: it aided the
anti-Naturalist crusade, offered a compromise between modernity and
legend and, most of all, lent itself to exercises of literary transposition.
Mourey wrote: “Toujours les créateurs de rêve valurent mieux que les
architectes de réalité” (Dream-makers have always been superior to reality
builders),23 and he saw in the Pre-Raphaelites a union between an
idealized past and the modern soul—a melancholy soul materialism has
deprived of spirituality.
The Pre-Raphaelite craze, carried to its extreme limits, soon brought
about parodies and disparaging judgements among its former fans. At the
1895 Exhibition, Love Among the Ruins, painted by Burne-Jones was
deemed “chromo,” dull and overly sentimental, “sugary,” and “sickly
sweet.” Robert de Montesquiou, a devotee of Burne-Jones a few years
before, declared his works mere “gigantic Christmas cards.” In 1896,
Baroness Deslandes’ Portrait (the portrait of an eccentric woman-of-
letters who had gone to London to have herself painted by Burne-Jones,
her idol) was shown in Paris and incurred sarcastic remarks. “The crash of
the Burne-Jones painting” was forecast by Jean Lorrain, who had
dedicated a poem to Burne-Jones in 1887.24 A cartoon in Le Courrier
Français in 1897 showed two women face to face: one, a Pre-Raphaelite
maid in a long dress, and the other, a naked woman—decidedly French—
who was making fun of the maid, saying, “Tu me chatouilles avec ton
lys!” (You tickle me with your lily!).25
Yet, that disparagement wasn’t devoid of nostalgia—far from it. The
article in which Montesquiou said that the folds of the clothes painted by
Burne-Jones were hanging like sheet-metal ended with a declaration of
love to Cophetua’s Beggar Maid. As a matter of fact, Burne-Jones was
old-fashioned insofar as his great popularity had made him seem common
and dull. But in Contre Sainte-Beuve, published in 1907, Marcel Proust
still noticed a young handsome man “aux yeux trop pleins qui dépassaient
des orbites … comme un héros de Burne-Jones” (with protruding eyes …
like one of Burne-Jones heroes).
Nevertheless, the Pre-Raphaelites kept a world-wide reputation for the
quality of their creation in the field of decorative arts. When William
Morris died, Octave Mirbeau himself underlined the importance of Pre-
Raphaelitism in this field. This opinion was never to vary, but it may have
contributed to their decline as far as painting was concerned. In the very
last years of the century, the public preferred Burne-Jones’ tapestry

cartoons or his stained-glass windows to his pictures.
But the French Decadent and Symbolist artists opened up the way for
Surrealist reevaluations. After reading M. de Phocas, a novel by Jean
Lorrain, André Breton followed its advice: he visited the Gustave Moreau
Museum and wished he could be locked in it with a lantern, so as to be
alone with the painted women. In an article published in 1936 and
illustrated with photographs of Millais’ Ophelia and Rossetti’s Beata
Beatrix, Salvador Dali greeted the “Eternel Féminin Préraphaélite” and its
“légendaire printemps nécrophilique” (legendary necrophilic spring).26
Just as Breton saw the revelation of Beauty and Love in the women
painted by Moreau, Dali stated that the Pre-Raphaelite women were the
only “edible” women—which is the greatest compliment imaginable under
his signature. The Surrealists rediscovered Gustave Moreau, Arnold
Böcklin, Max Klinger and the Pre-Raphaelites as well, heralding them as
the forerunners of the painters of the subconscious. Our contemporaries
are indebted to the Decadent and Symbolists artists, far beyond the
Surrealists, for the look they cast to the Pre-Raphaelites as the painters of a
dreamworld.
Notes
1
Théophile Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe (Paris: Lévy frères, 1855), 37. All
translations are mine.
2
Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, Salon de 1859 (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1968), 390.
3
Fusées, 626.
4
Robert de la Sizeranne, La Peinture anglaise contemporaine (Paris: Hachette,
1894), 277, 284.
5
Journal, June 7, 1892.
6
In Notes sur l’Angleterre (1872).
7
In “Sensations d’Oxford,” Etudes anglaises, (Paris: Plon, s.d.), 215-216.
8
“Un gentilhomme de letters,” Le Figaro, July 6, 1892, quoted in Emilien
Carassus, Le Snobisme et les Lettres françaises de Paul Bourget à Marcel Proust,
1884-1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), 486.
9
In France, The Beguiling of Merlin was called Merlin et Viviane.
10
A rebours, chap. 11.
11
See Laurence Brogniez, Préraphaélisme et Symbolisme (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2003), 139-141.
12
Carnet vert (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 1887).
13
Brogniez, Préraphaélisme et Symbolisme, 358.
14
Gabriel Mourey, Passé le Détroit, la Vie et l’Art à Londres (Paris: Ollendorff,
1895), 236.
188 Chapter Ten
15
Camille Mauclair, “Choses d’art,” Mercure de France, December 1894;
Edouard Rod, “Les Salons de 1895,” Le Correspondant, May 25, 1895.
16
Degas, Danse, Dessin (1938).
17
Revue des Deux Mondes, April 1, 1925.
18
Le Figaro, May 2, 1896.
19
Said by the ridiculous painter Loys Jambois. Gil Blas, July 27, 1886.
20
Le Journal (28 April 1895).
21
Said by another ridiculous painter, Kariste. Le Journal, April 7, 1895.
22
Robert Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D.G. Rossetti” (signed
“Thomas Maitland”) in The Contemporary Review, October 1871.
23
Mourey, Passé le Détroit, la Vie et l’Art à Londres, 197.
24
“Printemps mystique, pour Burne-Jones,” Les Griseries (Paris: Tresse & Stock,
1887).
25
Le Courrier Français, April 4, 1897.
26
“Le Surréalisme spectral de l’Eternel féminin préraphaélite” (Spectral
Surrealism of the Pre-Raphaelite Eternal Woman), Minotaure 8 (1936): 46, 48.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE SYMBOLIST IMAGERY OF BURNE-JONES:
BEHIND CLOSED EYES
KATHRYN MOORE HELENIAK
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), though often viewed as a second

generation English Pre-Raphaelite painter, has come to be seen more
appropriately as an early and influential Symbolist artist whose works
were known and prized not only in England, but in European Symbolist
circles as well. A device that provided a rich source for his Symbolist
sensibility was the figure with closed eyes. Drawing on medieval sources,
classical myths, biblical themes, and characters from his own imagination,
Burne-Jones employed closed-eye figures to convey complex suggestive
meanings around the themes of love, fate, faith, ambition, and mortality.
Whether blindfolded, asleep, or absorbed in contemplative, often
melancholy thought, his figures—both male and female—conjure up
various complex mental states. Or, when dead, they provoke uncomfortable
responses on the part of viewers who come to his paintings with eyes wide
open.
What is instantly obvious when examining the work of Burne-Jones is
that he avoided the modern developments that were then coursing through
English society. Though born in Birmingham, England1—a bleak city in
the heart of the newly industrialized world of factories working round the
clock, spewing smoke from coal-fired furnaces—Burne-Jones painted
imagined scenes of myth and legend peopled by languid, soulful characters
far removed from the here and now of modern nineteenth-century Britain.
Medieval legend, especially depictions of King Arthur and his court,
including the Quest for the Holy Grail; classical mythology, especially
themes related to Cupid and Psyche or to Perseus and Medusa; and
romantic fairy tales, especially those associated with Sleeping Beauty,
offered rich possibilities for Burne-Jones.
When he arrived at Oxford University in the mid-1850s, it was to
prepare for the ministry, as was the case with his new, life-long friend,
190 Chapter Eleven
William Morris.2 But both abandoned a formal religious calling for the
religion of Art. The slightly older artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti served as
inspiration for their conversion. Rossetti was one of the original members
of the young Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists who, in 1848, as their
name suggests, rebelled against the High Renaissance ideals embodied in
the work of Raphael, who was then highly favored by the Royal Academy,
in favor of artists who came before Raphael—early Renaissance or late
medieval painters. In 1857, Rossetti invited Burne-Jones to participate in
painting murals on the walls of the Oxford Union Debating Hall with a
medievalizing scene from Arthurian Legend, sadly now barely visible.3
Morris and Burne-Jones had already displayed a keen appreciation of
medieval poetry, especially the work of Chaucer.4 One of Burne-Jones’s
earliest stained glass designs for the new firm of Morris, Marshall, and
Faulkner & Co, founded in 1861—now the focus of Morris’s artistic
ambition5—was Chaucer Asleep, 1864 (Victoria and Albert Museum).6
Cushioned by flowers and plants, the bearded Chaucer cradles his head in
his hands for a seemingly tranquil nap. But this tranquility masks the
actual import of the subject, inspired by the poem “The Legend of Good
Wimmen,” in which Amor/Love visits Chaucer in the midst of a dream and
introduces him to various women of antiquity who suffered violently for
the sake of love (Alcestis, Cleopatra, Dido, and Ariadne, among others).
This early example of a sleeping subject was directly related to a literary
source, one that clearly had a special attraction for the artist. (It had
inspired the design of tiles and an embroidery shortly before.) While this
was a secular subject, Chaucer provided another occasion for a figure with
closed eyes when Burne-Jones painted The Prioress’s Tale from The
Canterbury Tales (Delaware Art Museum, Fig. 11-1); this time, the figure
with closed eyes was the embodiment of intense faith. Begun in 1865, it
was only completed shortly before the artist’s death in 1898. Burne-
Jones’s watercolor features the temporary revival of a boy recently
murdered by Jews as he walked through a ghetto singing songs in praise of
the Virgin Mary.7 The interracial violence of the tale is ignored in favor of
the wondrous revival of the devout lad by Mary. With hands clasped in
prayer and eyes fervently closed, the murdered youth miraculously
receives a grain of wheat in his mouth from the Virgin Mary, an act that
enables him to continue singing in defiance of death.
An intense inner vision suggested by a figure’s tightly clasped hands
and closed eyes also characterizes The Lament (William Morris Gallery,
Walthamstow), begun at about the same time in 1865.8 It was one of many
subjects without a literary reference, but was inspired instead by Burne-
Jones’s own imagination. In a vague historical setting, a barefoot young man
The Symbolist Imagery of Burne-Jones: Behind Closed Eyes 191
Fig. 11-1. Edward Burne-Jones, The Prioress’s Tale.

192 Chapter Eleven
swathed in brilliant blue robes sits on a bench, drawn into himself. He

rests his head upon his hands in seeming earnest, silent contemplation. A
seated young woman holding a stringed musical instrument merely looks
at him. Though both bear serious expressions, it is the title, The Lament,
that confers an especially gloomy reading on the scene. What is their
relationship? Does the rose vine framing the man hint at sorrows
associated with a lost love, since roses were associated with Venus,
goddess of love? Did his companion attempt to soothe his spirit with her
music? Do his closed eyes and withdrawn pose suggest that she failed?
The watercolor raises more questions than it answers. It suggests rather
than defines.
A similar evasion of meaning attaches to Le Chant d’Amour of 1868-
77 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fig. 11-2), though the title
itself, the song of love, alludes to romance. In a tender twilight landscape,
a lovesick knight in armor sits informally in the foreground, gazing
longingly at a young woman playing an organ whose bellows are worked
by a winged Cupid with closed eyes—thus referencing the age-old adage
generally linked with Cupid that “love is blind.” (In the slightly earlier
watercolor version of 1865, Cupid is actually blind-folded.)9 A woman
playing a musical instrument inevitably calls up thoughts of Burne-Jones’s
wife, Giorgiana, an exceptionally skilled pianist, whom he married in
1860. The artist painted a similar theme on the lid of a piano given to them
as a wedding gift, though in this version the knight is absent.10 Did the
living artist assume the knight’s place in this scene which decorated an
intimate domestic musical instrument? Though Burne-Jones once described
pianos as “the very altar of homes, and a second hearth to people,”11 in the
oil painting, there is nothing to suggest prosaic Victorian homes with
piano-playing spouses and worshipping husbands. Both the woman and
the man exude sadness here. There is no eye contact among the three
figures. A haunting melancholy pervades the scene. For whom is the song
of love played? Though it incorporates the mythological character of
Cupid, the subject refers to no known myth, much like Giorgione’s
mysterious Fete Champetre, which Burne-Jones had seen on a visit to the
Louvre,12 and which it resembles stylistically. Le Chant d’Amour, which
possesses the air of a Quattrocento Italian painting rather than a medieval
manuscript illumination (the manner that characterized his earlier
medievalizing works), reflects Burne-Jones’s trips to Italy in 1862, 1871,
and 1873,13 sometimes in the company of his champion, John Ruskin, who
urged him to study Italian Renaissance art, especially Venetian painting.14
Viewers are left to ponder this moody scene without narrative—to ponder
the obscure intention of the artist, as Henry James described it.15 The
inclusion of this theme in a portrait of his then mistress Maria Zambaco

(Clemens-Sels Museum, Nuess)16 in 1870 suggests that the subject embodied
deep associations of passionate love for Burne-Jones—perhaps once felt
for his wife in 1860, but by 1870 transferred to his young mistress.
Fig. 11-2. Edward Burne-Jones, Le Chant d’Amour.
The more conventional myth of Cupid and Psyche provided many

occasions for Burne-Jones’s artistic invention, including the frequent
depiction of the sleeping Psyche. Morris wrote a cycle of poems inspired
by the myth, eventually published in The Earthly Paradise (1868-70),
which first directed Burne-Jones’s attention to the subject, in particular
with the thought of providing illustrations for a later edition which never
materialized. Cupid and Psyche (Yale Center for British Art, Fig. 11-3)
begins his treatment of the narrative myth: Venus, jealous of Psyche’s
beauty, sends Cupid down to kill her, but Cupid, upon seeing the sleeping
Psyche, falls in love with her. This subject is one of any number of ancient
myths detailing the sexual attraction of a god for a sleeping woman
(Bacchus and Ariadne, Jupiter and Antiope). These sleeping women
present, as does this image of the sleeping figure of Psyche, an opportunity
for standard voyeurism: here, Cupid’s and the spectator’s. With tilted
194 Chapter Eleven
profile head and loose limbs, Psyche reclines asleep near a bed of roses.
Cupid approaches her tentatively, bending down cautiously to appreciate
her beauty, taking care not to awaken her. A gaping pool opens up in the
foreground just inches from Cupid’s feet, heightening the tension in the
scene by seeming to challenge his balance; the pool also keeps viewers at
bay. In this watercolor version of 1865, Psyche is partly clothed. The
arrangement of her clinging drapery reminds the viewer that Burne-Jones
studied appropriate ancient models, the Parthenon marbles in the British
Museum,17for his subjects that were derived originally from antiquity. In
this instance, Psyche’s closed eyes do not call attention to what she is
thinking (her own psyche is not the issue here), but rather to what Cupid
and the viewer can see, unobserved by her. Italian Renaissance art
provided models for the sleeping female, especially in the figure of Venus.
(One is reminded of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, c. 1508 [Gemaldegalerie,
Dresden] who was once accompanied by Cupid, now painted over—
though here Venus is nude.) The sleeping figure was a very rich source for
Burne-Jones, appearing in his many works depicting Arthurian legend and
in his Briar Rose series, an interpretation of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.
But before turning to those themes, another ancient source deserves
mention.
Burne-Jones’s series of paintings devoted to the Greek legend of
Perseus offered another occasion for closed eyes: death. This representation
can be seen in his painting The Baleful Head (1885, Southampton City Art
Gallery).18 Morris’s The Earthly Paradise was once again the inspiration
for his series of paintings devoted to Perseus. The artist was particularly
fascinated with both the heroic rescue of Andromeda, whom Perseus
would later wed, and with Perseus’s successful quest to slay Medusa, the
Gorgon whose stare could turn men into stone (something Perseus cleverly
avoided by looking only at her reflection). The Baleful Head depicts
Perseus holding up the decapitated head of Medusa, which he and
Andromeda see reflected below in well water. Burne-Jones had already
treated the subject of dead floating heads in one of his earliest designs, The
Return of the Dove to the Ark, c. 1863.19 Intended, though never used, as a
woodcut illustration for the Dalziel Brothers Bible project, it contains a
shockingly gruesome rendering of closed-eye cadavers in the foreground
water, a vivid and stark foil to the barely noticeable return of the dove to
Noah’s ark above. In contrast, The Baleful Head features a surprisingly
decorative image. Grasping a fistful of Medusa’s tangled snake tresses,
Perseus holds up her pale deathly head before lush branches of a fruit-
laden apple tree. Though Medusa’s eyes are now closed and her fatal
vision—her open-eyed stare—is no longer a threat, Perseus and Andromeda
Fig. 11-3. Edward Burne-Jones, Cupid and Psyche.

196 Chapter Eleven
are only willing to look at her face as a reflected image in the well water
below—a reflection that registers Medusa’s closed-eye visage between
their sober, now scrutinizing gazes.
The half female/half fish mermaid of ancient legend and folklore
captures (literally) Burne-Jones’s most striking image of a deathly figure
with closed eyes in his painting The Depths of the Sea (RA1886, Private
Collection).20 This femme fatale creature, much beloved of the Decadent
generation, embraces a young male nude who has expired on his forced
journey down into her watery realm; she smiles with satisfaction, not yet
aware that her action has killed him. It is only his closed eyes and the
stream of bubbles no longer escaping from his mouth that alert the viewer
to his fate. Macabre, mysterious, morbid, this deadly mythical female
embodies the perceived danger attached to sexual allure and attraction—a
common theme of the period in literature and art. While her arms ensnare
him, the muscular young man, infused with the spirit of Michelangelo
(whose works Burne-Jones had studied while in Italy in 1871),21 could
only have been overcome by her sensuous appeal, not by her physical
strength. Assertive women and weak men were a feature of Burne-Jones’s
art, one that earned him contemporary criticism. His earlier Wheel of
Fortune (1875-83, Musee d’Orsay, Paris)22 featured a gigantic figure of
female Fortune controlling the fate of a struggling Michelangelesque nude
king23 whose crowned head, wearing a pained, close-eyed expression,
bears the weight of a slave above him as the wheel, turned by powerful
Fortune, brings the king down.
But sleeping figures provide, by far, the most common occasion for
closed-eye figures in Burne-Jones’s art. His admiration for Michelangelo,
who employed several expressive models of sleeping forms (for example,
Michelangelo’s Night, Medici Tomb, Florence), no doubt conditioned his
attraction to this imagery. Not surprisingly, sleeping figures are the central
focus of his three completed versions of the Briar Rose series, paintings
devoted to the story of Sleeping Beauty, and they also appear often in the
many works inspired by his life-long favorite source, Arthurian legend.24
Tennyson had already treated both subjects in his poetry (Sleeping Beauty
in “The Day-Dream,”of 1842, and King Arthur in “The Idylls of the King”
of 1859), establishing the popular appeal of both sources. Burne-Jones first
depicted the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty in a tile designed in 1864. He
then painted two versions of the subject, one in 1869-71 (Museo de Arte
de Ponce, Puerto Rico), telling the story across three canvases, and later a
larger series of four paintings completed in 1890 (Buscot Park,
Oxfordshire).25 The fairy tale recounts the curse cast upon a young princess
who, along with her court, was forced to sleep for one hundred years
behind a dense, dangerous thorny hedge that grew up around her castle;
only the kiss of a prince would awaken her. The scenes depict armored
knights forced into sleep in the wood; the princess’s father, the powerful
king who now dozes, slouched on his throne in his counsel chamber; and
the somnolent princess and her maids. Burne-Jones’s paintings take up the
inherently fascinating notion or fear that time might somehow magically
stop in the state of sleep. Strangely, though Burne-Jones tells the story in
three or four paintings, he neglects to complete the tale. Though the prince
enters the thorny hedge, he never kisses the princess to release her from
the spell. Instead, the last scene in the series, The Rose Bower (Museo de
Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, Fig. 11-4) simply dwells on the sleeping
princess and her maids who still await the arrival of the prince. Since the
princess came to resemble his daughter, Margaret, scholars have speculated
that this oddity reflects Burne-Jones’s deep attachment to his daughter and
his (perhaps unconscious) unwillingness to consider giving her up to a
suitor, to her own “prince”—though she married J.W. Mackail in 1888.26
Burne-Jones himself explained, “I want to stop with the princess asleep
and to tell no more, to leave all afterwards to the invention and imagination
of the people.”27 The sheer number of sleeping bodies in a variety of languid
poses woven decoratively across the frontal plane of the paintings created
some of the most aesthetically beautiful paintings of his career.
Fig. 11-4. Edward Burne-Jones, The Rose Bower.
The sleeping figure appears in several guises in Arthurian tales, most

meaningfully in Burne-Jones’s last painting The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon,
worked on from 1881 to 1898 (Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, Fig.
198 Chapter Eleven
11-5). According to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century Historia

Regum Brittaniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), the Island of
Avalon was the location where King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was forged,
but more importantly in this context, it was also the place where King
Arthur was taken to recover from the wounds suffered in his last battle.
Folklore recorded that Arthur never died in Avalon, he simply slept there
with the promise that some day he would return again to protect his people
from their enemies. Tennyson took up the subject in 1842 with his popular
interpretation of the story in his “Morte d’Arthur” (inspired by Sir Thomas
Malory’s fifteenth century text of the same name). In his poem, Arthur,
deeply wounded after slaying his enemy Mordred, is brought by three
queens to Avalon, where he rests, awaiting the call to serve his nation once
again.
Fig. 11-5. Edward Burne-Jones, The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon.
This subject was evidently very close to Burne-Jones’s heart. He

selected it himself when he was commissioned to do a painting for George
Howard in 1881, but it was never delivered to its intended patron. It
remained with the artist. He was evidently reluctant to complete the work.
As his wife observed, it was “a task of love to which [he] put no limit of
time or labour.”28 Of course, in the meantime, many projects called for his
attention, including, to name just two, his extensive woodcut illustrations
for the Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer (published in 1896),29 and his
designs for the Holy Grail Tapestries (1890-91)30 for Morris’s firm, which
in turn inspired yet another painting of a closed-eyed figure inspired by
Arthurian legend, The Dream of Lancelot at the Chapel of the San Grael,
1895-96 (Southampton City Art Gallery). Here Lancelot is told in a dream
that, as a result of his adulterous love of Guinevere, Arthur’s wife, he will
never be able to obtain the Holy Grail. The somber palette and the deadly,
desiccated landscape express the death of Lancelot’s own dream—of his
own ambition—brought about by his illicit attachment to Guinevere. This
grim scene of a sleeping, despondent knight, completed in 1896, was one
of Burne-Jones’s self-declared favorites. (Might it suggest his own guilt
over past passions?)31 The Dream of Lancelot was also a studio companion
to The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, which received Burne-Jones’s last
touches on the day he died in 1898.
Many interpretations have been proposed for this huge painting (11 ½
by 21 ½ ft.), including the theory that it represents the artist’s own fear of
death as he himself grew weaker with age,32 or that it serves as a memorial
to the death of various friends, especially of the recently deceased William
Morris (d. 1896), who shared his love of Arthurian tales.33 Certainly the
artist’s statements, “I am at Avalon—not yet in Avalon . . . I shall let most
things pass me by . . . if I ever want to reach Avalon,”34 indicate a personal
identification with the sufferings of Arthur. But Debra Mancoff offers the
most compelling view: that this painting represents Burne-Jones’s desire
for artistic immortality.35 Given the artist’s deep and life-long attachment
to the King Arthur cycle, going back to his earliest youthful design for the
Oxford Union Debating Hall and up to and including his many Arthurian
projects in the 1890s, this painting of the sleeping King Arthur with its
inherent allusion to Arthur’s promised return—that is, to his immortality
following his rest on the Island of Avalon—symbolically embodies the
artist’s own desire for artistic immortality.
Perhaps it would be best to conclude this discussion of Burne-Jones’s
closed-eye figures with the artist’s own amusing comments acknowledging
the mysterious, evocative, and finally imponderable nature of his work. As
he confessed, “I feel inclined to write to Mr. Burne-Jones and apologize
for troubling him, but [I] should be so grateful if he would tell me the
hidden meaning of these pictures.”36
Fig. 11-1. Edward Burne-Jones, Prioress’s Tale, c. 1865-98 (watercolor,
bodycolor and pastel, 27 ¾ x 19 in., 70.3 x 48.3 cm). Delaware Art
Museum, Wilmington. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial.
Fig. 11-2. Edward Burne-Jones, Le Chant d’Amour, 1868-77 (oil on

canvas, 45 x 61 3/8 in, 114.3 x 155.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York. The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund, 1947, 47.26).
Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.
200 Chapter Eleven
Fig. 11-3. Edward Burne-Jones, Cupid and Psyche, c. 1865 (watercolor,

bodycolor, and pastel, 27 ¼ x 19 in, 70.3 x 48.3 cm. Yale Center for
British Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, New Haven. Mary Gertrude
Abbey Fund B2979.12.1038).
Fig. 11-4. Edward Burne-Jones, The Sleeping Beauty from the small Briar
Rose series, c. 1870 (oil on canvas, 24 x 45 ½ in, 61 x 115.6 cm. Museo de
Arte de Ponce. The Luis A. Ferre Foundation, Inc. Ponce, Puerto Rico
59.0114). Photograph by John Betancourt.
Fig. 11-5. Edward Burne-Jones, The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, 1881-
98 (oil on canvas, 110 x 256 in, 279.4 x 650.2 cm. Museo de Arte de
Ponce. The Luis A. Ferre Foundation, Inc. 63.0369). Photograph by John
Betancourt.
Notes
1
See Pamela Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography (London: Michael
Joseph, Ltd.,1975) for biographical information.
2
G[eorgiana] B[urne]-J[ones], Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London:
Macmillan & Co, 1904), 1.72. This text, the work of his wife, is a crucial (if
censored) record of Burne-Jones’s life.
3
Ann Dean, Burne-Jones and William Morris in Oxford and the Surrounding Area
(Malvern: Heritage, 2003); Christine Poulson, Morris, Burne-Jones & the Quest
for the Holy Grail (London: William Morris Society, 2001); Caroline Arscott,
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven, CT, London:
Yale University Press, 2008).
4
Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography, 34.
5
Later Morris & Co., see Lucia van der Post with an introduction by Linda Parry,
William Morris and Morris & Co. (London: V & A Publications, 2003), and Diane
Waggoner, ed., The Beauty of Life: William Morris and the Art of Design (London:
Thames & Hudson, 2003).
6
Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-
Dreamer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., 1998), 96, where it is illustrated and discussed.
7
Ibid., 128.
8
Ibid., illustrated 131.
9
Ibid., 213.
10
GB-J, Memorials, 2.111. For a discussion of Burne-Jones and pianos, see
Michael I. Wilson, “The Case of the Victorian Piano,” Victorian and Albert
Museum Yearbook 3 (1972): 133-53 and “Burne-Jones and Piano Reform,” Apollo
102 (1975): 342-47.
11
Alan Crawford, “Burne-Jones as a Decorative Artist,” in Wildman and Christian,
Edward Burne-Jones, 15.
12
J. B. Pullen, “Burne-Jones’s Dream-work,” Modern Painters 11 (1998): 93.
13
Frances Spalding, Magnificent Dreams: Burne-Jones and the Late Victorians
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978), 36.
14
See “Ruskin and Italy” in Wildman and Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, 77-106.
15
Henry James, The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed.
John L. Sweeney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 162-64, reviewing
the Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition in 1878: “It will be a matter of course to say that
the subjects are unreal, the type of figure monotonous and unpleasant, the
treatment artificial, the intention obscure.”
16
Wildman and Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, cat. 49, illustrated 139.
17
Ibid., 113.
18
Illustrated in Wildman and Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, 232.
19
Illustrated and discussed in Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone, eds. The Age of
Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910 (London: Tate
Gallery Publishing, 1997), cat. 24, 126-27.
20
21
GB-J, Memorials, 2.26.
22
23
Laurence des Cars, “Edward Burne-Jones and France,” in Wildman and
Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, 37. Michelangelo’s Dying Slave (Louvre) serves
as the inspiration for the male figures in this work.
24
Burne-Jones and Morris discovered Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in
1855. See Poulson, Morris, Burne-Jones & the Quest for the Holy Grail, 7.
25
All versions are discussed in Wildman and Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, 159-
162. The story was recounted by Charles Perrault in the seventeenth century and
by the Brothers Grimm in the early nineteenth century.
26
Kirsten Powell, “Burne-Jones and the Legend of the Briar Rose,” Journal of
Pre-Raphaelite Studies 6 (1986): 20.
27
28
Ibid., 2.116.
29
Duncan Robinson, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and the Kelmscott
Chaucer (London: G. Fraser, 1982).
30
Linda Parry, “The Tapestries of Edward Burne-Jones,” Apollo 102 (1975): 324-
28.
31
Wilton and Upstone, eds., The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watt, cat. 114,
250-51 where it is illustrated; the discussion links the work to his earlier adulterous
affair with Maria Zambaco. The figure of Lancelot is taken from Rossetti’s Oxford
Union mural of the same subject for which Burne-Jones had served as the model.
Georgiana Burne-Jones believed that “the whole composition was commemorative”
(GB-J, Memorials, 2.258).
32
Mary Lago, ed., Burne-Jones Talking: His Conversations, 1895-98, Preserved
by His Studio Assistant Thomas Rooke (London: John Murray, 1981), 160.
33
Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography, 276.
202 Chapter Eleven
34
35
Debra N. Mancoff, “Epitaph in Avalon: Edward Burne-Jones’s last picture,” in
Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: the Anglo-American Enchantment, ed. Margaretta
Frederick Watson (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997). 163-74.
36
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE INFLUENCE OF SYMBOLISM
ON THE FORMAL EVOLUTION OF SCULPTURAL
RELIEF BETWEEN 1900 AND 1940
CLAIRE BARBILLON
The Paradox Between Sculpture and Symbolism

The question of whether one can speak of Symbolist sculpture was
already being raised twenty-three years ago. That’s when nineteenth-
century French sculpture was magnificently brought out of oblivion,
thanks to an exhibition held prior to the opening of the Orsay Museum and
presented at the Grand Palais by Anne Pingeot, Philippe Durey, Antoinette
Le Normand-Romain, and Isabelle Leroy Jay Lemaistre. Part of the
exhibition catalog, which remains a reference for any research conducted
in the field to this day, was devoted to “overlapping styles” and contained
a short chapter on Symbolism. The existence of this study was more
audacious than it may seem, as Le Symbolisme en Europe, the exhibition
held in Rotterdam, Brussels, and Paris in 1976 and considered the
reference on the subject at the time, was exclusively devoted to the two-
dimensional arts, if not exclusively to painting. The exhibition that
pursued the matter twenty years later, Paradis perdus. L’Europe
symboliste, did not include a single section on sculpture, even though it
featured the decorative arts, photography and illustrated books.
In 1986, one name seemed, from the outset, enough to justify including
Symbolism in a study of sculpture: Rodin, reader of Baudelaire, linked to
Mallarmé, Octave Mirbeau, and Rodenbach. Rodin who, when explaining
to Paul Gsell how he conceived his art, made obvious ties to several
aspects of the definition of Symbolism and the role of the Symbolist artist:
“To any artist, worthy of the name, everything in nature is beautiful,
because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an
open book, all the inner truth.”1 Then, a little further: “We only feel and
conceive those things which are patent to us and which impress our minds
and our senses. But all the rest is plunged in infinite obscurity.”2
204 Chapter Twelve
Starting with Rodin, but also a number of other sculptors like Camille
Claudel, Jean Carriès, Carabin, Fix-Masseau, Bloch, Roche and Dampt,
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, who was in charge of Symbolism for the
1986 exhibition, began by defining the corpus of Symbolist sculptures
using a common theme, a set of iconographic markers such as fantasy,
mystery, unusualness, and affectation in works.
And yet the matter of an intrinsically Symbolist sculpture does not
seem to have been definitively resolved, since a recent summary of
Symbolism published in 2007 still explores the relevance of the correlation
between the medium and the artistic movement. Rodolphe Rapetti does not
consider Symbolist artwork to be so much a transcription of what the artist
“sees” as the projection of an abstract intellectual notion:
Everything real—all of “creation”—functions primarily as a medium for

invoking an immaterial reality. That is why Symbolism is, in principal,
antithetical to sculpture, whose three-dimensional nature has always been
considered close to the tangible world, which drawing and painting
attempted to dematerialize.3
The tangible nature of sculpture, its weight, density and tactile approach,
are indeed part of the essential features that distinguish it from other
artistic mediums. This would be a good opportunity to note the daring
innovations a number of artists deemed Symbolist made in their choice of
materials—wood, ivory, mother-of-pearl, inlaid semi-precious stones,
etc.—precisely to relax or even transgress the academic norms specific to
this art. But we will have to focus on one perspective. Today, rather than
from a material or theme perspective, we would like to re-examine the
definition of Symbolist sculpture from the angle of form.
The Uncertainty of Form

When we compare Rodin’s Fugit amor, Camille Claudel’s Age mûr,
Victor Prouvé’s Nuit and Boleslas Biegas’ Vague, we can’t help but be
struck by a similarity. Not so much in terms of subject (although Rodin
and Claudel both convey the tragedy of unshared love), but more in the
visual use of a motif that is partially formless, uncertain, undecided:
Prouvé’s hair, Claudel’s wave, and what can be interpreted as flames in
Rodin’s piece (for this group is part of his Gates of Hell). Of these works,
in which decidedly figurative elements (characters) co-exist with more
shifting, less defined, elements, these motifs are what express the Symbolist
power of the idea. They are also what draws the works out of the realm of
The Influence of Symbolism on the Evolution of Sculptural Relief 205
the anecdotal (the personal lives of Camille Claudel and Rodin, for
example) and raise them to the level of timeless and general meaning (by
metaphorically integrating thought on the irretrievable nature of time—
tempus fugit irreparabile). As such, these works are, in a way, akin to the
famous definition of pictorial Symbolism in the article written by Albert
Aurier in March 1891: they “express an idea through forms”, the object
being “a sign of an idea perceived by the subject.”
From this perspective, a certain number of sculptural works that
maintain ambiguous relationships with other arts—architecture, the
decorative arts, and even painting—also formally come within Symbolism.
For these works, which can be referred to as “mixed,” threaten or even
violate the coherence of the definition of each of the artistic disciplines or
technical norms they fall under. Let’s look at a few examples.
La Fontaine aux agenouillés by Georges Minne (1898, Essen, Folkwang
Museum) demonstrates an exemplary search for spatial structuring, in
which the sculpted motif—a thin, nude, kneeling adolescent —is repeated
five times, like an ostinato in music. This repetition creates an enclosed
universe, a circular space with perfect rhythmic regularity, as well as a
pentagram, for each of the kneeling figures determines the invisible radius
of a circle with the well as its center. The effect produced by the repeated
figure here is strongly linked to the very definition of architecture in its
general sense of structure and spatial organization.
The ambiguity is less geometric, but more organic, in the sculptural
furniture pieces by François Rupert Carabin, in which human or animal
figures are nestled in or spring forth from tables, windows, and chairs to
disrupt the form. A prime example is the imposing walnut and wrought-
iron bookcase that is part of the Orsay Museum’s collection, and even
more so the strange armchairs intertwined with nude women and cats
shown for the Carabin exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de
Strasbourg in 1993. Carabin’s boldness, often still accused of extravagance,
resides in this interpenetration, as much as in the tension, between sculpture
and structure.
What may seem even more paradoxical is that Medardo Rosso wanted
to make people “forget the material.”4 Using the general effect of
“shimmer and shadow” to envelope, so to speak, the figures, Rosso chose
not to give primacy to the treatment of volume, but instead explored the
effects of surface in relation to three-dimensionality, an intrinsic
characteristic of sculpture in the round. More allusive than description, his
sculpture, as evinced by the soft, almost veiled features of the face in Ecce
Puer (the artist is said to have been struck by the face of child seen from
behind a curtain) has often been likened to the paintings of Eugène
206 Chapter Twelve
Carrière, which are marked by the deliberate use of blurred effects. For
both the sculptor and the painter, it is not a matter of portraying the image
of reality, but rather, in the words of Rodolphe Rapetti, “the appearance or
disappearance of this image on consciousness, within a subjective
timeframe.”5 The author is thus referring here to the influence of philosopher
Henri Bergson on this generation of artists, who were especially marked by
his 1889 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, which
distinguishes between the notion of an instant and subjective time.
We could cite numerous examples of the works that play on formal
hybridism, beyond the scope of the academic definition of sculpture that
nevertheless persisted in the late nineteenth century, particularly due to the
controlling influence of the Ecole des Beaux Arts and public commissions,
which were necessary for the survival of many a sculptor. According to
these standards, the two main distinct formal categories of sculpture
remain sculpture in the round and relief, the latter most often viewed as
secondary to the former, particularly in the distribution imposed by the
sculpted public monument.
Relief: A Privileged Form of Symbolism in Sculpture

But relief, that already intrinsically mixed form between three- and
two-dimensionality, is precisely what a number of sculptors used, tempted
by formal experimentation derived from Symbolism. From this perspective,
Auguste Rodin’s Gates of Hell emerges as the sculpture in high relief most
emblematic of Symbolism. From the time he received a commission in
1880 for a “decorative gate … adorned with bas-reliefs depicting Dante’s
Divine Comedy,”6 Rodin spent thirty some years using all possible means
to assemble, cut out, and modify what could be seen as a gigantic,
ingenious jigsaw puzzle. As Rosalind Krauss points out, the work spells
the breakdown of the principle of spatio-temperal uniqueness.7 For the
narrative model of Trajan’s Column, or the more segmented narrative of
Ghiberti’s portal for the Baptistery of Florence,8 are challenged by the
profusion, entanglement and apparent disorder of the figures from the
Gates of Hell steeped in tension and torment. What does the work gain
from this narrative deconstruction? Heightened expressiveness of the figures
themselves, springing forth alone or in small groups from the formless
material of an uncertain background, a profound mystery, that cannot be
clarified by references to literature—to Dante’s text—but that draw from
deep within the impulses of desire and death,9 a freedom of movement that
Meier-Graefe hailed as bringing sculpture, until then immobile, to life.10
The Influence of Symbolism on the Evolution of Sculptural Relief 207
More than any other form, sculpture in relief allows these variations
between form and formlessness, insofar as the figures and the background
maintain relationships of fusion and tension with all their infinite nuances.
The Gates of Hell was not unveiled to the Parisian public until the
1900 Alma Pavilion Exhibition, in a version stripped of its figures. Just
prior to that, the public at the 1897 Brussels World Fair discovered a work
different in format but strangely twinned in subject and comparable in its
formal choices: Jef Lambeaux’s monumental relief, Human Passions,
which was first presented as a plaster copy, before being replaced by
marble in 1899. This impressively sized work (12 m long by 8 m high)
was installed in a pavilion built by Victor Horta.
The debauchery of humanity is depicted in a sort of grotesque orgy
dominated by an allegorical figure of death and Christ on the cross,
surrounded by figures blending into a very low bas-relief. An article by
Fiérens-Gevaert, published in Art et décoration in 1899, comments on the
relief at length, seeking its sources in Jordaens, Rubens, and Carpeaux. It
also highlights the symbolic power of the work, and refuses to rebuke its
exaggerations, justifying them in comparison with the poetic work of
Emile Verhaeren.11 That same year (1899), Charles Van der Stappen
presented the Belgian press with his project Monument à l’Infinie bonté, a
kind of counterpart to Human Passions that shared the same colossal
ambitions, but was never completed.
While less eloquent, more declamatory, and less innovative in form,
Lambeaux’s monumental relief nonetheless shares similarities with
Rodin’s Gates, in the uncertainty of its form, between surging figures and
very low bas-relief, which simultaneously reveals and conceals meaning in
fully Symbolist equivocation.
Time does not permit us to continue exploring the appropriateness of
the relief form to the Symbolist esthetic. Let us mention in conclusion
French sculptor Pierre Roche’s relief composition, La Délivrance, a
combination of lead, plaster and wood frames created between 1905 and
1911. In the center, a mysterious female figure plugs her ears with her
severed hands. In such a way, and by means of the partitioning, she seems
to escape cardinal sins, as explained by the words on the base: “speak no /
see no / hear no / evil.” The allegories of each of the sins stand out by the
suggestive nature of the design. The sculptor had planned for this
“program” sculpture, to use a Wagnerian expression, to have a matching
piece, Les Sept oeuvres de miséricorde.
Just like the themes here are freely interpreted from the Christian
source and mythically recast by sculptors, the invention of new formulas
and forms shows, by way of these few examples, the decorative vitality of
208 Chapter Twelve
Symbolist relief. This is the proposal we would like to offer: by its

intrinsic qualities of formal freedom, promoting the constant play of
revealed and hidden figures, relief provides, from the perspective of
sculpture, the medium most in keeping with the founding esthetic
principles of Symbolism.
Notes
1
Auguste Rodin, L’Art, entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell (Paris: Gallimard,
collection Idées/arts, 1967; first ed., 1911), 152.
2
Ibid., 155.
3
Rodolphe Rapetti, Le Symbolisme, coll. Tout l’Art (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 15.
4
Edmond Claris, quoted by Rodolphe Rapetti, Le Symbolisme, 199.
5
Ibid., 198.
6
Arch. nat. F21/2109. Quoted by Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Rodin. La
Porte de l’Enfer (Paris: éditions du musée Rodin, 1999), 5.
7
Rosalind Krauss Passages in Modern Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson,
1977), translated in French as Passages. Une histoire de la sculpture de Rodin à
Smithson (Paris: Macula, 1997), 21.
8
See The Gates of the Paradise, Lorenzo Ghiberti Renaissance Masterpiece, ed.
by Gary M. Radke (Yale University Press, 2007).
9
Octave Mirbeau, Des artistes (Paris: collection 10-18), 16. C’est bien dans cette
perspective morbide et effrayante qu’Octave Mirbeau construit son ekphrasis:
“Rien de plus effrayant que le groupe d’Ugolin. Maigre, décharné, les côtes saillant
sous la peau que trouent les apophyses, la bouche vide et la lèvre molle, d’où
semble tomber, au contact de la chair, une bave de fauve affamé, il rampe, ainsi
qu’une hyène qui a déterré des charognes, sur les corps renversés de ses fils dont
les bras et les jambes inertes pendent çà et là dans l’abîme.”
10
Quoted by Heinz R. Fuchs, La sculpture contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel,
collection l’Art dans le monde, 1972), 39.
11
H. Fiérens-Gevaert, “Jef Lambeaux et le Monument des Passions humaines,” Art
et décoration (1899), second part, 129-133, 133. “Nous nous garderions bien de
chicaner l’artiste pour ses exagérations de pensée et d’exécution. … Ces violences
sont légitimes autant, par exemple, que les élans passionnés et sans frein du poète
Emile Verhaeren.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FROM APPEARANCE TO APPARITION
AND REFLECTION:
SYMBOLIST CONSTRUCTIONS OF SALOME,
JOHN THE BAPTIST, AND THE SPECTATOR’S
SEVERED HEAD
LESLIE STEWART CURTIS
The very phrase “Symbolist movement” seems to conjure images of

the many fatal dances undertaken between alluring female personages and
severed heads—from Salome and John the Baptist to the Maenads and
Orpheus—that began to appear with increasing frequency in the art of the
late 1870s and 1880s and into the early twentieth century. Thus, at the
origins of this “movement,” an adolescent dancer enters stage left,
playfully tossing a severed head like a ball, as in Heinrich Heine’s text
Atta Troll from earlier in the nineteenth century, or chasing an apparition,
as in Gustave Moreau’s famous watercolor (Fig. 13-2; 1876, Cabinet des
dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris,) or Odilon Redon’s charcoal drawing
(Fig. 13-1; 1883, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux). She eventually
appears as a mature but dangerous singer, as in the staging of Richard
Strauss’s opera Salome (Fig. 13-24; ca. 1910,). But this entrance to the
dance floor initiates a troubled passage whereby the reader/spectator/
listener beholds apparitions in a sort of Never Never Land where a
foothold in the material world is shaken: heads float with forms of flying
saucers; the spaces between words become a typographical abyss, as in
Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry; and musical paradigms suggest a final ascent
into the celestial realm. This essay examines the transposition of these
severed heads from the printed page—by way of Heine, Flaubert, and
Mallarmé—to the visual images of Puvis de Chavannes, Moreau, Redon,
and Jeanne Jacquemin. Redon’s significant departures from artistic and
literary sources are considered and parallels between his work and
Mallarmé’s poetic creations are established. I will explore how Redon’s
210 Chapter Thirteen
“suggestive art” set an important precedent for emphasizing the spectator’s

active involvement in what Marcel Duchamp would ultimately describe as
the “completion” of the artwork. I will also analyze this rupture with
traditional narrative and the provocative questions Redon’s and others’ art
raise about the gaze and how it is gendered.
Fig. 13-1. Odilon Redon, L’Apparition. 1883.

From Appearance to Apparition and Reflection 211
Redon's Apparition (Fig. 13-1) is derived from Moreau's watercolor of

the same title (Fig. 13-2) and from the related oil painting Salome Dancing
Before Herod (Fig. 13-3; 1876, Armand Hammer Collection, UCLA).1
Pierre-Louis Mathieu has asserted that
Like Moreau, Redon was obsessed by the theme of the severed head living
its own existence [but] … he represented the head of John the Baptist
hovering in the air with closed eyes over an erect and abstracted Salome,
who seems unaware of it.2
Redon’s reliance on a visual source is significant in that the biblical text

describes no such scene, and it would appear to have been the creation of
Moreau. The only textual source that has been suggested for Moreau’s
watercolor was identified by the artist’s friend Ary Renan as Heinrich
Heine’s poem “Atta Troll,” where Herodias is described as “condemned to
carry forever in her hands the martyr’s head” and thus, “every now and
then by the odd whim of a woman, she would toss the head in the air,
laughing like a child, and deftly catch it again as if playing with a ball.”3
Having been conceived as part of a long process, Moreau’s oil painting
began with a Beheading of John the Baptist showing “Salome waiting
with a platter for the executioner to finish” (Fig. 13-4; ca. 1870, oil on
canvas, Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris).4 This early sketch is based on
Puvis de Chavannes's painting of The Beheading of John the Baptist (Fig.
13-5; 1869, oil on canvas, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of
Birmingham) but, characteristically, Moreau shifted the point of view
about ninety degrees.5 Having evolved from some seventy preparatory
drawings, the appearance and costume of Moreau's Salome Dancing
Before Herod is also related to Gustave Flaubert's description of the
princess Salammbô.6 Such textual sources are balanced by further visual
ones, with the iconography of the severed head “with blood dripping from
the neck” coming from Eugène Delacroix's decorations for the Palais
Bourbon library (Fig. 13-6; 1838-1847, oil and wax on plaster, Paris).7
Although Redon’s two main figures and the general architectural
features come from Moreau, the stark differences between the two
compositions are striking. Redon's Salome figure is still seen in profile,
but the ghostly head of the Baptist, despite having the same central
compositional placement as Moreau’s, confronts the viewer frontally, as
though Redon was more interested in dealing with the viewer’s response
to the hovering apparition rather than examining Salome's reaction to it.
Redon scholar Sven Sandstrom has emphasized just this difference, noting
that in Moreau, “The eyes are wide open and fix the girl in fear,”8 while
the Moreau scholar Ragnar von Holten has interpreted one of Moreau's
Fig. 13-2. Gustave Moreau, L’Apparition, 1876.

Fig. 13-3. Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing before Herod, 1876.

Fig. 13-4. Gustave Moreau, Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, ca.1870.
Fig. 13-5. Puvis de Chavannes, The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, 1869.
Fig. 13-6. Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Saint John the Baptist, 1843-1854.
Fig. 13-7. Gustave Moreau. Salomé dancing, ca.1875.

drawings (Fig. 13-7; Salomé en face, pen and black ink with white
highlights, Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris) as having switched the point of
view so that the spectator assumes the position of the hovering head, and
thus confronts Salome directly, in the same manner as John's head in the
finished watercolor.9 Joris-Karl Huysmans was also interested in this
confrontation, and he included elaborate descriptions of Moreau’s
paintings in his novel A rebours, which José Pierre has analyzed at length:
Herodias-Salome is then the eternal feminine challenging masculine nature

manifested as power and lust (Herod) and as spirituality and chastity (John
the Baptist). Gustave Moreau was so completely convinced of this that
alone of all the poets who handled this theme he tried to invert the terms,
or to be more precise, to conjure the castratory curse. The radiant, bloody
head of the martyr who, in the watercolour of The Apparition, pierces the
pretty, terrified dancer with a look, not unlike Oedipus’s expression
confronting the Sphinx, is very different from any image that would inspire
remorse. … The goddess of seduction and castration is no more than a
frail, frightened mortal. The look of John the Baptist, like the glance
Oedipus had once cast, represented the victory of the spirit over the flesh,
of poetry over death. Now began the spiritual reign of Orpheus.10
Given the direct confrontation between the two protagonists in Moreau

and in Huysmans, questions arise concerning Redon’s “inversion” of the
theme in a manner that, at least on the surface, appears to avoid sexual
confrontation. Even more striking is the apparent lack of sensuality in
Redon's Salome, considering that most other representations of her are
given over to an orientalizing exoticism and even eroticism, with the
details of costume and architecture playing a significant role, as Eva
Kuryluk has so eloquently written in her examination of the theme:
Most of the late-nineteenth-century Salome tales as well as her

representations in the visual arts are characterized by an extremely
grotesque form: a style heavy with oxymorons and an imagery overburdened
by quotations, allusions, parodies, and caricatures. Thus it is all difficult to
take quite seriously, particularly the written works. One has to remember,
however, that the function of such a style may be to hide what is forbidden.
Certain things can be played only on a stage that looks like a worldly
theater and not like someone's bedroom. Cruelties and obscenities are
couched at a distance when they are attributed to a goddess, but then they
are brought back, by means of wit, caricature, and parody, to touch and to
pinpoint the obscene within the self.11
In support of Kuryluk, any number of examples can be cited, from the

complexly detailed compositions of Moreau to the flirtatious and highly
sensuous Salome Triumphant of Édouard Toudouze (Fig. 13-8; 1886, oil

on canvas. whereabouts unknown). Given these tendencies, it is a bit
ironic that Redon's female figure is far closer in physique and appearance
to the silent executioner at the right of Moreau's composition.12 Redon’s
Salome is similarly passive and motionless, and positioned so as to blend
in with the architectural backdrops of the composition. Also, like the
executioner in Moreau, she is draped from the waist down. Redon even
drapes the feet of his Salome, avoiding the opportunity to indulge in the
foot fetishism that appealed to several other writers and artists. Further, it
is ironic that, in A rebours, Huysmans described Moreau's executioner as
being either “a hermaphrodite” or “a eunuch,” a characterization that
would emphasize the desexualized appearance of Redon's Salome. However,
this transference of the role of executioner to the character of Salome
would appear to be consistent with Bram Dijkstra's analysis of fin-de-
siecle female imagery in which he refers to Salome's role as “the
executioner's assistant” and as “priestess of man's severed head.”13
These major differences between Moreau’s and Redon’s representations
are of further significance for Sandstrom, who has suggested that Redon’s
charcoal was created at the very moment of his self-definition as a
visionary artist, when he differentiated himself from those such as
Moreau, who remained tied to a dominant narrative:
Up until the period when Redon began his Apparition, he was in the
process of liberating himself from the direct influence of Moreau. With
this work he had found his own true style, that of a visionary, and he was
fully aware of it. In Moreau's work there is always a narrative element
which dominates; Moreau describes a vision by rendering it perceptible to
the spectator but in a manner which is a little theatrical. Redon creates the
vision itself.14
Thus, for Moreau the process of creation led to an elaboration and

embellishment of the beginning sketch, so that his works are always
recognizable according to a specific time and place within the narrative. In
fact, von Holten has argued that, because Moreau’s many works on this
theme can be arranged sequentially into various episodes, they prefigure
the emergence of cinematic narrative.15 José Pierre has also commented
upon this “episodic” quality in Moreau:
When Huysmans saw The Apparition as the sequel to the episode of

Salome dancing before Herod, he had discovered one of Moreau's
methods, which could modify the limitations of ‘succession’ as Ragnar von
Holten has called it and as it is described in Laocöon. When Moreau was
obsessed by a subject, he would paint different moments of the story as it
Fig. 13-8. Edouard Toudouze, Salome Triumphant, ca. 1886.

developed. Dynamism in the single painting did not interest Moreau, but in
a series of paintings on the same subject it is introduced in an original
manner, which not only shifts the position of the subject in time but also
changes the point of view. The theme of Salome undoubtedly offers the
greatest variety of this kind; the tone changes with the different mediums
of charcoal, pen and ink, pencil, watercolour and oil.16
By contrast, Redon’s works remain resistant to such an analysis. He

moved in the opposite direction, reducing the composition to two
figures—and ultimately to one partial figure—for his favorite way to
present this subject was to show a single, isolated severed head as in his
Head of a Martyr on a Platter (Fig. 13-9; 1877, chalk and charcoal,
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo). The result is that, while Moreau’s
details help to indicate specificity of time and place, Redon’s works are so
sparse that it is difficult to tie them to a specific subject matter. Moreover,
within his compositional space, all sorts of suggestive syntheses are
possible; a severed head could easily be associated with John the Baptist,
Orpheus, Osiris, or with whatever subject the spectator’s projection upon
the work might be (Fig. 13-10).17 Redon offered his viewer a vision that
appears mysteriously to exist in the here and now, haunting the viewer in
the same way it seems to have haunted the artist. Placed out of time,
Redon’s images are not confined to a moment within a historical narrative
as in the case of Moreau. Thus, the confrontation between the viewer and
Redon’s apparition always takes place in the present, for even if the image
has a history, Redon attempted to erase those extraneous details that would
allow that history to be traced, forcing the viewer back into a direct
confrontation with the scene at hand.
Confrontations between John the Baptist and Salome were not limited
to the visual arts or to Huysmans's novel. A brief consideration of
examples by Gustave Flaubert and Stéphane Mallarmé will indicate that
similar tensions between narrative and visionary modes existed in the
literary arts as well. Flaubert's short story “Hérodias” was published in
1877, and although Stéphane Mallarmé's poem “Hérodiade” was
incomplete at the time of his death, it had appeared in various forms, most
notably in Huysman's A rebours, alongside descriptions of works by
Moreau and Redon. In his study of “Representations of Decapitation” in
Mallarmé and Flaubert, the scholar J.D. Hubert offered the following
comparison:
In the first two parts of “Hérodiade,” which deals essentially with poetic
creation, only the title and the identity of the protagonist indicate any close
association with the beheading of John the Baptist. Flaubert, whose tale
simply teems with biblical places, characters, and actions, never swerves
from the crucial event. It would seem that the author has accumulated an
overwhelming amount of detail so as to show how masterfully he can
impose order and build up tension.18
Fig. 13-9. Odilon Redon, Head of a Martyr, 1877.

Fig. 13-10. Odilon Redon. Head of Orpheus Floating on the Waters, 1880.
Furthermore, Hubert found that “Mallarmé has divested the beheading of

all but its plastic homologies” and concluded that “the swish of the scythe,
the bounce of the bloody pate lose, through spatial and festive
associations, all the emotional aspects that a narrative of martyrdom would
normally convey.”19 Thus, the “decontextualization” process and the
refusal to employ overdetermined subject matter that I have identified in
Redon's work was also present in Mallarmé’s texts, where the poetic
imagery evoked a multitude of associations and sometimes even made the

recognition of specific subject matter similarly problematic.
Thus, despite the complex chain of influences described here, we can
find a parallel to the comparison drawn above between Flaubert and
Mallarmé in the differences that exist between the works of Moreau and
Redon. Indeed, Moreau's Salomé was influenced by Flaubert's Salammbô,
but in return, the paintings influenced that author's “Herodias.” Redon's
borrowings from Moreau are obvious—indeed, they help us to identify his
drawing's subject—but his dismissal of the “overwhelming amount of
detail” in both Moreau’s paintings and Flaubert’s text indicates a more
“suggestive” approach, which is far closer to that of Mallarmé. Thus, even
though Redon’s keen interest in the work of both writers can be attested to
by his dedication of at least three lithographic albums to Flaubert’s
Temptation of Saint Anthony and his presence among Mallarmé’s circle of
friends, Les Mardis, Redon’s attitude and working method display far
more similarities with those of Mallarmé than with those of Flaubert
(especially his more naturalistic tendencies). In fact, Redon and Mallarmé
were so close that Maurice Denis referred to Redon as “precisely the
Mallarmé of painting.”20
Both Redon and Mallarmé were interested in a “suggestive approach”
to their respective arts. Mallarmé wrote that “To name an object is to
suppress three-quarters of the pleasure [or play; ‘jouissance’] of the poem
which is meant to reveal itself only little by little: to suggest, that is the
dream.” [le suggérer, voilà le rêve.]21 This is very similar in spirit to
Redon’s remark that
In order to maintain a sense of mystery one must always remain

ambiguous, with double and triple meanings, and with hints of other
meanings (with images within images); with forms in the process of
coming into being or which take on certain aspects according to the point
of view of the spectator. Everything has a suggestiveness because of its
appearance.22
Perhaps because of this aspect of their work, in which one image or one
theme could lead to another, both men recorded private impressions of the
problems related to starting this process of association at the work’s
inception—a difficulty which may find its clearest manifestation in their
stated abhorrence in approaching a blank sheet of white paper. For
example, Mallarmé described the paralyzing effect of this experience,23
and Redon, despite his reticence in discussing matters related to the
origination of his works, reluctantly confessed:
I have always had a horror of a white sheet of paper. It creates such a

disagreeable impression that it almost renders me sterile to the point of
losing the desire to begin to work (except in the case where I am
representing something directly from nature). A blank sheet of paper
shocks me so much that I am obliged, as soon as it is put on the easel, to
rub charcoal, crayon, or other materials onto its surface, and this operation
gives it life.24
As a result, both artists produced works in which the process of artistic

creation and the adventure of discovery for the viewer and/or reader is
emphasized. For Mallarmé, this process—seen in its most tangible form in
the typesetting for the poem Un coup de dès (Fig. 13-11), where the
viewer/reader follows the tumbling dice from one page to another—
involved a new sense of syntax, leading to a creation of poetry derived
from associative sounds of words, their etymologies, their use of unusual
rhymes, homonymic puns, and even a breakdown of the individual word
into its component syllables and phonemes to create new words. This
spawned a creative process that suggested unexpected meanings and
formal combinations, with the structure of language itself constantly
brought into question.
Although this paper offers only a cursory examination of the very rich
relationship between Redon and Mallarmé, perhaps it has been established
that the two artists shared a special kinship in their approach to the
narrative of Salome and John the Baptist. The challenges that their
approaches present recall the desire, stated in the Huysman’s preface for A
rebours, “to rupture the limits of the novel,”25 and I would like to consider
further the rupture with narrative suggested by severed head imagery in
both Redon and Mallarmé. This rupture has become especially evident in
the way scholars such as Jacques Derrida and Mary Ellen Wolf have
approached Mallarmé’s “Herodiade,” calling attention to the writer’s
cutting of the text to create new word and syntactical relationships and the
corresponding meditation upon decapitation and castration as a metaphor
for artistic creation.26 Careful examination of Redon's pictorial syntax may
reveal a similar mechanism of meaning at work that has not been
previously emphasized.
Fig.13-11. Stéphane Mallarmé, Page from Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le

Hasard, 1897-1898.
Fig. 13-12. Unknown artist, Chef-reliquaire de saint Jean-Baptiste, second third of

the 14th century.
Redon went to great lengths in many of his artistic creations to offer

his viewers an identification with the severed head image. On the one
hand, he frequently depicted heads on platters, which recalled the mystical
tradition of identification with saints and their relics in the Middle Ages—
perhaps best seen by comparison of his Head of a Martyr on a Platter
(Fig. 13-9) and a Johanischlussen (St. John's Platter) by an unknown artist
of the fourteenth century (Fig. 13-12; polychrome wood sculpture from
Alsace, Musée historique, Haguenau).27 On the other hand, Redon himself
identified with the imagery, as seen in his drawing of Salome with the
Head of John the Baptist (Fig. 13-13; ca. 1880-1885, charcoal on paper,
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) where the severed head is a
partial self-portrait,28 as can be seen by comparing the drawing to a
photograph of Redon made in 1914 (Fig. 13-14). If the notion of
identification with the pictorial imagery is transferred from artist to
viewer, an interesting problem is presented; it suggests that the proper
viewing situation is one in which the viewer’s head either rests on the
platter, with eyes closed, or else floats in a space free of contact with the
rest of the body. Such a precarious viewing position had already been
suggested by a 19th-century critic of Puvis de Chavannes's Beheading of
John the Baptist (Fig. 13-5). The critic, Elie Sorin, condemned the painting’s
deficiencies in perspective and warned:
Here we have an executioner who, with a single stroke of his sword, is

about to lop off not only a large sycamore tree and the saint's head but also
the head of any viewer who stops to look at it.29
Fig. 13-13. Odilon Redon, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, ca. 1880-
1885.
Fig. 13-14. Photograph of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) by Guy & Mockrel, 19th-
20th century.
In fact, such a potential for severing the head of the viewer may already
exist within the structure of most paintings of severed heads, as can be
seen from famous Baroque examples such as Artemisia Gentileschi’s
Judith Slaying Holofernes (Fig. 13-15; ca. 1612-1613, oil on canvas,
Museo di Capodimonte, Naples), and Caravaggio’s David with the Head
of Goliath (Fig. 13-16; ca. 1605-1606?, oil on canvas, Borghese Gallery,
Rome), which tend to place the head very close to the viewer’s own
space.30 This placement of the severed head so near the picture plane and
its tendency to jut out of the picture into the viewer's space—and thus to
break from the picture plane—may represent a violation of the pictorial
code and with the fiction of pictorial representation. In this sense, the
picture plane—commonly referred to as a theoretical transparent plane,
much like a picture window—assumes the role of both a mirror, which
contributes to the viewer’s spectral identification, and a blade marking the
space where the “fictive head” is separated or severed from the viewer.31
Such a construct suggests that these visionary images of severed heads
may either open up a space or create a rupture in the viewer’s fictional
relationship to the image similar to the opening up of the white space
between words and letters in the poetry of Mallarmé. In Redon’s pictures,
as in the poems of Mallarmé, this narrative rupture is the product of the
discontinuity of the severed head with the body, which poses special
challenges to both the reader and the viewer seeking narrative continuity
in the art of the fin-de-siècle. To explore these suggestive images and their
artistic sources is to move from appearance to apparition and reflection.
These images confront us with closed eyes, and they reveal little by way
of identifying details. Yet to the extent that our imagination intermingles
with the artist’s construction of John and Salome, they seduce us and pull
us closer to them. But to stick our necks out to see these images is to enter
a dangerous space, for the death we contemplate could be our own.
But I certainly do not wish to leave my readers/viewers headless or in
suspense. Indeed, for the effect I describe to really work, there would need
to be sufficiently strong identification with the work of art, and this leaves
us (in our suspended state) with several difficult questions. For example,
how much would depend upon how the gaze is gendered? To identify with
John the Baptist, would a viewer need to be male (or adopt a male viewing
position)? Such an interpretation of this Symbolist imagery might seem
rather sexist or even single-minded, returning us to all too familiar
ground—with the male head and the femme fatale. Perhaps one way to
respond to this dilemma would be to suggest that if my theory is true, then
Symbolist artists tended to degender the male gaze (to “castrate” it) and, in
the very process, reveal not only sexual anxieties but also challenges to
Fig. 13-15. Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, ca. 1612-1613.
dominant ways of thinking. Beyond this, what happens when the creator
of the work is female, as in the case of Jeanne Jacquemin, whose work
was well known in Symbolist circles at the end of the nineteenth century?
One of her lithographs depicts the head of a Christ-like figure with a
crown of thorns in a chalice (Fig. 13-17; lithograph, published in Le
Courrier Françias, June 23, 1895).32 Indeed, this work is very close to that
of Redon’s Head of a Martyr on a Platter (Fig. 13-9). Nevertheless,
skeptics might ask whether her case is really so exceptional and attempt to
dismiss her by saying that she has simply been enculturated by a male
dominant situation. Before considering the implications of her work and
the questions posed here, I would like to briefly emphasize the extent to
which so many artists sought some form of identification with the severed
head imagery they depicted.
Fig. 13-16. Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, ca. 1605-1606 (?).
Fig. 13-17. Jeanne Jacquemin, Christ á la couronne d’épines. Lithograph,

Fig. 13-18. Jean Baptiste (Auguste) Clésinger, Tête de saint Jean-Baptiste, 1877.
Fig. 13-19. James Ensor, The Dangerous Cooks, 1896.

Fig. 13-20. Emile Bernard. Salomé, 1897.

Certainly, the clearest examples of artists’ self-identification with

severed head imagery can be found in works where the male artist
includes his own likeness in the depicted severed head, as can be seen in
works by Caravaggio (Fig. 13-16), Jean-Baptiste Clésinger (Fig. 13-18;
Tête de saint Jean-Baptiste, 1877, Terra cotta, Musée Carnavalet)33 and
James Ensor (Fig. 13-19; The Dangerous Cooks, 1896, Oil on panel,
private collection, Belgium).34 Puvis de Chavannes worked on the edges
of this tradition; rather than showing his own likeness within the painting,
he signed and dated the work in an unusual way that suggested an
identification between the artist and Saint John (Fig. 13-5).35 In other cases
the head is placed on a platter held by the artist’s wife or mistress, as is the
case in Emile Bernard’s Salomé (Fig. 13-20; 1897, oil on canvas, private
collection, Switzerland).36 One of the most fascinating examples of this
practice—and proof that the tradition extended well into the twentieth
century—can be attributed to Marcel Duchamp (Fig. 13-21; Mary
Reynolds, Marcel Duchamp, 1937, photograph). Duchamp’s example is
especially relevant in this context given his strong affinity for the work of
Redon, one of the few artists from the nineteenth-century who’s work he is
said to have admired.37 Like Redon, Duchamp thought that the spectator
played an important role in the completion of the work of art, as he stated
in a talk called “The Creative Act” delivered April of 1957:
the creative act is not performed by the artist alone. The spectator brings
the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting
its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.38
This photograph records one of Duchamp’s most explicit explorations of

the severed head theme. In a recent article, “The Decollation of Saint
Marcel,” the scholar Sheldon Nodelman has emphasized that the artist
himself suggested the photograph’s inclusion and placement within Robert
Lebel’s famous first monograph on Duchamp.39 It shows the artist’s
mistress, Mary Reynolds, standing before an image of Duchamp’s own
severed head. After placing this image within the context of a number of
Symbolist works by Redon, Moreau, Redon, and Mallarmé, most of which
are discussed in the present paper, Nodelman argues that this work has a
key place in Duchamp’s oeuvre and relates it not only to the Large Glass,
but also to other works such as Duchamp’s design for window displays
and his ultimate final installation Étant donnés. One of Nodelman’s most
interesting observations is that Duchamp’s Large Glass, “with its upright
rectangular frame, horizontally bisected, is reminiscent of the guillotine.”40
Nodelman’s associations of the glass with the guillotine and Duchamp’s
interest in revealing the ways that reflections in glass display windows can
create interesting verbal/visual puns on the headless object of the gaze and
the identity of the spectator (as in Duchamp’s window design for André
Breton’s novel, Arcane 17, that was installed at Gotham Book Mart in
New York City in 1945) lend further support to arguments made in the
present essay that the picture plane serves not only as a type of mirror that
aides in the spectator’s spectral identification with the imagery in the art
work, but also as a kind of blade that threatens to either rupture the fictive
construction that takes place in the viewing of the picture (as one leans out
to see the picture) or serves as a mechanism by which spectators leave
their grounded position in the material world so as to further enter into and
identify with the vision presented in the art work.41
In returning to the example of Jacquemin, it is necessary to ask
whether her work is simply the exception that proves the rule. It is curious,
however, that like her male counterparts, she often used her own image for
many of the saints she depicted. For example, her lithographic depiction of
a head in a chalice bears a crown of thorns that is just like the one
appearing in her pastel La Douloureuse et Glorieuse Couronne (Fig. 13-
22), which is a thinly disguised self-portrait. She did something similar in
her treatment of Saint George (Fig. 13-23; 1898, color lithograph for
L’Estampe moderne), an image that just as easily evokes the appearance of
Jeanne d’Arc. It seems that one way to leave the prison of the flesh was to
reinvent oneself as transgendered or androgynous.42 Certainly Oscar Wilde
did this with his famous play Salome. He was so successful that even his
most respected biographer misidentified a photograph of a female
performer as being one of Wilde himself as Salome (Fig. 13-24;
photograph of Alice Guszalewicz as Salome in the opera by Richard
Strauss, ca. 1910).43 Jacquemin’s main critical champion, the writer Jean
Lorrain, who was in some ways one of the French counterparts to Wilde,
constantly identified himself in his creative writings with Jacquemin
(playing his Jean to her Jeanne) in both profound and ultimately tragic
ways.44
These subtle challenges to gender norms and games of identity might
also be read in the light of the comments by Mireille Dottin-Orsini on the
predominance of Salome imagery in late nineteenth-century culture. For
example, she has offered new insights into the power that Salome derives
from her seemingly compromised situation.45 If John, whose head floats
free from the earth, has been associated with the triumph of the intellect
and the imagination over base materialism, we should also remember that
Salome’s gravity defying dance is another challenge to the earthly realm,
even if most artists never allow her to quite escape its grasp. Thus, in
considering the fabled dance that set in place a “Symbolist movement”
that conjured images of the many fatal dances undertaken between alluring
female personages and severed heads, we should also keep in mind the
delicate position of the spectator who comes to step in on these partners
from time to time. Perhaps we should also remember that both John and
Salome, in their own ways, find a means of freeing themselves from
earthly constraints. Are they really opponents in an eternal struggle or a
fateful couple on the verge of an apotheosis? Surely to some extent what is
significant about the “Symbolist movement” is the means it offers us to
escape the cares and constraints of the physical and mental demands of the
material world, even if these efforts sometimes involve risks and leaps of
the imagination that could cause us to lose our safely anchored places in
reality.
Fig. 13-21. Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), American, 1890-1976.

Fig. 13-22. Jeanne Jacquemin, La Douloureuse et glorieuse couronne, 1898.

Fig. 13-23. Jeanne Jacquemin. Saint-Georges, 1898.

Fig. 13-24. Photograph of Alice Guszalewicz starring as Salome in the opera by

Richard Strauss (1864-1949), ca. 1910.
Fig. 13-1. Odilon Redon. L’Apparition. 1883. Charcoal with white
gouache highlights on chamois paper. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.
© Cliché du M.B.A. de Bordeaux/photographe Lysiane Gauthier.
Fig. 13-2. Gustave Moreau. L’Apparition. 1876. Watercolor. 106 x

72.2cm. Cabinet des dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Réunion des
Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi.
Fig. 13-3. Gustave Moreau. Salome Dancing before Herod. 1876. Oil on
canvas. The Armand Hammer Collection. Gift of the Armand Hammer
Foundation. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Fig.13-4. Gustave Moreau. Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. ca. 1870.
Oil on canvas. 85 x 60 cm. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris. Réunion des
Musées Nationaux/Art Resource. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda.
Fig. 13-5. Puvis de Chavannes. The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.
1869. Oil on canvas. 124.5 x 166 cm. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts,
University of Birmingham/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Fig. 13-6. Eugène Delacroix. The Death of Saint John the Baptist. 1843-
1854. Frescoes from the spandrels of the main hall. Assemblée Nationale,
Paris, France. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 13-7. Gustave Moreau. Salomé dancing. ca. 1875. Pen and black ink
with white highlights. 29.4 x 14.8 cm. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris,
France. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY; René-
Gabriel Ojéda.
Fig. 13-8. Edouard Toudouze. Salome Triumphant. ca. 1886 (Salon of

1886). Oil on canvas. Current whereabouts unknown.
Fig. 13-9. Odilon Redon. Head of a Martyr. 1877. Chalk and charcoal on
paper. 37 x 36 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, The
Netherlands. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 13-10. Odilon Redon. Head of Orpheus Floating on the Waters.

1880. Charcoal on paper. 41 x 34 cm. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller,
Otterlo, The Netherlands. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 13-11. Stéphane Mallarmé. Page from Un coup de Dés jamais

n’abolira le Hasard. 1897-1898. Paris, Doucet. Photo: © Roger-Viollet.
Fig. 13-12. Unknown artist. Chef-reliquaire de saint Jean-Baptiste.

Second third of the 14th century. Polychrome wood sculpture. Musée
Historique de Haguenau, Haguenau, France. Photo: ©Musées de
Haguenau.
Fig. 13-13. Odilon Redon. Salome with the Head of John the Baptist.
ca.1880-1885. Charcoal and black chalk on tan paper. 22 x 19.8 cm.
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of Milton
McGreevy, 81-30/67. Photo: Mel McLean.
Fig. 13-14. Photograph of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) (b/w photo) by Guy

& Mockrel (19th-20th century). Archives Larousse, Paris, France. Photo:
Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library International.
Fig. 13-15. Artemisia Gentileschi. Judith Slaying Holofernes. ca.1612-

1613. Oil on canvas. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy.
Photo: Scala/ Ministero per I Beni e le Attivitá culturali / Art Resource,
NY.
Fig. 13-16. Caravaggio. David with the Head of Goliath. ca.1605-1606 (?).
oil on canvas. Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy. Photo: Mauro Magliani for
Alinari, 1997/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 13-17. Jeanne Jacquemin. Christ á la couronne d’épines. Lithograph,

Fig. 13-18. Jean Baptiste (Auguste) Clésinger. Tête de saint Jean-Baptiste.

1877. Terra cotta. Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France. Photo: © Eric Emo /
Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet.
Fig. 13-19. James Ensor. The Dangerous Cooks. 1896. Oil on panel. 38 x
46 cm. Private collection, Belgium. Photo: © DACS / Giraudon / The
Bridgeman Art Library International. © 2010 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ SABAM, Brussels.
Fig. 13-20. Emile Bernard. Salomé. 1897. Oil on canvas. Private

collection, Switzerland.
Fig. 13-21. Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), American, 1890-1976. Mary

Reynolds and Marcel Duchamp. 1937. Gelatin silver print. 15 x 14.9 cm.
Gift of Frank B. Hubachek, 1970.796, The Art Institute of Chicago.
Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.
Fig. 13-22 . Jeanne Jacquemin. La Douloureuse et glorieuse couronne

(The Crown of Thorns). 892. 52 x 34 cm. Pastel on paper. Private
Collection, Paris, France. Photo: Lessing Photo Archive.
Fig. 13-23. Jeanne Jacquemin. Saint-Georges. 1898. Color Lithograph.

Appeared in L’Estampe moderne, March 1898.
Fig. 13-24. Photograph of Alice Guszalewicz starring as Salome in the

opera by Richard Strauss (1864-1949) (b/w photo). ca. 1910. Private
collection/Roger-Viollet, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library. (This
photograph was identified in 1987 by Richard Ellman as being a
photograph of Oscar Wilde, an error which was corrected in 1992).
Notes
1
Ragnar von Holten, "Le développement du personnage de Salomé à travers les
dessins de Gustave Moreau," L'Oeil: Revue d'Art mensuelle 79-80 (July-August
1961): 48.
2
Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: With a catalogue of the finished paintings,
watercolors and drawings, trans. James Emmons (Boston: New York Graphic
Society, 1976), 241. Mathieu has also emphasized that "Redon's apparition was
clearly inspired by Gustave Moreau's version, which was exhibited in 1876. But
instead of Moreau's teeming details and debauchery of description (reminiscent of
Flaubert's in Salammbô), Redon gives us a severe geometrical space. In the center,
we distinguish John the Baptist's head radiating light—though it is beginning to be
eclipsed by a sort of dark disk—while Salome is barely visible on the left. Beyond
this subject's obvious level of meaning Redon's message, which concerns the
struggle between darkness and light, probably has an esoteric dimension." See
Pierre-Louis Mathieu, The Symbolist Generation, 1870-1910, trans. Michael
Taylor (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1990), 49.
3
Ary Renan, "Gustave Moreau," La Gazette des Beaux-Arts 33 (May 1886): 391-
392. This is also discussed and translated in Pierre-Louis Mathieu, Gustave
Moreau: With a catalogue of the finished paintings, watercolors and drawings,
126. Mathieu notes that Renan and Moreau were friends and that "he may have
heard about this source from the artist himself."
4
According to Geneviève Lacambre, the earliest version of this work may be the
painting in Tokyo (National Museum of Occidental Art): Salomé à la prison. See
her entry in Gustave Moreau et la Bible, exhibit catalog (Nice: Musée National
Message Biblique Marc Chagall, 1991), 89.

5
Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: With a catalogue of the finished paintings, watercolors
and drawings, 122. Two other striking images of decapitation appeared at the
Salon during those years: Henri-Alexandre-Georges Regnault's Salomé of 1869-70
(Musée d'Orsay, Salon of 1870) and his Exécution sans jugement sous les rois
maures de Grenade (o.c., 1870, Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Salon of 1870 and
Exposition Universelle of 1878).
6
Ragnar von Holten, L'Art fantastique de Gustave Moreau (Paris: Jean-Jacques
Pauvert, éditeur, 1960), 19. Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô, 2 vols. (Paris: Société les
Belles Lettres, 1944).
7
Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: With a catalogue of the finished paintings,
watercolors and drawings, 126.
8
Sven Sandstrom, Le monde imaginaire d'Odilon Redon, trans. Denise Naert
(Lund and New York: CWK Geerup and George Wittenborn, Inc., 1955), 48.
9
von Holten, "Le développement du personnage de Salomé à travers les dessins de
Gustave Moreau," 46 and 72.
10
Jean Paladilhe and José Pierre, Gustave Moreau: His Life and Work, trans.
Bettina Wadia (New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 102.
11
Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex: The Grotesque: Origins,
Iconography, Techniques (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press,
1987), 190.
12
Such an identification was actually made by Jean-Pierre Reverseau, in his article
"Pour une étude du thème de la tête coupée dans la littérature et la peinture dans la
seconde partie du XIXe siècle," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6, no. 80 (September
1972): 173-74. This is how he described Redon's painting: "il offre une curieuse
variante de l'aquarelle de G. Moreau: Salomé et Hérode ont disparu, la tête
symbolisant l'âme s'échappant de son enveloppe terrestre s'élève flottant au-dessus
du bourreau." Are we to believe that Reverseau has not identified the figure as
female, or should we believe that he was suggesting that the executioner was
actually a woman? This is a very interesting "slip" for it may suggest an intuitive
reading of Redon's work that indicates an actual conflation or condensation of the
figure of Salome and the figure of the executioner!
13
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity; Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle
Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). This analysis is
given in the chapter that focuses on Salome and related themes, “Gold and the
Virgin Whores of Babylon; Judith and Salome: The Priestesses of Man's Severed
Head,” 352-402.
14
Sandstrom, Le monde imaginaire d'Odilon Redon, 49. Emphasis in original.
15
von Holten, "Le développement du personnage de Salomé à travers les dessins
de Gustave Moreau," 72. A full discussion of the successive stages in the
development of Moreau's composition also appears in two articles by Ary Renan,
"Gustave Moreau," La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 33 (May, 1886): 377-394 and "Part
II," La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 34 (1886): 35-51. While it is not surprising that the
younger artist Redon has created works that have been differentiated from earlier
ones by Moreau, the relationship of both of these artists to “literary” sources has
been very complex. For example, recent scholarship suggests that the ways in
which both Moreau and Redon depart from traditional approaches to narrative and
history painting are even more significant than the differences between them. For
example, Dario Gamboni has analyzed Moreau’s relationship to literature and the
“literary,” concluding that “On voit qu’abstraction ne s’oppose pas ici à
représentation mais plutôt à narration, introduisant par rapport à la source littéraire
et à la logique iconographique une distance propice au lyrisme, à la polysémie et à
la participation imaginative du spectateur.” Dario Gamboni, “‘Vers le songe et
l’abstrait’ Gustave Moreau et le littérature,” 48/14 La Revue du Musée d’Orsay,
no. 9 (1999): 50-61. Peter Cooke has also made a number of interesting
contributions to the study of Moreau and the ways in which the artist intended to
“reinvent” history painting. Peter Cooke, “Gustave Moreau’s ‘Salome’: The
Poetics and Politics of History Painting,” The Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1253
(August 2007): 528-536. Peter Cooke, “Gustave Moreau and the Reinvention of
History Painting,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 3 (September 2008): 394-416. Peter Cooke,
“Symbolism, Decadence and Gustave Moreau,” The Burlington Magazine 151, no.
1274 (May 2009): 312-318. In Redon’s own time, his friend and fellow artist Paul
Gauguin saw the comparison between Moreau’s and Redon’s work in a less
favorable light, for he characterized Morreau as being able to “speak only a
language already written by men.” Daniel Guérin, ed. The Writings of a Savage:
Paul Gauguin, trans. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 42-43.
16
Paladilhe and Pierre, Gustave Moreau: His Life and Work, 102.
17
Jean-François Chevrier has noted how the theme of John the Baptist morphs in
Redon’s work into the theme of Oannès, and how “Le nom même d’Oannès
évoque d’ailleurs l’appellation liturgique de saint Jean, Sainte Ioanes.” Jean-
François Chevrier, L’Action restreinte; L’art moderne selon Mallarmé, exhibit
cataloque (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2005), 62.
18
J.D. Hubert, "Representations of Decapitation: Mallarmé's `Hérodiade' and
Flaubert's `Hérodias,'" French Forum 7, no. 3 (September 1982): 245-251.
Mathieu also notes Moreau's affinity for Flaubert. Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: With
a catalogue of the finished paintings, watercolors and drawings, 22.
19
Hubert, "Representations of Decapitation: Mallarmé's `Hérodiade' and Flaubert's
`Hérodias,'" 247.
20
Maurice Denis, Histoire de l'art religieux (Paris: Flammarion, 1939), 283: "Dans
cette période d'avant 1900, Odilon Redon, entre Puvis et Gustave Moreau, fut le
premier qui orienta le culte de l'idéal dans le sens du symbolisme; il voulait que la
réalité fût suggérée plutôt que représentée; il cherchait à exprimer les sentiments
ou les idées par la musique du tableau. Nous touchons ici aux origines du
mouvement contemporain... Redon a été le Mallarmé de la peinture." This quote
by Denis is also discussed in The University of Kansas Museum of Art, Les
Mardis: Stéphane Mallarmé and the artists of his circle (exh. cat., Lawrence, n.d.),
44.
21
Stéphane Mallarmé in an interview with Jules Huret, published in l'Echo de
Paris, 14 March 1891; as quoted by Henri Nicolas, Mallarmé et le Symbolisme
(Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1963), 91.
22
Odilon Redon, A Soi-même, journal (1867-1915): Notes sur la vie, l'art et les
artistes (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1961), 100-101. This was translated into
English by Mira Jacob and Jeanne L. Wasserman as To Myself, Notes on Life, Art,
and Artists (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1986), 84. "The meaning of
mystery is to be always in ambiguity, with double, triple aspects; in the hints of
aspect (images in images), forms which will be, or which become according to the
state of mind of the beholder. All things more than suggestive because they
appear."
23
See Nicolas, Mallarmé et le Symbolisme, 9.
24
Odilon Redon in a letter to André Mellerio of 16 August 1898, published in
Marius Ary-Leblond, ed., Lettres d'Odilon Redon, 1878-1916 (Paris and Brussels:
Librairie Nationale d'art et d'histoire and G. Van Oest & Cie, éditeurs, 1923), 33.
25
“Désir ... de briser les limites du roman” in “Préface écrite vingt ans après le
roman” in Joris-Karl Huysmans, A rebours (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1977), 71.
The phrase is translated this way by Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of
Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (University of Chicago Press, 1987),
43.
26
Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1978; Paris: Seuil, 1971), 257 note 56. Mary Ellen Wolf, Eros
Under Glass; Psychoanalysis and Mallarmé's "Hérodiade" (Columbus, Ohio: The
Ohio State University Press, 1987), 89.
27
See the discussion of the "Johanischlussen" or "Caput St. Johannis in disco," in
Danièle Duvyneck's catalogue entry in Salomé dans les collections françaises
(exh. cat., Saint-Denis, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, 1988), 46: "Le 'plat de saint
Jean,' emblème des Confréries de la Miséricorde et des Pénitents noirs, qui
assistaient les condamnés au supplice, est en outre censé guérir les maux de tête ou
de gorge.”
28
Tedd Gott, The Enchanted Stone: The Graphic Worlds of Odilon Redon (art
exh., Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 1990), 73. This is also discussed by
Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, “Taking Wing, 1870-1878,” in Odilon
Redon; Prince of Dreams (exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 1994), 86.
29
Élie Sorin, as quoted by Louise d'Argencourt, in Puvis de Chavannes, 1824-
1898, National Gallery of Canada (exh. cat., Ottawa, 1977), 100. The original
quotation appeared in Élie Sorin, Le Salon de 1870 (Angers, 1870), 9.
30
Caravaggio includes a self-portrait in the image of the severed head of Goliath.
For a discussion of this image and other autobiographical uses of the severed head
see Laurie Schneider, “Donatello and Caravaggio: The Iconography of
Decapitation,” American Imago: A Psychoanalytic Journal for Culture, Science
and The Arts 33, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 76-91.
31
This effect may have some kinship to the radical cropping of the image that has
been observed in Impressionist paintings and that has been analyzed by Linda
Nochlin in works such as The Lowering of the Curtain by Edgar Degas (1880): “At
its most extreme, the Degas cut-off view may suggest that, like the ballet
performance, the pictorial representation is nothing but convention, and just as the
dance performance ends with the falling curtain, representation ends with an
encroaching plane of colour, the erstwhile realism of the scene transformed into
pure abstraction by the end of the act: a painted canvas divided into a lighter and a
darker rectangle, a sort of Mark Rothko before the fact.” Linda Nochlin, The Body
in Pieces: The Fragment as A Metaphor of Modernity (London and New York:
Thames and Hudson, ), 45. In describing another of his works, Orchestra at the
Opera (1870), she writes, “the performers are guillotined by the top margin of the
painting,” 43.
32
Leslie Stewart Curtis, “Jeanne Jacquemin: A French Symbolist,” Woman’s Art
Journal 21, no. 2 (Fall 2000/Winter 2001): 27-35. See also Jean-David Jumeau-
Lafond, “Jeanne Jacquemin, peintre et égérie symboliste,” Revue de l’Art no.
141/2003-3: 57-78.
33
Philippe Sorel, entry for catalogue no. 44 in n Salomé dans les collections
françaises (exh. cat., Saint-Denis, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, 1988), 77. Sorel notes
that this work may have been inspired by an executed criminal (and it was
commissioned by the prefect of the police) who’s name was also “Jean-Baptiste.”
According to Sorel, the criminal’s memoirs of his last days in prison place the
blame for his fate directly upon his lover, whom he described as “Salome.”
34
John David Farmer, Ensor (New York: George Braziller, 1976), 30. Farmer
describes how this work depicts “the critics who prepare a selection of artists’
heads for more critics, the waiting dinner guests: Eduard Fétis, Eugène Demolder,
Camille Lemonnier, Max Sulzberger, and Emile Verhaeren.” It is the critic Octave
Maus who holds Ensor’s head on a platter, which also includes a “sour herring” or
“hareng saur,” and Farmer emphasizes how these words would correspond to the
French sounds, “art Ensor” and thus they created a “favorite pun and occasional
signature” of the artist.
35
Louis d’Argencourt, Puvis de Chavannes, 1824-1898, 100, has emphasized the
artist’s identification with John the Baptist: “Finally, one detail is worth a second
glance: the date written under the signature—14th Xbre 1869 (14 December
1869)—is the date of Puvis’s forty-fifth birthday. Because it was rare for the artist
to have dated his work so precisely, one might legitimately conclude that he
wished in this way to indicate a parallel between the melancholic feeling of
growing older and the tragic irreversibility of Saint John’s fate.” Moreover,
according to Mary Anne Stevens and Alan Bowness, the “face of Salome is said to
be based upon the Princesse Cantacuzène, Puvis’ Muse inspiratrice, whom he met
in 1856 and married in 1897.” See French Symbolist Painters: Moreau, Puvis de
Chavannes, Redon and their Followers (exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London,
1972), 103.
36
Jean-Jacques Luthi, Emile Bernard: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint (Paris:
Éditions Side, 1982), 120-121.
37
Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York:
Grove Press, Inc.1959), 58. For more information on the work by Duchamp, see
also Paul B. Franklin, “A Whodunit,” Étant donné Marcel Duchamp no 8 (2007),
158-163. The special affinities Duchamp shared for the work of Redon have been
discussed by Dario Gamboni in an article that explores the indeterminate aspects
of both artists' works. See "Images potentielles et 'soupçons d'aspect': la
contribution d'Odilon Redon à l'histoire de l'ambiguïté visuelle," in Odilon Redon:

La Natura dell'Invisibile (exh. cat., Museo Cantonale d'Arte , Lugano, 1996), 94-
119. Gamboni discusses Duchamp's stated interests in Redon's art, 116-117. He
also notes the importance of another author to have studied the implications of the
ambiguity in Redon's imagery for his spectators: Matthias Schatz, Der Betrachter
im Werk von Odilon Redon. Eine rezeptionsästhetische Studie (Hamburg: Krämer,
1988). See also: Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy
in Modern Art, trans. Mark Treharne (London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2002). In an
irony that Duchamp might have appreciated, it was only after deciding upon a title
for this paper that I realized Duchamp had used the same phrase, "Appearance and
Apparition" in formulating his ideas about a proper approach to the fourth-
dimension. These notes are from A L'infinitif (The White Box), published in Michel
Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp
(Marchand du Sel), trans. Arturo Schwarz (New York: Oxford University Press,
1973), 84-86.
38
Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act.” Lecture given in April of 1957 at a
Session on the Creative Act at The American Federation of the Arts convention in
Houston, Texas. Published in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 77-78.
39
Sheldon Nodelman, “The Decollation of Saint Marcel,” Art in America 94, no. 9
(October 2006): 107-13, 115, 117, 119.
40
Katherine Dreier and Matta Euchaurren also described the shift from canvas to
glass as follows: “Painting—glass—mirror—these are the three substances in
dynamic interrelation to the final image of the Glass. While we gaze upon the
bride—there appears through the glass the image of the room wherein we stand
and on the radiation of the mirror design lives the image of our own body.”
Katherine S. Dreier and Matta Echaurren, "Duchamp's Glass, La mariée mise à nu
par ses célibataires, même," in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph
Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), 108. This was
originally published in 1944. Duchamp's response to the mirrored reflection of the
spectator also played a role in the inception of his infamous L.H.O.O.Q., which
was in part a meditation upon the viewing conditions of the Mona Lisa after it had
been placed behind glass—like the cartoonist from Le Rire, he found it to be very
humorous that the reflection of the bearded guards in the Louvre might perform a
type of sex change operation upon the famous painting. His source was a
caricature by Lucien Métivet from Le Rire (November 20, 1909), which is
identified in Francis M. Naumann, The Mary and William Sisler Collection (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 188. A much more recent enactment of
some of the dynamics described by Dreier and Matta can be found in the artist
Hannah Wilke’s 1976 performance piece, Through the Large Glass. Her work was
created at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in it she performed a striptease
behind Duchamp’s work.
41
These associations have been discussed in Leslie Stewart Curtis, “From Salome
and John the Baptist to Orpheus: The Severed Head and Female Imagery in the
Work of Odilon Redon,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1992).
42
In this context, one thinks of the Rose + Croix group and their explorations of
androgyny and subjects and styles very similar to those of Jacquemin. Ironically,
however, she could not exhibit with them because they banned women from their
salons!
43
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1987).
44
See Leslie Stewart Curtis, “Jeanne Jacquemin: A French Symbolist,” 30-31.
45
Mireille Dottin-Orsini, Cette femme qu’ils disent fatale: textes et images de la
misogynie fin-de-siècle (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993). See also: Mireille Dottin-
Orsini, ed. Salomé (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1996).
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WOMEN, THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT,
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
JOËLLE JOFFE
The work of genius is unconscious.
Art precedes psychoanalysis by several millennia and psychoanalysts,

from Sigmund Freud and post-Freudians to Jacques Lacan, have not failed
to acknowledge its obvious anteriority. Furthermore, they have admired
the pertinence of this sublimated form of expression, which has direct,
although unstated, access to the unconscious mind and to the ministrations
of jouissance (pleasure, enjoyment).
Psychoanalysis has traced the path of the unconscious imagination to
its symbolic expression in language, then in the “Real.” The Symbolist
movement in painting, which I will examine here, particularly the work of
Gustave Moreau, has taken as its object the image—the image that
represents not reality, but ideas. I will gradually focus my commentary and
my observations on the interests that painting and psychoanalysis have in
common and then on several works by this Symbolist genius.
I. Similarities Between Art and Psychoanalysis

Painting, for both the artist and the spectator, naturally raises the
question of the jouissance of the eye because we are concerned not only
with a pictorial work, but also with the pleasure in the language we use to
describe it. Art and psychoanalysis have several great affinities:
Quite a number of psychoanalysts are art lovers—lovers of
literature, painting, music, and especially dance and opera, which
bring the body and the voice into play; some artists have chosen to
undergo psychoanalysis, and all artists have found an elegant
solution in the act of creation, an act of sublimation to cure their
“discontent with civilization,”1 to use the Freudian expression.
252 Chapter Fourteen
Psychoanalysis and art are two “useless,” futile occupations, not

arising from any necessity, not without product nor efficacy nor
merchant value occasionally, and in an economic crisis or armed
conflict, they are the first things to be reduced or destroyed.
Psychoanalysis and art are essential, necessary, and specific to the
human race. They are apt to be classed in the category of
subversive, even dangerous, activities and are the chosen object of
repression or persecution by political or religious authoritarian
regimes.
They both refer to our desire and not to our knowledge, although
they claim the latter.
They relate to a mystical element, an unknown presence that
manifests itself.
They are linked to the truth, considered a lie by Lacanian
psychoanalysis, and subject to interpretation in art, which can give
direct access to truth by means of realism or brutal, crude, weird
imagination; they are noticeably liberated from custom, propriety,
convention. Of art, Moreau writes, “It is more than truth in feeling,
it is truth released from everything limited and purely human,”2
and, “The truth is the simple, fair, sensitive, tender feeling that
comes from the soul and the heart.”3 “It is the disharmony of
thought in relation to the soul,”4 says psychoanalysis.
Artists and psychoanalysts are particularly interested in detail: “the
unusual detail alerts and sets in motion the historian . . . and the
psychoanalyst.”5
Both art and psychoanalysis permit the flourishing of the
imagination, of dreams, of creation in Art and the Cure by free
association, the inscription of symbols in the imagination before the
final encounter with an undeniable Real, which closes the Cure in
psychoanalysis and sometimes in artistic production. Moreau
writes, “Reason alone in art leads nowhere; the importance of
feeling over reason.”6
Love is the spur of the art lover, Moreau tells us, love directed
towards the artist who permits a soothing of the spectator’s
jouissance as he rests his eyes on the work. In similar fashion, the
patient under analysis transfers his love onto the analyst at the
beginning of analysis, love for the subject who is supposed to know
the truth of the enigma of a suffering subject. There is no other way
to truth than by love.
Women, the Symbolist Movement, and Psychoanalysis 253
Lacan refers to the psychoanalyst performing his function as a “saint,” for

he accepts being swept aside like trash (the sicut palea of St Thomas
Aquinas) when the satisfied patient leaves him; Moreau, the symbolist
painter, likens artists and poets to martyrs, totally sacrificed to their
destiny. The artist, like the working psychoanalyst, is at first rejected by
humanity, a leftover, marginal figure, excluded, an outcast. He is in the
position of the cause of the desire and encourages the “cause” (“cause”
means also “chat” in French).
II. The Period and Its Culture

A psychoanalyst cannot resist being interested in paintings that are as
rich and plentiful as they are inventive and strange. What interpretation
can we allow ourselves outside the context of a cure? What can we “see
and understand” in the artist’s work? Every work of art is a product of its
time, and Moreau’s is no exception. A work of art makes its mark on a
period and interprets it. We must consider “the history and the social
context … at the base of customs, beliefs and institutions.”7
For artists, nature imitates art just as a psychoanalyst’s listening
“creates” the unconscious. In the Symbolist movement in literature,
painting and sculpture appear with the exploration of the unconscious, the
hidden side of the body, with the demonstration of its source and its
unbearable characteristics. The truth, vérité in French, is later called
“varité” by Lacan (vérité plus variété, truth plus variety), referring to the
search for the truth and the mystery of speech variations. Two major texts
are written at approximately this time by two psychoanalysts interested in
painting: Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci8 and Karl Abraham’s text on
Giovanni Segantini.9
We are in fact at the dawning of Freud’s discovery of the forms of the
unconscious; he is laying the foundations of psychoanalysis, based on
dreams, especially his own, and on the accounts of hysterical patients from
the Viennese bourgeoisie. While J.M. Charcot in the Salpétrière hospital in
Paris is showing hysterical young women to his colleagues, including
Freud, Rodin and his contemporaries are depicting distorted, twisted,
revealing, sensual bodies of young women full of desire and anguish in a
remarkably similar fashion.
Wilhelm Roentgen is working on cathode rays and produces the first
radiographic image, that of his wife’s hand showing the opacity of the
bones and the wedding ring on her finger and the transparency of the flesh.
He was to call them X-rays; these rays that explore the inner body and
show the opaque zones without revealing anything else of the subject’s
being. Scientific discovery places the “X” label on the desires of Mother
and Woman! The thoughts of Freud and Roentgen are set in motion …
both of them in the Bavarian Alps.
At the end of the nineteenth century, photography too is in its initial
stages with official portraits, scenes of family life, and “naughty” sexual
images. Louis Lumière discovers cinema and makes the first documentary
about workers leaving a factory. Méliès takes a further step forward and
directs Le voyage dans la lune (Journey to the Moon), bringing together
creative artistic imagination and developing science. We do know that the
moon is the traditional symbol of woman, night, obscurity, mystery,
Hecate.
Woman, then, is a definite presence in the different domains of thought,
science, technology. She follows her path in art, but her form changes. For
a long time she has been a virgin or a mother, deified, respectable or
erotized. She becomes a mystery, a subject of anxiety, terror. Until now,
neither the psychoanalyst nor the neuroscientist has managed to explain
genius or artistic creation or even the choice of this vocation, this
“unfathomable decision of a being.”10
As we follow the life and works of Moreau, we come nearer to
knowing the structure of the desire driving the artist, the characteristics of
his phantasms, conscious and unconscious. We will examine the
particularities of his choice of “subjects” and the very personal interpretation
of this creative genius.
According to Freudian and Lacanian theory, each person sees and lives
only through his phantasm; perceived reality is indeed the phantasm. The
artist follows the impulse of his unconscious and the spectator, who is
especially interested in the jouissance of the eye, is, in his turn, moved by
what makes up the fabric of the story. “A picture is not primarily what it
represents, but what it transforms.”11
III. Gustave Moreau’s Commentary on Art and His Work

My study will concentrate on Moreau’s work and on his representation
of Woman—“Woman in all her states.” I will begin by quoting him, then
move on to look at his pictorial works, making particular reference to the
volume of texts prefaced by Geneviève Lacambre, and edited, presented
and annotated by Peter Cooke.
Moreau asserts that there is an
inferiority of the art of words to the silent arts … he, the craftsman, the
assembler of dreams is more jealous of his 200 hidden canvasses than a
caliph of his wives.12
He glorifies “the eternal eloquence of this silent language; painting is the

language of God, one feels, one loves, one knows art … but one doesn’t
speak of it13. Moreau orders everyone to be silent:
It is impossible to treat these questions in words … to estimate art for what

it is, one must understand it and love It; it is therefore a task for a loving
specialist.14
Moreau, in a paradoxical stance, evokes the indescribable in words,

expressed by the art of drawing or painting, in representation, and he sets
or serves (sert or serre) this impossibility in hundreds of pages of notes,
pages of writing destined for his “happily” deaf mother and a few friends
to read … and for posterity.
The Irish writer James Joyce wished to provide a work of elucidation
of his writings that would occupy university scholars for centuries to
come. In contrast, Moreau, the unrivalled talker (causeur), speaks about
his work and addresses us in mocking tone: “Let us leave to the great
thinkers, to the great researchers, the pleasure of finding themselves in it,
as the common expression goes.”15 He adds in a letter his fear, his desire
to betray the Other, the spectator, the onlooker, just as the patient in
analysis is afraid for a while of betraying his analyst.
Desire—the negation of an artist who hides his works away for his
sole, personal jouissance and yet at the same time dreams of exhibiting
them in salons and academies. We hear in this artist the painter’s outright
scorn for non-artists, words, and commentators, yet in his old age he
rearranges his house like a studio and museum and bequeaths it to future
generations. Joris-Karl Huysmans speaks of “good painting [which]
contains a distant place [là-bas] where artist and critic may meet, art and
truth: it becomes a pretext for writing.”16 I am going to explore the
immense body of work by this genius of Symbolist painting in order to
pick out the salient features, the unconscious, as represented and
commented on by the artist himself, the structure of desire, or “Woman” in
Moreau’s imagination. I will ask the question: Painting, what do you want
of me?17
IV. Woman in the Imagination of Gustave Moreau

If one follows Moreau in his works and his writings on art, the
Freudian question arises: “Was will das Weib?” (What does Woman
want?) Moreau writes:
Inspiration is never in the subject treated, it is in the soul of the artist …

[O]ne of the passions of man and woman which is terrifying is the love of
the senses … and the unfulfilled desire of Woman in general, but
especially of perverse woman pursuing her quest for her ideal sensuality …
[E]ternal woman often deathly pale, a flower in her hand, searching for her
vague ideal, trampling all under foot.18
Woman is disturbing in her desire, her desire for sexual jouissance, her
desire for death on the horizon—death of the Other and especially of man.
Moreau displays, through the themes of mythology, the universal and
unconscious source, the image of Woman as a triumphant or fatal ordeal.
An imaginary confrontation is always unto death with the Other and in the
terrifying gamble of the relationship with the Other. The artist’s
interpretations in his literary or pictorial art are subconscious and, as a
result, often opaque to himself or to the Other.
The Symbolist movement chooses to express the soul; the ideal, poetic
feeling; dreams and passions; the artist’s aesthetic emotion far removed
from realism; the cult of nature or the romanticism of a figure or a scene.
The muses are evanescent, hieratic, ambiguous, set in an indeterminate
world. We are not often aware of the names of the painter’s models; his
women represent “Woman” and not one of her individual subjects. Can we
go so far as to say that a woman here represents neither an individual
female subject nor a category, but a human feeling, as in paintings or
sculptures portraying beauty, generosity, maternity, night, and death?
In psychoanalysis, the most real point for a single speaking subject, in
this case, the artist, is not accessible to him consciously, and it
continuously repeats itself. Moreau is thus, like anyone, a slave of his
unconscious. He is in pursuit of the Truth, of his own obscure Truth
perceived through the screen of his phantasm. Moreau creates his
paintings in the same manner in which each spectator views them—with
the distortion of reality caused by his own singular unconscious.
“We can’t see a thing,”19 to use Daniel Arasse’s beautiful expression.
Can one remove the veil? Does the veil hide or does it reveal? What is it
hiding? Are we able to catch a glimpse of the unconscious desire, of the
artist’s mode of jouissance, or simply his way of treating his subject,
determined by a “forced choice”? What does Moreau wish to show us, to
say to us in his painted works? Does he wish to say something? To speak
to someone? Or is he simply accomplishing his desire to represent?
“In paintings, objects are signs. What would a painting be if it were not
a sign?” says Pablo Picasso.20 As in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Purloined
Letter,” that which is the most obvious escapes the investigator, the art
critic. Therefore modesty is required on the part of an art lover when
commentating on a work of art in the light of psychoanalysis. The

interpretation always becomes delirious when one tries to make sense out
of every word, gesture, characteristic, portrayal, or act, whereas it is
perhaps about being beyond meaning, or contrary to meaning, about a
particular jouissance provoked by a subject. If only a subject’s jouissance
were confined to art! Rather than occurring in the “Real” of life.
Now I am going to exercise my “right” to the jouissance of
observation, my own observation of a curious work and the pleasure of the
discourse it may inspire in an effort of transmission. I allow myself to cite
Rainer Maria Rilke’s reflection:
a hand which is placed on the shoulder or thigh of another body no longer

belongs exactly to the one it came from. It, and the object it is touching,
together form a new object which has no name and belongs to nobody …
and it is this particular object which concerns us now.21
A work that is exhibited is observed by an Other and is subject to his

interpretation. It becomes “this particular object,” something added to the
world, a new thing.
V. The Pieta
Moreau is a member of the Symbolist movement, representing the idea
or rather the artist’s soul, his unconscious, his reality seen through his
phantasm, the phantasm itself and the jouissance springing from it. We
will look at possible interpretations of a few pictures, as metaphors of
meaning, but also as deception, if Moreau’s enjoyment comes from the
painting itself, the act of painting, the dissimulation shown in the painting,
“spiritual onanism in chaste flesh,” in the words of Huysmans.”22 Moreau
writes, “I love my art so much that I will only be truly happy when I am
doing it for myself alone … no representation of my person.”23 Rarely did
Moreau exhibit his self-portraits, but is he not present in many of his
works in the shape of the poet, often represented with his ancient lyre? He
is omnipresent in his work, like the photographer in the choice of his
pictures. Is he the sacrificed martyr, the severed head of John the Baptist?
His large-scale paintings do not represent the women in his entourage,
their faces or their expressions. His women have little to differentiate them
sexually from men; they have little flesh and rarely possess identifiable
features of the model. Moreau breaks with the styles of painting that
precede and follow him. He prefers the drawn line, the “arabesque,”
richness of decoration and background tracings that emphasize still more
the coldness, the rigidity of his figures' androgynous bodies, their lack of
sensuality, presence, and individuality. Movement, life even, is often

absent; the light colors, only faintly contrasted, increase this impression.
The ideal of Woman’s beauty and perfection dehumanizes her and
certainly “de-eroticizes” her.
Moreau is at first commissioned by the church to paint a picture. He
chooses a representation of the Pieta, virgin and exalted, sacrificed
motherhood. The representation is fixed for eternity: the dead son, a
mummified phallus, his inert body devoid of libido, and the grieving
mother, as an inseparable couple. Moreau gives his mother’s face to the
Virgin Mary, a portrait that is now kept in the artist’s bedroom. The
finished work will show a couple of young lovers.
We know that after a brief and painful separation to attend secondary
school, Moreau returned home to live with his parents following the death
of his young sister. An object himself of mortified love, the developing
young man hardly ever left his mother’s house again. He represented
many times the downward slope to death and the impossibility of
separation in scenes depicting improbable lovers, taken from mythology,
in which at least one lover in the pair is doomed to die. The sexual
encounter, the confrontation with the opposite sex, the “impossible
encounter” of psychoanalysis is staged against a background of deceit,
menace, and lamentation. Moreau exalts the horror in each encounter. That
of Oedipus is the premise for all others.
We know that Moreau would have liked to be a painter of iconostases,
the painted panels that group together the saints around the altar and
separate the nave, where the congregation is, from the sanctuary reserved
for priests in the Orthodox Church. Moreau, drawn to God and religion, is
in a position close to the sacred, the divine, and surrounds himself with
beings whose sexuality has been purged by holiness and virginity. In the
same way, an icon is first and foremost a representation destined to release
the desire for and jouissance in God.
VI. Three Major Paintings

We will now look at three major paintings by Moreau from the
beginning, middle, and end of his career:
Oedipus and the Sphinx, which is presently on display at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, revealed at the 1864 Salon the
genius of a new Master.
The Daughters of Thespius, begun in 1853 and reworked in 1882 (a
large-scale work in the Gustave Moreau Museum), raises the question of
seduction and procreation.
Jupiter and Semele, presently in the Gustave Moreau Museum,

finished three years before his death in 1895, is the concluding point of a
remarkable body of work.
In Moreau’s work, women usually possess no distinctive
characteristics; neither body nor gaze is eroticized, and their eyes are
downcast or closed; they are not allowed to show any feelings, and their
faces are impassive. They are pale, even diaphanous, in a state of
“beautiful inertia,” like sleepwalkers, absent from themselves as from the
spectator in the “contemplative immobility of the human body … [Their]
beauty is purely plastic, more beautiful in their tranquility”24—dead
perhaps, dead to desire certainly. The women portrayed do not tempt the
desire of the creator nor that of the spectator, and their thin bodies remain
the bodies of fairies, angels, shadows, or imaginary fleshless people—
androgynous, sexless, blurred or veiled, distant silhouettes, indifferent.
The danger of the flesh and desire, of sexual relationships, melts away
with the disintegration of their bodily forms, which are unmarked by any
sexual differentiation. Even beyond all this there is a certain abstraction of
the question of desire, a foreclosure rather than a repression or denial. The
bodies are “de-eroticized,” although they are beautiful and young, their
hips swaying, differentiated from perfect antique beauty. The subjects are
also “desubjectivised,” undivided by desire. There is no tension apparent
in the resolute heroes, who are placid, somewhat absent, their gazes
directed elsewhere or turned towards themselves, indifferent in the midst
of a scene of seduction or violence. Solitude or grief is the primary
emotional attribute of the heroes and the women around them. The women
are evocative of Byzantine virgins, sacred and timeless, their bodies
unmoved by libido. Moreau writes,
I believe only in what I do not see and solely in what I feel. My brain, my
reason seem ephemeral to me and of doubtful reality; my inner feelings
alone seem eternal, undeniably sure.25
“Monsieur Moreau … lacks that intimate fervor,”26 wrote a critic at the

time—a fervor that would captivate and touche the observer. The death
instinct is very present.
A solitary child, whose passion for drawing from the age of eight was
verified by his mother, Moreau saw his destiny recorded in this “picture”
of a mother who admires her little boy who draws so well: “Gustave loved
his parents passionately, especially his mother whom he could never
leave.”27 His “good father” is described as “inflexibly strict,” waiting to
“rejoice in the triumph” of his artist son.28 He was also a passionate
scholar of ancient cultures—a passion that he transmitted to Gustave. We
know that Moreau very soon chose painting as his symptomatic partner in
life. He rests with his parents for eternity in the Montmartre cemetery in
Paris, France. His “ladyfriend” for thirty years, Alexandrine Dureux,
continues to be by his side, once living next to his house and now lying
next to his tomb. Very early on, then, Moreau found the signifiers of his
destiny in his parents’ words. His drawing, his painting, his images are
“God’s language.”29 Woman are presented either as versions of the dead
Christ’s mother or as figures of unbridled seduction and accompanying
death, as a figure of myths.
Moreau expressed exuberantly passionate feelings of love for his
parents, which we know engender in return manifestations of hate
(Lacan’s hatred/love/haine/amoration = enamoration) and which may end
in death wishes with the approval of the super ego, who turns this wish
against the subject himself. The process of repression and sublimation
permitted the instincts to diminish along with their inhibitions. Other
incitements appeared, and the artistic activity of this passionate subject
guided his primitive sexual energy towards sublimation.
VII. Moreau Discovered at the 1864 Salon

with His Painting of Oedipus
His father, who “deserved this moment of happiness,” had been dead
for two years; meanwhile, the artist was failing to complete and show his
fearsome painting of an incestuous son who, in the myth, murders his
father. Hamlet, similarly, takes five acts in the theatre to avenge his father.
Moreau chose to depict the moment when the wandering youth encounters
the female Sphinx, a desiring and devouring lioness-woman. We know,
and Moreau knew, too, that Oedipus pays for his father’s sin of sexually
seducing his host’s son. Laius must be killed by his son. Passers-by and
the people of Thebes are devoured by the Sphinx. The crossing of the
forbidden line, the spurning of hospitality and the refusal of Truth, demand
this exorbitant price. The unconscious process is relentless and pursues
subjects who are not prepared to confront the signifier (signifiants) of their
story. So there is no divergence between myths, biblical writings, artistic
expression, and psychoanalysis. It is the reign of the unconscious. The
interpretation in the name of the Father, according to Freudian theory, can
be completed with Lacanian interpretation directed by jouissance.
The word “symbol” (signifier) first designated an object split into two
parts—so that two partners recognize each other, whatever the
circumstances, when each one presents the half that completes the other.
Can we try here to supply the half of the text, which would not complete
what is impossible to complete, but which would fit alongside the picture?
The Sphinx’s sayings are only dangerous if the subject is not aware that he
must face them as a sexed being. The riddle is displaced; the woman asks
the question about jouissance, and she puts it to the man. The work will
always show one point of view, which in its turn will be interpreted by the
spectator’s observations, for desire constitutes interpretation.
Here, Oedipus is elegantly un/dressed in a silky fabric that reveals the
body of a handsome young man with fine features and long hair reminiscent
of Florentine models, with a discreet feminine touch. (Reminding us of the
father’s homosexual episode? Or denying the sexual difference?) Sexuality
is associated with sin, shame, and death or, on the contrary, it is absent,
denied. In this respect, Moreau’s Oedipus is fundamentally different from
Monsieur Ingres’ Oedipus, who is a man with the attributes of powerful
virility, seeking an answer at the foot of the Sphinx. Oedipus is meeting
his destiny, but I find he doesn’t seem particularly worried. It is because of
this chance meeting that he will forge his destiny.
Like most mythological heroes, Oedipus is not afraid of death, and the
question of sexuality is most often overridden by his obedience to the
Gods: a commanding father who “turns a blind eye to jouissance.”30
Oedipus leans on his lance in a rather languid pose, but the look he
exchanges with the Sphinx is intense. While Flaubert judges the Sphinx’s
gaze to be “lethal” as she curiously grips the man’s breast, Théophile
Gautier sees a sensual dimension in it: “in the monster, the beast is just as
coquettish as the woman.”31 The female Sphinx is harmoniously proportioned,
with her woman’s face and breasts, her attractive wings raised towards the
sky, the body of a lioness, and a jeweled band gracefully encircling her
waist, very similar to the ornament in the hair of Alexandrine Dureux in a
pencil sketch done at the same time. A funerary urn serves as a reminder
to Oedipus and to spectators that human life ends in death; it is thus a
“vanity.” Parts of bodies appear at the front of the painting, presumably
the remains of passers-by devoured by the monster. A claw-like hand is
raised up—a reminder of the virgin’s talon-like hand in Leonardo da
Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks, which Freud interprets as the shadow of
death on the child, the divine son. The sky is gloomy, symbolizing,
perhaps, the sad fate of all human existence, the end of dreams of love and
power? All around there are plants growing—a sign of possible renewal
set against a background of arid rocks and a gulf—and there is an opening
in the landscape.
Two young people are meeting for the first time and the question of
desire and sexuality is raised. The woman has literally jumped onto the
man, is clutching at his torso, one paw (hand?) on his thigh, she stares at
him and questions him; her hair is neatly pinned up, tied gracefully, and
her diadem has not slipped. Determined and expectant as she is, what does
this woman desire? The request perhaps, the desire, of a man who might at
last dare to confront her—Woman with all her demands, Woman and her
desire, Woman and her threat of symbolic castration and, here, her menace
of death. Oedipus, calm and determined, is at the foot of the rocks, on the
edge of the abyss, just as Lacan puts man at the foot of the bed,32 where
the trial of the sexual encounter with a woman awaits him. Oedipus is
much larger than the Sphinx, who is supposed to be threatening him. With
a downward vertical movement of the eyes, he looks steadily at the face of
the ravishing female monster who is staring back at him. Has she already
asked the awesome question that he must answer if he desires to pass, or is
she preparing to do so?
It is the moment of expectation before the question and the reply,
before the upheaval that is to take place in both their lives. Will the Sphinx
renounce the deadly jouissance of her existence as a solitary murdering
female, take the risk of life and love, be delivered from the curse? She
chooses to throw herself into the chasm immediately after the true reply
and her partner’s refusal.
Will Oedipus choose his programmed destiny, take sexual pleasure
with his mother and make her bear children, or will he accept symbolic
death (or possibly real death) under the claws of the triumphant
seductress? It is significant that the title Moreau gives to each of his works
and the moment he has chosen to represent already reflect the artist’s
interpretation, while in the picture alone there is no foreshadowing of the
outcome of the scene. The viewer’s observation is guided by the work’s
title and by his or her prior knowledge of mythology. A myth is the
revelation of a truth half spoken. Interpretation is “not what we learn about
a subject but what is added to give the subject meaning.”33
Mythical women issue from the range of hysteric structures that lead to
knowledge. Oedipus is accepted by Jocasta because he has undergone a
trial of truth. The riddle is the Sphinx’s pronouncement.
Here Moreau examines the chimera’s question itself. What else does she
want apart from a derisory answer? Oedipus chooses the most terrible
jouissance, for which he will pay with the horrible fate of the Labdacides,
choosing exile and acceding to the status of the man at Colonus. As
Sophocles asks, “Thus it is when I am no longer anything, that I become a
man?34 And Lacan writes, “Love is giving what one does not possess.”35
Oedipus chooses his castration through a request, an assumed desire
that is addressed to his partner and submitted to her response: “Love is
persuading the other that he possesses that which may complete us.”36 In
this respect, the encounter between a man and the female Sphinx, the
incarnation of the enigma of desire, is an appropriate image of the meeting
of the sexes.
What does Woman want? It is the question that Freud cannot answer,
and Moreau poses the same question in this mythological and enigmatic
picture.
Moreau’s sexual object choice was single and definitive in the person
of Alexandrine Dureux, a timid primary school teacher from a neighboring
family, a young woman, certainly, but also a woman in the position of
mother to children who were not her own. Moreau speaks of her as “good,
tender, affectionate friend, his sister spirit.” He evokes no passionate
feelings, or subjective division, no tension between his art and his life, no
woman’s body or palpitation of life, nor any demands made by
Alexandrine, no want of a child. He draws on his canvas an infinite
repetition of the image of a couple in a struggle to the death. The person
who was “dearest in the world” to him was his mother—a mother,
therefore not exactly a woman for psychoanalysts.
Sexuality is displaced. Women are mad and violent, threatening.
Oedipus reflects calmly before making his decision, just as Hercules will
do later, faced with the fifty daughters of Thespius, who are offered to him
by their father. The decisions are serious in their implications, but both
heroes appear to me more perplexed than anguished, not very “divided.”
VIII. The Daughters of Thespius

“There is no subject, no precise idea; it is purely plastic beauty, but
also a hymn to virility, to the creative force,” writes Moreau. Hercules has
killed the lion, which devoured young men. In gratitude, King Thespius
offers to let him “lie with his fifty daughters during one night.” Here, the
hero, half-god, is in charge of engendering a new race of humanity, a
combination of plastic lyricism and religious sensibility, a fantasy of
almighty virility, of limitless jouissance—possibly the female fantasy of
Don Juan? The work is far removed from the eroticism of the bodies in the
tepidarium by Chasseriau; it does not ooze sensuality, despite the presence
of so many naked female bodies offered up unto the legendary hero. The
female bodies are multiple and single at the same time, like the working
studies of an artist showing different poses of the same “de-eroticized”
body. The bodies proliferate like rats in the Indian temple of Karni Mata
(which Moreau perhaps knew, enthusiast as he was of art and multiple
religions), creating a delicious mixture of ornament, symbols, cultures,
beliefs, Gods, and religions. All these women, so finely drawn, disappear
in the absence of all questions concerning us in this mysterious new

language of Symbolist art. They ask nothing; they show no opposition, and
they emit no aura. Their denuded flesh appears unreal, possessing no
libidinal life. One single Olympia with her hand placed on her sex and her
eyes staring at ours was much more shocking to contemporaries.
While the women, with no passion nor desire, are waiting for the
hero’s decision to make them mothers, Hercules is seated like the thinker;
he, the man of duty, is guided by the Ideal, the savior of a world
threatened by the powers of evil. He is in an “abyss” of thought (polysemy
of the signifier: plunged, destroyed (abîmé), on the brink of the abyss). He
knows, in the light of psychoanalysis, that motherhood is an attempt at
humanizing a woman’s desire.
Behind him, there is column on either side, one with a representation
of the father Sun on top of it, the other crowned by the Moon, symbol of
the mother, night, death. A small sphinx, next to his head, is a reminder of
the menace, the devouring desire of the sphinx, of the riddle of the
question that remains unanswered. The sexual act seems impossible under
these staring eyes; there still remains the procreative ritual act, decreed by
the king and Gods. The hero’s eyes are lowered in shame, hesitation,
doubt, in absence of desire, sadness, renouncement, obedience, contemplation.
The scene takes place in a temple or holy place, which does not evoke
a harem full of women, and is therefore devoid of sensuality, ornament,
suggested pleasure, physical jouissance. Boredom and inertia are the
dominating impressions rather than anticipation of pleasure. The women,
pale and expressionless, are united in their absence of desire—virgins or
vestals of a Father or a God. Their destiny is sacrifice, renouncement of
the world, submission to the demands of a ritual ordered from above.
Moreau suggests questions of procreation and lineage rather than the
question of the sexual act. Death is very present in Moreau’s portrayals. In
his 1865 painting, Eurydice gazes sadly at Orpheus’ head, which has been
severed by the Erynies and placed on top of a lyre, which she is holding in
her arms. Orpheus refused himself to these wild women who entreated and
desired him, and he paid for it with his own destruction and death, he who
was always faithful to one single woman. It was only after the death of
Alexandrine Dureux that Moreau painted, in 1891, an Orpheus weeping on
the tomb of his beloved.
Moreau’s love of maternity is displayed on the canvas. Like Jupiter, he
wants to make them all mothers, and he shows us them at the moment
before—before the act, before engendering, before death. Jouissance is
exalted and displaced. Moreau writes of his extreme emotion when
looking at a flower, a metaphor (metonymy) for Woman. His libido is
suppressed, and the man is alone. Virile action is shown by the massacre
of Penelope’s suitors. The return of Ulysses might have shown us the
wife’s refusal of the men or the happiness of the reunited couple. Instead,
Moreau paints the lifeless bodies of the rivals, killed before the eyes of the
poet represented in the centre of the picture. The poet watches and sings,
perhaps to his lyre. The artist as subject is absent from the scene, with no
obvious affect, a stranger. But what does Woman want?
Women love dead men, whether they are mothers or simply women.
Men love dead women, disincarnate, silent, stilled at last, a masculine
fantasy (as is feminine masochism).37 Sexuality and death are the two
extremities of the life of a human subject. We are born out of desire and a
sexual encounter; we may die of their consequences.
What does this man-artist want? Who is this creator of so many scenes
of figures presented in more and more luxurious detail, increasing with the
size of his canvases, with so many naked or veiled bodies? The women
have abundant hair, often unloosed like the mad virgins in mediaeval
sculptures or drowned actresses in the theatre. We are shown no sensual
flesh or gazes, no voluptuous forms, nor provocative poses, though these
are painted at the same time as Gustave Courbet is exhibiting, in 1866, his
L’Origine du monde (“Origin of the world”). Lacan owned this painting;38
a system of sliding panels enabled it to be covered up by Masson's
drawing, with the same stylized shapes of the stomach and sex of the
woman, but we can’t see anything.
The picture is staring at us. The phantasm is covered, hidden in the
myth. Moreau devotes himself to the jouissance of an Other who has given
form to his phantasm; woman is singular and multiple at the same time,
incarnate in many bodies all identical and without libido. The success of a
work, whether it delights or shocks us (two sides of the same coin), lies in
the mobilization of the artist’s affect, which communicates with the
spectator’s unconscious.
In painting, the rest is talent, draughtsmanship, representation. The
work of art is in a position of causal object for the subject-painter and the
spectator. Moreau’s works puzzle us more with their meaning, their
orientation, the cause of the painter’s desire for representation. The details
are profuse, they confuse us, throwing us off track and perhaps soothing
our eyes as they rest on a scene that is conventional, codified but that, at
the same time, is treated in a very original fashion and is therefore
enigmatic. The arabesques carry us along in a labyrinthine swirl as
mysterious as desire and fantasy.
Spectators who are fond of ancient history rediscover childhood
memories; dreams of great myths; royal or divine lineage; the possibility
of procreation without the problem of sexuality; the pleasure of ornament

and the charm of things strange; foreign, exotic, faraway places. Our love
of travel and the Orient, which lends itself to dreams without the
inconvenient risks of adventure, is heightened. The attributes of different
religions are mixed together without conflict in universal love in a world
where harmony and tolerance reign. The beauty of the settings rests our
eyes with a touch of spirituality and opulence.
IX. Jupiter and Semele, Moreau’s Last Painting

Jupiter and Semele, Moreau’s last painting, shines forth after the death
of his mother and then of his good friend. The description of the title
guides our interpretation of the work. Is it not the inverted representation
of the artist’s first work? A Pieta with the roles reversed, an Oedipus who
has chosen almightiness at the expense of his beloved wife and mother’s
death?
Jupiter the God, with a gigantic body and exorbitant eyes, exalted, is
crushing the serpent with his foot—the incarnation of Evil, Woman,
temptation, sex and death. His naked body, seated on a throne in majesty,
appearing “in all his glory” at the request of Semele, is masked with many
adornments that evoke masculine power and feminine masquerade, a
derisory representation of triumphant virility and the deceitful seduction of
all women. Jupiter’s gaze has already left the woman who was the object
of his desire and is directed elsewhere. He had promised the woman he
loved that he would grant her all that she demanded, like Herod to Salome;
death appears suddenly in the midst of jouissance.
A tiny Semele, her sensual, pretty body identified as that of model
Antoinette Grillard, aged 21, flounders over his knee. The woman is still
alive, caught just before her death, crying out, a look of terror in her eyes,
a bleeding wound in her side like Christ. We are witnessing here the
instant before the death of Semele, who is dying for having wanted to see
the unnamable, for having wanted to know the mode of jouissance of a
man, of a God.
A little figure escapes from her side—out of the wound? Cupid, fleeing
and hiding his eyes in other paintings, has goat’s feet here, the feet of
Bacchus or Dionysus, the God of drunkenness, oral jouissance,
Bacchanalia, physical enjoyment in unbridled sexual practices, man’s
animal instincts. Is he falling down to Hell, abandoned by a mother who
has chosen first to be a woman? Will this child, with his hope of life, bring
a message of shameful jouissance to the world? His mother Semele, more
woman than mother, has endangered the life of the child she bears. This
“twice born” child owes his salvation to Jupiter alone—his father, who
snatches the child from his mother and places him in his thigh, okaying the
mediation function of the Father, the premise of a “do without it on the
condition of using it” of Lacan. Is this a phantasm of paternal gestation,
the feminine identification with the woman as mother, a metaphor of
lineage or transmission? The picture may also remind us of the young lady
King Kong desires and carries in the palm of his hand to the top of the
Empire State Building. Are the terrified stares of these two women
directed at the power, the sexual desire of the male partner, at the threat of
death, at the trial of the encounter with jouissance, both her own and that
of her partner? Is it directed at an Other or at the result of their desire for
knowledge? Semele, guilty in her demand to know the truth, has thought
only of her jouissance and dies because of it, like all the others in myths
and in the works of Moreau. King Kong is not a myth—and the woman is
spared and lives Happily Ever After.
As in a dream, we know that in art a person can occupy several places
at different moments; the sexual attribution can be displaced, turned into a
metaphor.
Does Moreau identify with the triumphant Jupiter, omniscient, all-
seeing? He is then the almighty Father, God himself, feminized in
by the attributes of power that surround him and absurd in a
theatrical temple décor, a mixture of diverse and imaginary
religious and cultural signs.
Is he the son of the Pieta, the little Semele, sacrificed in her
jouissance on the altar of the mother, but also of the Father, after a
last cry to the Father, the payment of the death wish towards the
Father? The red gash, bleeding in her side—is it the centurion’s
lance wound on Christ, a mark of the living on the body?
Is he the child of jouissance, carrying with him into the world the
curse of sex, set free as if from Pandora’s box with all the evils?
“There can be nothing in common between this naked child
(Cupid), very earthy in spite of his mythological wings… and these
sacred virgins . . . singing divine hymns,” comments Moreau on
Cupid and the Muses. 39
Is he the androgynous poet with his lyre, standing for the last time
next to his almighty father, but also without whom the father would
be unknown? The poet celebrates and writes history, History with a
capital H, History that was admired in paintings.
Is he the spectator who looks on the incongruity of the scene and is
frightened by the immense gaze of God (unlike the figures in
Moreau’s works, who often have their eyes closed or lowered)?
Is he the gaze itself against the power of Evil, the stain in the
picture, the multiple eyes in the peacock feathers decorating
Semele’s hair, her terrified stare?
X. What Does Woman Want?

The richness of God’s costume; the multitude of figures arranged
between a Christian heaven and earth; the many references to the ancient
Pantheon; the god Pan turned towards the damned; Hecate, queen of the
Night the representation of death observing us … all of these figures leave
the spectator at a loss. What is he to look at? What is there to see? We
can’t see a thing. Can we dream of a world where sexuality would be
without problem, where truth would be without anguish or horror, where
the desire to know and experience jouissance would be calmed?
Jouissance is flung into the world to bring excitement and suffering; the
sensation of life is always linked to death. The artist has made a Real
object out of his phantasm, the cause of his desire and his work. What
does Woman want?
The question becomes clearer after this vast journey through myth.
Throughout Moreau’s work, Woman wants to know; she wants to know
the mode of jouissance of a man; whether he walks on two, three, or four
legs, even if he were a God and at the risk of losing her life. Woman asks
in a clear voice for the reply … and dies. Knowledge of the truth takes the
place of pleasure in the hysterical subject who is often considered the
same as Woman. While Rodin, in the same period, was sculpting women’s
sensual bodies and virile men, Moreau was endlessly painting the idea of
the desire to know. Let us recall that Dionysus will later go and snatch his
mother away from the Kingdom of Shadows, and she will become
immortal.
I would like to interpret this last magnificent, gigantic picture of
Gustave Moreau as a successful conclusion to the life and unconscious
psychic work of the artist through his paintings. The artist who has always
chosen the immobile, inert, mortified side of life exhibits a surge of desire,
power, jouissance, birth, precisely the instinctive elements of the human
subject—phallic power, oral and sexual jouissance. He dies leaving
Dionysus, the child of jouissance, to invade the world with his mission of
life, death and suffering and … his museum-mausoleum, the home of a
singular artist, as an offering for the jouissance of our eyes.

Notes
1
Sigmund Freud, Malaise dans la civilisation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1971).
2
Gustave Moreau, Ecrits sur l’art (Fontfroide: Fata Morgana, 2002), 2:244.
3
Ibid., 1:161.
4
Jacques-Alain Miller, Enseignement de psychanalyse prononcé dans le cadre du
Département de Psychanalyse de Paris VIII (2008-2009), unpublished.
5
Daniel Arasse, Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris:
Champs Flammarion, 1996); André Chastel, Fables, formes, et figures (Paris:
Flammarion, 1978), vol. 1, 15; Hubert Damisch, “La partie et le tout,” in Revue
d’esthétique, 2 (1970): 168.
6
Moreau, Ecrits sur l’art, 2:243.
7
Meyer Schapiro, Style, artiste et société (Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1982), 137.
8
Sigmund Freud, Un souvenir d’enfance de Léonard de Vinci (Idées Gallimard,
1977).
9
Karl Abraham, Essais psychanalytiques in Oeuvres complètes (Payot, 1977), vol.
1.
10
Jacques Lacan, “Propos sur la causalité psychique.” Ecrits. (Paris: Seuil, 1966),
177.
11
Damish, “La partie et le tout,” 124.
12
Moreau, Ecrits sur l’art, 1:23; Geneviève Lacambre, Gustave Moreau: Maitre
sorcier (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Lacambre, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais:
Catalogue exposition (Paris: RMN, 1998).
13
Moreau Ecrits sur l’Art, 2:257, 258, 281.
14
Moreau, Ecrits sur l’art, 2.347, 365.
15
Pierre Henri Mathieu, L’assembleur de rêves, in Dossier de l’Art: Gustave
Moreau au grand palais (October 1998), 36.
16
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Ecrits sur l’art: L’art moderne, intro. Jerôme Picon
(Paris: GF Flammarion, 2008), 14.
17
Denis Diderot, Œuvres. Tome IV. Esthétique-théâtre. Paris. Laffont
18
Moreau, Ecrits sur l’art, 2 :262, 1 :94,1 :97
19
Daniel Arasse, On n’y voit rien (Paris: Editions Gallimard, Folio essais, 2006).
20
In André Malraux, La tête obsidienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 124.
21
Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin (Rennes: La part commune, 2007), 40.
22
Joris-Karl Huysmans, A rebours. (Paris: Gallimard, Folio classique, 1977)
23
Pierre Louis Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: L’assembleur de rêves (Paris, ACR
Edition, 1998), 6,7.
24
Ibid., 1.163.
25
Ibid., 2.262.
26
Pierre Henri Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: L’assembleur de rêves, 22.
27
Ibid, 10.
28
Ibid, 14.
29
Luisa Capodieci, in Dossier de l’Art, 30.
30
Sigmund Freud, L’interprétation des rêves, (Paris: PUF, 1967), chap. 7.
31
Mathieu, Gustave Moreau: L’assembleur de rêves, 69
32
Lacan, Ecrits, 177.
33
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris:
Seuil, 1991), 130
34
Sophocle, Œdipe à Colone, trans. Leconte De Lisle, ed. Alphonse Lemerre, line
393.
35
Lacan, La logique du fantasme (1966-1967), unpublished.
36
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la
psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 121.
37
I will recall the satiric author Sacha Guitry who, as an artist and neurotic, must
have been expressing that same point of view in a hate/love exchange with his
wife. She said: “When you are dead, we can say, ‘stiff at last.’” He replied, “And
to you, we can say ‘cold at last.’”
38
The work was given in payment of tax debt. It is now on show at the Musée
d’Orsay, Paris.
39
Moreau, Ecrits sur l’art, 1:46.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AGAINST THE TIDE:
PAUL GAUGUIN’S WOMEN IN THE WATER
AND THEIR SYMBOLIST LEGACY
ERIKA SCHNEIDER
Paul Gauguin’s In the Waves (1889) in the Cleveland Art Museum

evinces both his embrace and rejection of the academic tradition of
painting women in the water (Fig. 15-1). Salon entries abounded with nude
women on the shore. While having the anonymity of goddesses, nymphs,
and naiads, these women echoed contemporary images of nineteenth-
century women with their long hair and corset-indented waists.
Predictably, these “fleshscapes” garnered public attention, not to mention
awards and honors.
By the 1880s, many of the avant-garde artists had shed the mythological
pretext for their bathing women.1 By conflating the imagery of Venus,
Ondine, and other mythical water women, they complicated the
established Salon depictions of women. As art historian Jennifer Shaw has
written regarding the figure of Venus in the Salon of 1863, male viewers
subjugated women based upon their fluctuating bodily functions such as
menstruation and pregnancy. Ancient (and not so ancient) medicine
averred that women were the weaker sex by using the humors to explain
dominant personality characteristics and to diagnose ailments. Doctors
described women as cold and moist, the phlegmatic humor, which
accounted for their inferiority to men.2 Gauguin absorbed these ideas into
his own personal symbolism.
This essay explores how Gauguin conjoins women and water, focusing
on his 1889 work In the Waves and how that work influenced other
Symbolist artists. Typically, scholars have analyzed Gauguin’s biographical
metaphor of the nude woman in the waves as a force of nature, an
expression of the artist’s rejection of social conventions and desire to live
more simply in the tropics. Others have traced these thematic and stylistic
similarities throughout his career. None, however, has examined the
Paul Gauguin’s Women in the Water and Their Symbolist Legacy 273
women in water in Gauguin’s oeuvre as revelations about his antipathy for

the female sex, his subversion of Salon norms, in conjunction with his
contention that the French art world had betrayed him. Furthermore, few
have connected the motif to other artists influenced by Gauguin such as
Odilon Redon (1840-1916), Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), and Maurice
Denis (1870-1943). Both influential and allegorical, Gauguin’s women in
the water transform the fleshcape into a symbolist palette.
Fig. 15-1. Paul Gauguin, In the Waves, 1889.

274 Chapter Fifteen
The figure’s pose in In the Waves first suggests a nontraditional

treatment of the bathing theme. Although Gauguin had painted earlier
representations of bathers, the image of a diving woman with arms
outstretched later became a leitmotif for him.3 Monique Nonne of the
Musée d’Orsay demonstrated how similar it was to the strawberry blonde
figure holding a basket on the right in Puvis de Chavannes’ Autumn from
1863-64 in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (Fig. 15-2).4 Moreover,
Gauguin further accentuates the figure’s precarious position. One of the
most arresting features of the composition, the women’s crooked pose
suggests that she is about to leap or fall into the waves. Her fused legs
offer no support as they tip alarmingly to the left. With her left arm raised
protectively, she also shields her face with the right arm. Her head blocks
her hand and forearm. Neither playful nor alluring, her pose evokes a fear
of being overwhelmed, literally by the waves, but symbolically the waves
could represent the demands of Gauguin’s career and family.
Unlike a traditional view of women in the water, the setting of In the
Waves reflects turmoil. No Arcadian setting, instead of having peaceful
waves lapping at the shore, an icy sea of emerald green and a relentless
surf of white caps without horizon surround the woman. The picture plane
crops the left arm, while the waves truncate the body at the mid-thigh. The
contrasting colors of the woman’s flame-red hair versus the cold green
water create a tension commensurate with the precarious position of the
figure.
In 1889, Gauguin painted himself in front of the work, which has led
some scholars to suggest a primarily autobiographical relationship. In Self-
Portrait from, 1889-90 in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts,
Moscow, a mirror image of In the Waves appears behind Gauguin. While
the artist’s life certainly helps explain Gauguin’s preoccupation with
watery women, this focus obscures the primacy of symbol and metaphor in
his life. The figure has multiple layers of meaning within both the history
of art and the artist’s own life.
The story of the birth of Venus provides the basis for the primal
connection of women and water. Gauguin’s painting reverses the standard
frontal artistic representation of Venus, one of the most traditional subject
matters in the history of art. Gauguin’s figure clearly returns to the water
rather than emerges from it. By placing the female figure with her
backside to the viewer, the artist subverts the sensual aspect so favored by
French Academicians. Similar to the story of the birth of Venus, she is
surrounded by the white foam, alluding to the seeds of creation unleashed
when Cronus castrated his father Uranus and threw the scrotum into the
sea. Like the woman’s hair, the artist’s signature boldly stands out in
orange against the green. Gauguin’s recasting of the birth of Venus theme,
in which the waves suggest beginning while the figure suggests ending,
unite his identification with the creative process which is both a birth and a
death.5 Tellingly, Gauguin signed the work in the waves at the bottom center
of the composition, reinforcing his connection to primal creative powers.
Fig. 15-2. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Automne (Autumn), 1863-64.

276 Chapter Fifteen
Gauguin later subtitled the work Ondine, the tragic woman from the
Germanic fairy tale who became the basis of the well-known “Little
Mermaid” (1836) by Hans Christen Anderson. Popular throughout the
nineteenth century in novels, poems, and musical compositions, the
Ondine legend follows different avenues but centers around a water
nymph who sacrifices her immortality so she can gain a soul and marry a
man.6 When she falls prey to senescence, her husband loses interest in her.
Upon finding him asleep in the arms of another woman, his wife curses
him to ever-wakefulness with death its only cessation. Thus the myth of
Ondine explores themes of sacrifice, betrayal, and vengeance—all of
which captivated Gauguin as he reflected on his own life.
Gauguin had reached a critical point in his career as an artist, a point
marked by personal and professional tribulations. First, he was not making
enough to support himself in Paris and had traveled to Pont Aven and,
even more remote, to Le Pouldu to find a more primitive and also more
affordable surrounding. His letters to his wife, Mette, are full of bitterness
about the impossibility of supporting his family, let alone visiting them
due to the demands of his profession and lack of funds. Secondly, Gauguin
saw betrayal in the failure of the art world to recognize his genius. As he
wrote to his friend Emile Schuffenecker in 1889 cataloguing his
misfortunes, “my paintings and carvings this year appall everybody!”7
Finally, he accused his wife of disloyalty when she communicated the
displeasure of her family in Copenhagen to her errant husband. He
chastised her, “Poor woman, to allow yourself to be advised so badly and
by people in short, who do not pay in money or in broken hearts.”8 Yet, his
revenge, he reasoned, would come later when he had established himself,
declaring in the same letter, “When [the children] have to make their way
in the world a famous father may prove a valuable asset.”9 Despite his
failure to provide steady financial support, he believed that his reputation
would pay dividends.
Shown at the Café des Arts, opposite the juried art exhibition of the
Paris Universal Exposition, In the Waves also represents the artist’s
rejection of societal expectations as he sought a more primitive existence.10
In order to advertise the so-called Volpini exhibit, he even used the image
on the front cover of the exhibition catalogue in the company of another
work.11 Living in Northern France, Gauguin had begun a campaign to
leave what he saw as corrupt urban life. He wrote to Schuffenecker, “I
love Brittany. I find wildness and primitiveness there.”12 Consequently, In
the Waves can be an allegorical representative of the primitive. The
woman’s atavistic features conform to Darwinian and phrenological
viewpoints. The flattened forehead and upturned snub nose of Gauguin’s
figure demonstrate the woman’s inferior intellectual and moral status as

well as her possible sickly physical state.13
The urgency of Ondine’s plunge suggests her need for purification,
especially considering the nineteenth-century views of women’s copious
deficiencies and infirmities. The light skin of Gauguin’s female figure
emphasizes the greenish blue shadows on her body. Although Gauguin
was known for liberating himself from the strictures of local color, the
woman’s backside, particularly the lumbar region, looks mottled and
bruised. Furthermore, her right forearm has a reddish hue like a rash,
which is echoed in her buttocks and inner thighs. The overall coloring
suggests she is diseased and may well being seeking a traditional water
cure, the type typically recommended for afflictions associated with the
humors.
In many ways, Gauguin’s In the Waves evokes the humors associated
with women, the presence of which explains the deficiencies of their sex.
In illustrations from fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, artists used the
female figure, often surrounded by water, to represent the phlegmatic
humor (Fig. 15-3). The connection of women with wet and cold attributes
harkens to ancient times, and though scientists by the late nineteenth
century had mostly abandoned this hypothesis, its influence, naturally,
persisted with those of a medieval temperament. Even Gauguin used the
humors to diagnose himself when he wrote to his wife from Pont Aven in
1888, “I cannot get rid of all the bile that accumulates.”14 Gauguin’s
identification with the melancholic humor demonstrates his knowledge
and application of the humor linked to the brooding artistic type.15 In
addition, bile is a dry humor associated with males as opposed to phlegm
and its association with females.
Gauguin was not alone in his quasi-medicinal pursuits. Artists
throughout history linked women and water specifically because of the
humor connection.16 Being cold and moist meant that females were more
prone to disease and to senescence. In particular cold water images in the
Renaissance and Baroque, as traced by Zirka Filipczak in a 1998 exhibition,
reinforced medical recommendations that women take cooling baths to
whiten skin, aid digestion, and prevent lust.17 She describes the scope of
influence the humors had over their hosts: “The humors not only
determined sexual identity and appearance but also governed emotional,
intellectual, and physical functioning.”18 Physically, women had lighter
skin, less hair, and higher voices, while personality traits included
passivity, moral weakness, and dishonesty, all as a result of the cold, moist
attributes or an excess of phlegm. Gauguin’s female figure’s extremely
pale skin and hairless body follows the standard gender conventions while
278 Chapter Fifteen
Fig. 15-3. Leonhart Thurn-Heisser, The Four Humours, 1574.
also evincing the feminine humors. The physical shape of women, and the
“fatter hips and narrower shoulders … [are] the result of colder humors,
which do not posses sufficient energy to drive matter up towards the
head.”19 Gauguin emphasizes the woman’s thin shoulders in contrast to her
fuller lower torso and projecting left hip. Coupling the woman with the icy
green water makes her an allegorical representation of the cold and moist
humors. Therefore, In the Waves traverses a landscape that ranges from the
mythological to the pseudo-scientific, a landscape also saturated in
metaphor and symbolism.
Gauguin later represented the leaping woman as a dark-skinned figure
to further reiterate his desertion of contemporary French society, its
morality and conventions—adding another layer to the allegory. In 1890
he sculpted Be Mysterious, now located in Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Fig. 15-
4), as a companion piece to Be in Love and You Will Be Happy from 1889
in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In this second polychrome wooden
relief created after his trip to Martinique, two floating forms of a man and
a woman flank the diving woman who reveals more of her face than the
original does in In the Waves. Stylized waves, as well as vines and lotus
blossoms, circle the crudely carved figure, demonstrating Gauguin’s
conflation of Caribbean and Egyptian sources, typical of his complex
Symbolist layering. Unlike the solitary jump of the earlier work, the
woman here seems to be throwing herself toward the male figure or at
least guided by the upraised hand of the woman on the right. The warmer
colors of the flesh also create a greater balance between the contrasting
hues of burnt sienna and jade. His contemporary critics didn’t appreciate
these features. When the relief was exhibited at the Salon des Vingt in
Brussels in 1891, critics called it a "highly farcical and a kind of joke,"
"beyond the limits of insanity," and Gauguin a "manufacturer of
pornographic images”—even though his work has little interest in exacting
a sexual response.20 Gauguin saw little public recognition during his
lifetime; he would not live to see his children enjoy the asset of his name.
By the time Gauguin painted Fatata te miti (By the Sea) in 1892,
located in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, he was living in
Tahiti, and the allegory has shifted to harmony (Fig. 15-5). Gauguin
transformed the Breton woman who initially made the plunge into the icy
water of the Atlantic into a dark-haired Tahitian woman who is one with
the verdant island landscape. The warm foreground colors now harmonize
with the leaping figure. As a man fishes in the upper right area of the
composition, a female companion on the shore willingly opens her sarong
to the surging waves. The jumping woman no longer covers her face but
makes the dive without trepidation. If one reads the In the Waves figure as
autobiographical, Gauguin now has the embrace of Tahiti to replace the
scorn of the French art world. As he wrote Mette in May 1892, “Here is
the beginning of the harvest at last. You see that all hope is not lost: you
know what I told you (one customer leads to another).” 21 Gauguin
280 Chapter Fifteen
believed he would reap the rewards which had so long evaded him and to
him the wood carving represented this optimism.
Fig. 15-4. Paul Gauguin, Soyez mystérieuses (Be Mysterious), 1890.
This hopefulness was short-lived. The penultimate dated work of

Gauguin’s to use the figure from In the Waves, the woodcut Auti te Pape
(Women at the River), 1893-94, created during his two-year sojourn in
Paris, exemplifies the artist’s frustrations.22 Marking a downturn in
Gauguin’s optimism over his career, during this period the artist had
returned to France with expectations of his artistic success. Instead, he sold
very few works and even lost money on one of his exhibits. Gauguin
intended to use the print, part of a series of ten, as an illustration for his
unfinished manuscript Noa Noa which would have attempted to explain
his style to western audiences.
The leaping woman figure in the print Women at the River demonstrates
Gauguin’s feelings of failure. Borrowing from the Fatata te miti (By the
Sea) composition, the print returns the figure to the original position of In
the Waves. Instead of freely giving herself to nature, the woman’s
companion sits with her back to the water. Her hunched body recalls the
figure in Death and Life, originally conflated with In the Waves for the
Volpini exhibition catalogue. Like Gauguin’s contemporaries, she has no
interest in the untamed wilderness. The leaping woman raises both arms,
revealing the loss of her right hand. In In the Waves, the figure held her
right hand over her mouth and thus obscured it. In By the Sea, the
vegetation covered her upraised left hand, reversed from the 1889
painting. In Women by a River, the leaping figure has no hand, obscured or
otherwise. For an artist, the loss of a hand equaled death on myriad levels,
most of all, the death of the means to support himself, let alone his family.
Fig. 15-5. Paul Gauguin, Fatata te miti (By the Sea), 1892.
A number of Symbolists borrowed the composition, no doubt enthralled

with its many layers of allegory. Artists could have seen the In the Waves
figure in various locations—from the original in the Café Volpini exhibit
of 1889 to her various reincarnations in other works such as the previously
mentioned Salon des Vingt in 1891. The following works suggest the
formal and ideological connections between Gauguin’s image and those of
his fellow artists.
Before Gauguin left for Tahiti, Redon, his friend and fellow Symbolist,
created the 1891 etching Passage of a Soul depicting a shadowy figure
282 Chapter Fifteen
with her head between her hands as a wave surges up from behind (Fig.
15-6). The figure resembles an earlier lithograph of his titled “My irony
surpasses all others!” completed as one of the illustrations to Gustave
Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony.23 Although the figure comes from
Flaubert’s novel, the artist, in true Symbolist form, rendered a description
rather than an event. In the 1889 print, a standing figure facing the viewer
holds her left arm over her head while a stream of flowers engulfs her
skull-like head. Below the figure a swirling vortex, suggesting a tail
according to the text, moves in the opposite direction. Redon gave copies
of the series to his friends, which was how Gauguin probably acquired a
copy. 24
Redon and Gauguin shared similar artistic interests in less literal
manifestations of narrative. The two most likely met in 1886 when they
both showed at the last Impressionist exhibition, and by the 1890s, critics
linked the two artists to the new Symbolist movement.25 Although
Gauguin seldom credited direct influence, In the Waves suggests a tribute
to Redon’s print. Likewise, when Redon created Passage of a Soul, he
may have conflated both his earlier piece as well as his friend’s work. The
rhythmic lines in later print suggest waves rather than a whirlpool or tail,
and the body sways rather than stands upright. As in Gauguin’s work, the
head blocks the hand of the upraised arm. Although the work was a
frontispiece to Adrien Remacle’s La Passante (The Passerby), Redon
would move away from earlier literal literary references in the 1890s as
well as from his dark prints known as “Les Noirs.” The figure is a spectral
reminder of the first one, but without her skull-like head and swirling tail,
she lacks the connection to the Flaubert descriptive text and instead more
closely resembles Gauguin’s watershed painting. In 1891, Redon, still
recovering from the suicide of his good friend, Armand Clavaud, employs
the figure to suggest both death and life like Gauguin’s.
The mutual admiration and connection between artists and the
Symbolist movement continued when Gauguin was in Tahiti. Once Gauguin
left France, Redon would become the unofficial leader of the younger
generation of Symbolists, the Nabis, who had looked to Gauguin for
guidance in forging the avant-garde.26 Gauguin found similar inspiration in
Redon and wrote to him before he left:
From you I have a souvenir in my mind of nearly all that you have done,
and a star, in seeing her in my house in Tahiti I will not think, I promise
you, of death, but on the contrary of eternal life, not death in life but life in
death. In Europe this death with its serpent tail is likely, but in Tahiti, one
should see her with roots that regenerate with flowers.27
Fig. 15-6. Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: Auti te Pape (Women at the River).
Most scholars believe Gauguin referenced the Flaubert illustration in the

letter, which demonstrates the primacy of the image for Gauguin. The way
he implies that connotations will flip from negative to positive once away
from Europe indicates the hopefulness the artist felt as he undertook his
journey to the South Seas. In fact, Redon also suggests a reverse of his
original meaning by reversing the figure in Passage of a Soul. After
viewing exhibition after exhibition of frolicking bathers and seductive
nudes, the Symbolists reveled in the ambiguity and multiple meanings of
Gauguin’s art.
The young Maillol also felt the pull of Gauguin’s figure from In the
Waves when he saw the painting at the Café Volpini. He would use the
figure in a number of his works, beginning with the 1898 painting, The
Wave in the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris (Fig. 15-7). He also created
drawings, prints, and a tapestry with similar themes. He avowed:
Gauguin’s painting was a revelation to me. Instead of enlightening me, the

Ecole des Beaux-Arts has thrown a veil over my eyes. Standing in front of
the Pont-Aven paintings, I had a feeling that I too could work in that spirit.
Right then I told myself that what I did would be good when it had
Gauguin’s approval.28
When he turned to sculpture, for which he is most well known and for
which he credited Gauguin’s encouragement, his figures often involved
women and water.
284 Chapter Fifteen
Fig. 15-7. Odilon Redon “Le Passage d’une âme,” Les Feuillets d’art V.
For his 1898 painting, Maillol borrows the figure’s stance with its
raised right arm but chooses to obscure her left arm. Her head bends into
the crook of her right arm so the viewer no longer sees her face. She lifts
her right leg and tips backward rather than forward. Maillol captures the
awkwardness and flatness of Gauguin’s figure. Ironically, he would
transform this clumsy water creature into full-figured classical ideals later
in his career. For Maillol, the figure from In the Waves represented his
own leap into an artistic career.
Denis’ Polyphemus from 1907 in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in
Moscow adds another mythological interpretation to Gauguin’s painting
(Fig. 15-8). As a founding member of the Nabis, Denis greatly admired
Gauguin and visited the 1889 exhibition. In an 1895 exhibition review, he
reminisced:
Who remembers the café Volpini? … There was a group of very beautiful
things there, of which a few will survive. Since then we have rarely seen an
affirmation of methods that are so simple, so primitive, and that have so
obviously ingenuous a basis.29
Denis, like many of the Nabis, found inspiration in Gauguin’s straightforward

line composition as well as the subject of untouched civilization first
explored in Brittany. Thus, through his reviews and books, Denis became
the spokesperson for the Nabis and thus represented a direct connection
from the earliest Symbolist supporters, such as Gauguin and Redon, to the
second generation of Symbolists, such as Denis and Maillol. The
enigmatically rendered mythological theme links the two facets of
Symbolism.
Purchased by Russian collector Ivan Morozov to accompany another
mythological work in his collection, Denis’ work loosely describes the
story of Polyphemus, a Cyclops, who woos the sea nymph Galatea.
However, Galatea is in love with the shepherd Acis, and she rejects the
giant’s many serenades. In a fit of jealousy, Polyphemus eventually kills
Acis by crushing him with a boulder. Galatea, who had fled to the ocean,
turns his blood into a stream so she can always be with her true love.
In Denis’ painting, the one-eyed giant plays his panpipes on a rock
overlooking the sea. On the shore behind him, nude boys frolic with
clothed and half clothed women. An androgynous figure clothed in red
next to the large rock below Polyphemus evokes the fate of Acis. In the
water, a woman in the distance turns in the frothy waves to see that she has
captured the unwanted attention of the burly Cyclops. Although she faces
the viewer, her arms are in the same position, though reversed, as
Gauguin’s In the Waves. The unsettling mood is also similar as she looks
alarmed and ready to flee. Her pale skin is a reference to the name Galatea
which means milk-white but also to Gauguin’s original figure.
Like Gauguin with In the Waves, Denis used Brittany for the setting of
Polyphemus.30 The distinctive black rocks of Le Pouldu appear throughout
the composition as they do in many of Gauguin’s works. Denis first went
to Brittany on his honeymoon in 1893 and eventually bought a summer
home there in 1908. By the time he painted Polyphemus, the artist had
established his own style distinctive from the earlier Symbolists such as
Redon and Gauguin. Like Maillol, Denis employed classical themes in
non-academic scenes. While the subject is traditional, the high-keyed
palette and ambiguous figures and setting is unexpected. Although Denis
had retreated from Gauguin’s influence, he offered a tribute to his early
mentor by including the archetypal woman in the waves.
Like many of Gauguin’s symbols, the leaping woman links traditional
themes with personal meanings; she is Ondine but she is also a
manifestation of the phlegmatic humor. In painting, sculpture, and print,
she appears at pivotal junctions of Gauguin’s career which connect her to
the artist’s feelings of familial and artistic rejection as well as his own
286 Chapter Fifteen
aging. For the other artists who used the figure in their own works, her
meaning was suffused with Gauguin’s essence and the enigmatic qualities
of the Symbolist movement.
Fig. 15-8. Aristide Maillol, The Wave, 1898.

Fig. 15-9. Maurice Denis, Polyphemus, 1907.
Fig. 15-1. Paul Gauguin, In the Waves, 1889, oil on canvas, The Cleveland
Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH.
Fig. 15-2. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Automne (Autumn), 1863-64, oil on

canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, France.
Fig. 15-3. Leonhart Thurn-Heisser, The Four Humours, 1574 (Image in

the public domain).
Fig. 15-4. Paul Gauguin, Soyez mystérieuses (Be Mysterious), 1890,

polychrome wood relief, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Erich Lessing/ Art
Resource, NY).
Fig. 15-5. Paul Gauguin, Fatata te miti (By the Sea), 1892, oil on canvas,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Erich Lessing/ Art Resource,
NY).
288 Chapter Fifteen
Fig. 15-6. Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: Auti te Pape (Women at the River),
1893-94, woodcut, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH.
Fig. 15-7. Odilon Redon “Le Passage d’une âme,” Les Feuillets d’art V
(15 Avril 1920): 31. Ingalls Library, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Rare
Books and Special Collections, Cleveland, OH.
Fig. 15-8. Aristide Maillol, The Wave, 1898, Musée du Petit Palais, oil on
canvas, Paris, France.
Fig. 15-9. Maurice Denis, Polyphemus, 1907, oil on canvas, Pushkin

Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP, Paris (Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY).
Notes
1
See for example Edgar Degas’ Peasant Girls Bathing in the Sea at Dusk, 1875-76
or Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bathers, 1884-86.
2
Jennifer Shaw, “The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of
1863” Art History 14:4 (December 1991): 540-70; Noga Arikha, Passions and
Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
3
Gauguin first uses the theme in The Bathers in 1886, an academically inspired
work in which one woman dauntlessly wades into the water, while another timidly
approaches the bank. The figure on the bank is somewhat androgynous compared
to her full-figured friend and prefigures the Symbolist interest in gender ambiguity.
However, the pastoral setting owes more to traditional imagery of women bathing
than Gauguin’s later images.
4
Monique Nonne in “Puvis de Chavannes and the ‘Petit Boulevard’ Painters:
Emile Bernard, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh” in Toward a Modern Art:
From Puvis de Chavannes to Matisse and Picasso (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), 82.
Gauguin borrowed from Puvis de Chavannes throughout his career. For another
example, see Erika Schneider, “Talisman for the Symbolist Movement: Puvis de
Chavannes’ Hope” in Symbolist Objects: Materiality and Subjectivity at the Fin-
de-Siècle, ed. Claire I.R. O’Mahony (High Wycombe, England: Rivendale Press,
2009).
5
The letters exchanged between Gauguin and his wife at this time support this
biographical interpretation. He seems anxious to flee the domestic situation which
he feels prevents him from reaching his artistic potential. Paul Gaugin: Letters to
His Wife and Friends (Boston: MFA Publications, 2003).
6
Gauguin’s wife Mette and Anderson were both Danish. Gauguin more likely
drew his sources from Symbolist inspirations, such as the poem by Aloysius
Bertrand. Symbolist writers Charles Baudelaire and Mallarmé particularly admired
Bertrand’s work.
7
Paul Gauguin: Letters to His Wife and Friends, 121.
8
Ibid., 119.
9
Ibid.
10
The exhibit at the Café Volpini took place opposite the Pavillion des Beaux-
Arts, where juried works were shown at the Paris Universal Exposition.
Considered the first Symbolist exhibition, entitled “Paintings by the Impressionist
and Synthetist Group (L'Exposition de Peintures du Groupe Impressioniste et
Synthetiste),” the exhibit contained roughly 100 works by eight artists. The artists
included Emile Bernard, Paul Gauguin, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin,
Schuffenecker, Louis Roy, Leon Fauche, and Georges Daniel de Monfried. Other
artists, who became associated with the group, were Paul Serusier and Roderic
O'Conor. For a recent examination of the works, see the Cleveland Art Museum
catalogue Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889 (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag,
2009).
11
Gauguin would continue to work this figure into several works often combining
her with figures from other paintings. For the title page of the exhibition catalogue
for the Café Volpini, he combined her with the woman in Life and Death, also
painted in 1889 and postulated as a pendant painting, Gauguin’s Nirvana: Painters
at Le Pouldu, 1889-90, ed. Eric M Zafran (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2001), 117. In the same year, he painted Nirvana: Portrait of Meyer de Haan,
which was the focus of a 2001 exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum. This
painting also combined the two figures in the background. In Gauguin’s Still Life
with Quimper Pitcher, 1889 in the Berkeley Art Museum, he darkened the original
figure’s complexion.
12
Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, “Paul Gauguin’s Third Visit to Brittany, June 1889-
November 1890” in Gauguin’s Nirvana: Painters at Le Pouldu, 1889-90, 15.
13
Martin Kemp, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), 237.
14
Paul Gauguin: Letters to his Wife and Friends, 94.
15
Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, 115-20
16
Zirka Z. Filipczak, Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women: Theories of Humours in
Western European Art, 1575-1700 (New York: American Federation of the Arts,
1997), 20-21.
17
Ibid., 24-25.
18
Ibid., 8.
19
Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman : A Study in the Fortunes of
Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), 32, 35.
20
Originally in L’Art Moderne (February 15, 1891) quoted in John Rewald, Post-
Impressionism: from Van Gogh to Gauguin (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1978): 431-32.
21
Paul Gauguin: Letters to His Wife and Friends, 168.
22
Gauguin did one more print with the same figure in At the Black Rock, 1898-99,
briefly discussed in Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889, 190-91.
290 Chapter Fifteen
23
Stephen F. Eisenmann, The Temptation of Saint Redon (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 218-22. The image is plate 142, 214.
24
“It is a skull wreathed in rose. It rises above a woman’s torso, pearly white.
Beneath this, a shroud starred with dots of gold acts as a tail; and the whole body
undulates, as might a gigantic worm lifting upright.” Douglas Druick, Odilon
Redon, Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 (New York: Abrams, 1994), 192-93.
25
Ibid., 197.
26
Richard Hobbs, Odilon Redon (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977), 83.
27
Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889, 93.
28
Bertrand Lorquin, Aristide Maillol (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 157.
29
Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889, 210.
30
Maurice Denis: Earthly Paradise (Paris: Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 2006),
217.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FABRICATED VISIONS:
FROM THE OPIUM-EATER TO DES ESSEINTES
ALINA CLEJ
J. K. Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against the Grain), published in 1884,

was both a manifesto of literary decadence, and its exemplary embodiment.1
Falling like an “aerolite into the literary fairground,” as Huysmans puts it
in a preface to the novel written twenty years later, À rebours was received
with a combination of “shock and anger” by contemporary critics, put off
by its outrageous display of barbarity and refinement, mysticism and
perversity.2 Indeed, the ingredients used in composing this work, to adopt
the culinary metaphor that informs the narrative, were far too outlandish
and overpowering for the taste of the common reader.3 Judging by
Huysmans’s declarations in the same preface, he intended to create “an ‘of
meat’” brew of “precious stones, of perfumes, flowers, literature religious
and lay, of profane music and plain-chant.”4 À rebours was certainly not
meant for easy consumption. In point of fact, Huysmans’s aesthetic recipe
could only be enjoyed by a few connoisseurs and a handful of literary
practitioners who happened to share the writer’s inclinations: like the
Goncourt brothers, Barbey d’Aurévilly or Mallarmé. But by publishing À
rebours, Huysmans secured what he craved—literary fame, albeit fame
due to the novel’s notoriety or success de scandale.
Since its publication, À rebours has lost some of its unwholesome aura,
and even gained, as Huysmans wished it in his later preface, a certain
propitious meaning in the author’s tortuous path to Catholic conversion.5
All in all, however, À rebours has retained its privileged status as a sui-
generis novel, not easily accessible to a wide audience, which may also
explain why it was so seldom translated into English.6 In this present essay
I will argue that notwithstanding its esoteric quality, À rebours is no less
concerned with the mundane reality of the day than any of Zola’s novels.
Although in its composition and style, Huysmans’s À rebours marks a
break with the writer’s earlier naturalist novels, neither the hero, des
292 Chapter Sixteen
Esseintes, nor the writer himself succeeds in leaving the “maddening

crowd” behind.
On close examination, and seen with a correcting lens, des Esseintes’s
refined, eccentric lifestyle offers in fact a distorted image of the consumptive
practices of the fin-de-siècle bourgeoisie.7 Likewise, I shall claim that des
Esseintes’s need for intoxicating visions parallels the general appetite for
illusion purveyed by the optical devices of the time, or by the use of drugs,
popularized by Thomas De Quincey, in his Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater (1821).8
I will start by examining the naturalist undercurrent that connects À
rebours with the writer’s earlier works, especially with his previous
naturalist novel: À vau-l’eau (Down Stream) (1882). Its hero, or rather
anti-hero, Jean Folantin, who also bears a close resemblance to the author,
is a young man of humble bearings, and with no clear sense of purpose.
Folantin’s work as an employee at a ministerial office is tedious and
uninspiring, so he tries to excite his senses and imagination in every
possible way: pursuing pretty women; wandering and browsing at book
stalls along the Seine; preoccupying himself with the culinary arts, and
taking an aesthetic interest in religion. The hero’s attempts to arouse his
senses and occupy his mind end in disappointment and bitter loneliness.
Folantin’s predicament clearly anticipates that of des Esseintes, the
protagonist of À rebours, who is haunted by the same sense of inner
emptiness and despair, with a notable difference, however. In À rebours,
des Esseintes’s grueling emptiness that nothing can satisfy leads him to
yearn for religious faith, and though he doesn’t find it at the end of this
novel, he comes to experience a “hunger” for it, a state that marks the
transition to a new phase described in Huysmans’s later novels, En Route
(1895) and L’Oblat (1903).
With des Essseintes one is also reminded of Russian decadent heroes
like Oblomov,9 since they belong to the same dying race of the nobility
that, in des Esseintes’s case, has reached its terminus in the person of the
Duke Jean des Esseintes, “a frail man of thirty, anemic, and nervous.”10 It
is clear, however, that through his physical appearance, family-history,
lackluster attributes, and dissolute life, des Esseintes fits the naturalist
typology explored by Zola in his novelistic cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart.
Faithfully or derisively, depending on how one reads the novel (as a
serious aesthetic exercise or a parody of Zola’s “experimental method”),
Huysmans presents the hero’s character as the product of his biological
and social heritage. Indeed, des Esseintes displays all the pathological
symptoms of a “lymphatic” personality: lethargy, anemia, hypersensitivity,
and neurosis.11 If À rebours has a plot to speak of, it is a “medical” one.
Fabricated Visions: From the Opium-Eater to des Esseintes 293
After exhausting the whole gamut of pleasures that Parisian life can
offer, des Esseintes retires to an exclusive “cottage” in Fontenay-aux-
Roses on the outskirts of Paris, far enough from its tumult to enjoy his
seclusion, “yet near enough for the proximity of the metropolis to add
spice to his solitariness.”12 Here he designs an “artificial paradise” that
enables him to explore, in truly aesthetic fashion, a whole range of
sensations and their possible combinations. Debilitated by the demands of
this extravagant pursuit, des Esseintes ends up in a state of calamitous
exhaustion that makes him send for his doctor, who brings his dying
patient back to health and orders him “to return to Paris and take part again
in the common life of men.”13
Although des Esseintes’s “experiments” in À rebours are pitched at a
much higher level of intensity and sophistication than was the case for the
hero of À-vau-l’eau, the difference between the two is more superficial
than it first seems. In fact, in his later preface to À rebours, Huysmans
reveals that he conceived the novel as a “pendant to À vau-l’eau
transferred into another milieu.”14 And he pictured des Esseintes as a
“more cultured, more refined, more wealthy” character, who finds in
“artificiality” and “the illusion of extravagant fancies” a form of “relief
from the disgust inspired by the worries of life and the American [i.e.
materialistic] habits of his time.”15 While Huysmans also did his best to
escape from Zola’s influence and vowed to write against the naturalist
trend, in his oppositional stance, Huysmans’s own “experimental” formula
inevitably mimicked and distorted the master’s “method.”
Taking the oppositional premise a step further, I will argue that in spite
of Huysmans’s professed contempt for “American habits,” and the
“aristocracy of money,” À rebours speaks not only against, but also about
the bourgeois world (and its money) from which its (anti-) hero, des
Esseintes, wishes to escape. In historical terms, Des Esseintes’s attempt
can only be interpreted as a desperate, absurd gesture, since des
Esseintes’s class had already been removed from the social scene. In
symbolic terms, however, des Esseintes’s withdrawal from the world is a
pretext for the nostalgic re-creation of a by-gone era of luxury and
splendor. In essence, Huysmans’s “invitation to a journey,” to use
Baudelaire’s poetic title,16 is not so different, I believe, from the “dream-
worlds” imagined by the nouveaux riches in furnishing their mansions
with all the luxuries that the domestic market could offer, as well as
products from the East, which were the rage in Paris at the time, and other
commodities provided by the emerging emporiums, whose prototype
features saliently in Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883).17
After selling the family château and its contents, des Esseintes proceeds,
294 Chapter Sixteen
like any wise bourgeois, and puts the revenue of the sale in “Government
annuities,” which bring him an annual income of fifty thousand francs.
The remaining funds allow him to buy a property in Fontenay-aux-Roses,
and all the trappings needed to create an ideal “retirement” place.18 In his
shopping spree, des Esseintes makes sure that everything he acquires fits
the imaginary blueprint of a space that functions simultaneously as a
cloister, a “pleasure-dome,” and a protective shell or womb. This multivalent
project involves a savvy combination of colors, whose effects could be
“confirmed and strengthened under artificial light,” original furnishings
that could evoke at one and the same time the sacred and the profane, and
gadgets able to stimulate all senses, and produce intoxicating effects.19
But des Esseintes’s project is not as eccentric as it purports to be. In the
same way that the hero’s hideout retains a connection to Paris, in the form
of a small “wretched” railway that links the village to the city, so his
imagination remains connected to reality, and feeds on the world he left
behind, by reflecting it in contrastive, exaggerated forms. Both literally
and symbolically, the hero has not weaned himself from the big city, and
the circulation of ideas and materials continues through the umbilical cord
provided by the “rustic” railway. Des Esseintes’s rejection of bourgeois
“vulgarity” and “mediocrity” is achieved mainly through antithesis and
hyperbole, and retains the negated term, i.e. the bourgeois norm, in its
opposition.
This type of incomplete negation is visible from the very beginning. In
choosing colors to decorate his interior, des Esseintes marks his stand by
differentiating himself from “the common run of men” whose “coarse
retinas” are insensitive to the “proper cadence” and “modifications” of
light, as well as from those “bourgeois eyes that are insensible to the pomp
and splendor of the strong, vibrating colors.”20 Since he numbers himself
among “the persons of delicate, refined visual organs,” des Esseintes
identifies his distinctive perception with “the eye of the man…who has
visions of the ideal, who demands illusions to satisfy his aspirations,” and
“who craves veils to hide the nakedness of reality.”21 Such “delicate” eyes
are “soothed and satisfied” by “blue and its cognate tints, such as mauve,
lilac, pearly grey.”22 Blue is the color of dreams, sadness, and Romantic
desire. Blue is also the color that by “candle light” can take an “artificial
green tinge,” as the hero puts it, that is, the color of disease, a color that in
its deep shades can,” like cobalt or indigo,” become black—the color of
melancholia and death.23
In effect, des Esseintes’s dwelling seems designed for a convalescent
hovering between life and death, in a ghost-like state of suspension. This
phantasmal space is represented at the center by a small dining room,
which resembles “a ship’s cabin,” through its sidings and porthole

window, inserted—in the manner of “Japanese boxes”—in a larger room,
the “real dining room as designed by the architect.24 The disposition of
windows in the parallel walls can provide a liquid ambience by filtering
light through a “large aquarium” and turning it at sunset from “dull and
opaque” to a reddish hue. This inner sanctum, reminiscent of Captain
Nemo’s submarine or a family vault, functions in the novel as a womb-
tomb structure.25
From a psychoanalytical point of view, des Esseintes’s ambiguous
construction satisfies his regressive desire to find a “retreat far from his
fellows,” which in the French original evokes the womb, rather than “a
hermit’s cell,” as the translator describes it.26 Huysmans uses the verbs se
blottir (to curl up) and se calfeutrer (to get cozy and warm) that both
suggest a fetal position. Given the absence of the mother’s affection
mentioned in des Esseintes’s short biographical “Notice,” and her own
life-in death condition, the hero’s only comfort is to become, like his
mother, “a chronic invalid . . . in a shuttered bedroom,” absorbed in
endless “reveries” or letting himself sink “into the artificial night” (nuit
factice) simulated by the heavy curtains that covered the windows.27
The ship’s cabin functions in other symbolic dimensions, as well,
which are not unrelated to the primal ones mentioned above.28 In its
intimate setting, des Esseintes embarks on imaginary voyages nurtured by
readings (e.g. Poe’s Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym) and his own
imagination, which “could easily substitute for the vulgar reality of prosaic
facts,”29 in the spirit of Baudelaire’s concept of the “substitutive
imagination” (l’imagination suppléante).30
In reality, however, this idealizing process was no “easy” matter, either
for Baudelaire or for Huysmans, one of Baudelaire’s devoted admirers.31
They lacked precisely the kind of natural, abundant imagination that could
gratify their dreams, which explains why they had to resort to a wide array
of artificial means to stimulate their lagging creativity, including mental or
spiritual exercises, autosuggestion, and drugs, in Baudelaire’s case.32
Naturally enough, they came to consider artifice as “the distinctive mark
of human genius.”33
À rebours is in itself an argument, as well as a demonstration of the
apparently endless possibilities of “satisfying even the most difficult
cravings” through artificial means—a how-to manual for those who wish
to “savor” the most intense experiences, “without fatigue or worry,” or
whose appetites are jaded by common fares. The operating principle of
this virtual Elysium is simulation, on the principle that given the “same
aroma,” even the most demanding “epicure” could not distinguish between
296 Chapter Sixteen
wines whether “genuine or faked.”34 By “transferring” the idea of “artful

manipulation” to the mental world one could “enjoy fictitious pleasures
every whit as good as true.”35 À rebours can thus be read as the story of
the use and abuse of simulation, in the same way that Baudelaire’s Les
Paradis artificiels detailed the pleasures and dangers of intoxication,
following De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, structured
around “The Pleasures” and “The Pains of Opium.”36
The “long voyages” that des Esseintes enjoys in his stationary cabin,
the vicarious trips through the Latin decadence, the terrifying descents into
the cruel world of medieval punishment facilitated by esoteric readings
and rare prints, like the hero’s “journey” to London, are all based on
simulation, with varying degrees of artificial enhancement. Perhaps the
best example of such a simulated experience is the passage in which des
Esseintes gives the “recipe” for the “health-giving impression of sea-
bathing” in the heart of Paris.37
According to the narrator, “all that is required is . . . to take a walk to
the ‘Bain Vigier,’ on a pontoon moored right out in the middle of the
Seine,” and then preparing “your bath” following “the formula” for briny
water “given in the Pharmacopoeia.”38 To achieve the desired effect one
should also stimulate the senses, “by inhaling the odors” of a ball of rope
bought “at one of the great marine store dealer’s emporiums,” as well as
“by examining a life-like photograph of the casino and industriously
reading the ‘Guide Joanne’ describing the beauties of the seaside resort
were you would like to be.”39 Adding to those stimuli the movement of the
waves raised by “passing river steamers,” and the “sobbing of the wind as
it blusters through the arches of the bridges” spanning the Seine, “the
illusion is undeniable, overmastering, perfect; you are as good as at the
seaside.”40
This exemplary passage reveals, however, that even in terms of artifice
des Esseintes’s ingenuity is not original. The props of this imaginary
marine experience are actually ready-made: the “formula” for briny water,
the “ball of twine,” the “photograph of the casino,” and the “Guide
Joanne” are all accessible to the “vulgar” bourgeois public as well, and so
are the means of satisfying special desires that go beyond everyday
experience, such as travel agencies and luxury department stores.
Later in the novel, on a social visit to Pantin, des Esseintes imagines
how the deceptive “spring-life fragrance” coming from the neighboring
perfume factories could benefit the workers, by providing “the illusion of a
breath of good air,” and transforming the industrial town of Pantin into “an
artificial Nice.”41 In general, however, des Esseintes cleaves to his
privileged position, avoiding any association with the industrious classes,
and condemning the “eagerness after gain” (âpreté de gain), the “itch for
filthy lucre” (prurit de lucre) that had contaminated even the Church,42 a
damnation (grand bagne) imported from America, and which had taken
over Europe and submitted it to “the limitless, unfathomable, and
incommensurable boorishness of the financier and the self-made man
(parvenu).
Des Esseintes’s retreat at Fontenay was supposed to stand in stark
contrast to the “idolatrous city that groveled on its belly, spurting vile
songs of praise to the impious tabernacle of Commerce.”43 It is true that in
designing his “sanctuary” the hero went out of his way to mark his
difference, including his own decadent style, from the philistine realm of
the conquering bourgeoisie whose mediocrity he despises. He is careful,
for instance, to avoid as far as possible the use of “Oriental tissues and
rugs” that had become so “common and pretentious” at the time, that
“wealthy tradesmen could buy them at discount prices in the novelty
stores.”44 Des Esseintes prefers instead to cover his walls in the same way
he bound his books, “in large-grained crushed morocco,” to reinforce the
distinctive bookish quality of his retreat.
To further mark his distance from “the petty-minded tradesmen
preoccupied exclusively by swindling and making money,” and from the
bourgeois who hated a refined intellectual like him, having nothing but
contempt for “literature and art, and everything he cherished,”45 des
Esseintes surrounds himself with books. In his disdain for the moneyed
class, unable to apprehend anything beyond politics, and to offset the
ignoble appetite with which “they devoured their sandwiches with the
daily news,”46 des Esseintes engages in a frenetic consumption of arcane
literature—the Latin authors of the “decadence,” and the early Middle
Ages—an orgy that occupies the whole of Chapter Three.
The same obsessive need to distinguish himself from the “vulgar” rich
determines the hero’s taste in jewelry. After buying a live tortoise, and
having its shell gilded in the idea of creating a “gigantic jewel” to
enhance the colors of his dining-room rug, des Esseintes decides to add to
it a pattern of precious stones, inspired by a Japanese print. Although the
taste for Japanese curios and designs was becoming common, des
Esseintes exceeds it by having the pattern filled with precious stones.
Moreover, when he chooses the stones that would adorn the tortoise’s
shell, he makes a point to stay away from the “commercial” stones, such
as “the diamond” that “had grown singularly hackneyed now that every
business man wears one on his little finger.”47 As to “Oriental emeralds
and rubies,” they may be less “degraded,” but they are “too reminiscent
of those green and red eyes that shine as head-lights on certain lines of
298 Chapter Sixteen
Paris omnibuses,” and in spite of its use in Church, “the amethyst” had
been “spoilt by its frequent use to ornament the red ears and bulbous
hands of butchers’ wives.”48 Also to be shunned was “the “Oriental
turquoise that is used for brooches and rings, along with the
commonplace pearl and the odious coral” that “form the delight of vulgar
souls.”49 Des Esseintes’s final selection is guided both by his unusual
chromatic ambition, and his concern to find precious stones yet
untouched by the “industrial, materialistic folly” of his day.
Anticipating the difficulty of cultivating distinction in a consumer
society where the signs of distinction are themselves for sale, the hero
seems cornered like the extravagantly decorated tortoise, soon to die from
its heavy display of jewels, in another cul-de-sac, and not the only one.
Although according to his later preface to À rebours, Huysmans intended
to write the novel in order to “escape” from the naturalist trend “in which
he was suffocating” and to “get away from a literature that had no door of
escape,”50 the author ends up trapped in his own aesthetic conceit.
Certainly, À rebours is not the breath of “fresh air” he had envisaged, and
by the end of the novel he is forced to admit defeat by opening the cavern
in which he imprisoned his hero, and letting him return to Paris, until
further notice.51
In terms of literary history, Huysmans’s novel occupies the extreme
end of the English Opium-Eater’s narcotic legacy to nineteenth century
France, a legacy I briefly described in the conclusion to my book, A
Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of
Writing (Stanford University Press, 1995). De Quincey’s Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater (1822), which gained him immediate notoriety
over the Channel and in the New World, effectively popularized opium
consumption as a source of intoxicating experiences and fantastic visions.
This happened in spite of De Quincey’s warning that it required a
philosopher like himself, a character who “deems nothing that is human
foreign to him” (Humani níhíl à se alienum putat), in Terence’s words, in
order to experience “the phantasmagoria of his dreams (waking or
sleeping, day-dreams or night-dreams).”52 Or, as De Quincey bluntly put
it, if “a man ‘whose talk is of oxen,’ should become an Opium-eater, the
probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream
about oxen.”53
Coming from De Quincey, who first published his confessions in The
London Magazine (1821), a journal whose audience was largely middle-
class and hardly inclined to philosophical reflection, the warning seemed
pointless, if not disingenuous. In effect, De Quincey’s warning acted as a
tease that promoted opium eating as a fashionable practice. The idea of
describing opium experiences (whether genuine or not) became itself

intoxicating and generated further opium confessions. As I argued in my
book, De Quincey’s prescient marketing savvy brought the Romantic
sublime to the city, and made it compatible with the urban appetite for
extraordinary events and states of being, in other words, with sensationalism,
a modern phenomenon that the Lake Poets, Wordsworth in particular,
profoundly despised.
More importantly, the practice of intoxication introduced by De
Quincey, and later developed by Baudelaire, provided the underlying
structure that enabled the collapse of the natural and the artificial into a
purely aesthetic experience in which fantasy and simulation could
substitute for reality and actual enjoyment. I argue that it was a similar
compromise between the Romantic ideal and its cruder gothic or
sensational variants, a compromise driven by the need to appeal to a wider
audience that made French writers imitate or emulate De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
One finds as early as 1828 a free translation of the Opium-Eater’s
confessions in Alfred de Musset’s L’Anglais, mangeur d’opium. The
Opium-Eater’s experiences were certainly familiar to the group of initiates
who conducted the experiments with hashish that took place at the Hôtel
Pimodan in the early 1840’s, and which Théophile Gautier described in
“Le Club des Hachinchins” (1846). But it was Baudelaire’s “creative”
translation or rather appropriation of De Quincey’s confessional writings,
including Suspiria de Profundis, in Les Paradis artificiels (1860), that
played the most important role in disseminating the practice of artificial
pleasures and intoxicating visions among fin-de-siècle writers like
Huysmans, and later among early twentieth century writers like Marcel
Proust and Jean Cocteau.54
The notion and practice of intoxication were part of the decadent
mystique, and found many amateurs in a period that compared itself to the
end of the Roman Empire.55 In Le Panthée, Joséphin Péladan mentioned
the fascination with drugs that dominated his contemporaries: “finally the
sensual enjoyment of the late Romans will be provided by [drug] potions
and subcutaneous injections,” and he concludes by claiming that this
modern fad proves to be “a specific symptom of this new decadence.”56
Following the example of Baudelaire, and like many of his contemporaries,
Huysmans tried some of the drugs fashionable at the time, but was never a
regular consumer.57 Like De Quincey, however, Huysmans was a
hypochondriac, and medicated himself for a variety of real and imaginary
conditions.58
By the end of the century, the means of intoxication had greatly
300 Chapter Sixteen
developed and came to include, besides opiates and hallucinogens, a wide

variety of chemical concoctions, as well as methods of mental and visual
stimulation, which De Quincey had already anticipated. More importantly,
what Huysmans and other fin-de-siècle writers inherited from De Quincey,
via Baudelaire, was a new modality of viewing the subject as both the
subject and the object of experimentation, a concept sustained by the new
psychological and medical experiments of the time.59
By reviving old confessional practices and techniques, and combining
them with the modern idea of hygiene, De Quincey created a new form of
“cultivating the self” or a “technology of the self,” to use Foucault’s
terms.60 The nineteenth century mentality was ripe for such a revival. In an
increasingly profane and individualistic world, the classic idea of
“cultivating the self” found new popularity. Although De Quincey and
Foucault had very different backgrounds and agendas, they were both
familiar with medieval and ancient literature that dealt with forms of soul-
and-body management, such as spiritual exercises, ascetic regimens, and
stoic notions of introspection and hygiene. So it shouldn’t be surprising
that they were rethinking subjectivity along similar lines.
De Quincey’s concept of the self, inspired by his considerable
erudition and in no lesser measure by his opium consumption, had the
virtue of making the “cultivation of the self” available to a wide public.
Enabling “everyman” to describe and publish intimate experiences set up a
trend that continued to be fueled—to this very day—by an individual
desire of exhibiting one’s self and the public’s insatiable appetite for
voyeuristic pleasures. The newspaper culture, and later the media
encouraged this trend that today’s digital technology has expanded to
global proportions.
In Huysmans’s novel À rebours, self-experimentation constitutes both
the matter and the manner of the book. Although Baudelaire is an explicit
model for des Esseintes’s experiments, De Quincey’s Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater is the blueprint, and the subtext of Huysmans’s
novel. The Folio edition of À rebours, edited by Marc Fumaroli, underlines
De Quincey’s influence by duly noting all the passages in which
Huysmans draws on the text of the Confessions, as translated by Musset in
L’Anglais mangeur d’opium, although there are clear signs that Huysmans
also used Baudelaire’s translation. De Quincey’s Confessions start with his
“Preliminary Confessions” (an autobiographical introduction), continue
with “The Pleasures of Opium,” and end with “The Pains of Opium.”
This tripartite structure reproduced by Baudelaire in “Un mangeur
d’opium” (in Paradis artificiels) constitutes the narrative matrix of À
rebours. Huysmans’s novel starts with a biographical “Notice” of the hero,
des Esseintes, and continues with a variety of pleasurable experiments in

design, simulated voyages, decadent readings, orchestration of liquors and
instrumental sounds (in the case of the mouth organ), print viewing,
triggering fantastic and terrifying visions, similar to the Opium Eater’s
dreams and nightmares, and takes an unpleasant turn in Chapter Seven,
which marks the rapid mental and physical deterioration of the hero,
corresponding to De Quincey’s description of “The Pains of Opium.” Des
Esseintes had come “to [live] on himself, fed on his own substance, like
those hibernating animals that lie torpid in a whole all the winter; solitude
had acted on his brain as a narcotic.”61
This is also the chapter in which Huysmans refers explicitly to De
Quincey, by quoting one of his most powerful nightmares. Caught in a
whirl of complex thoughts, des Esseintes has the vision of a priestly
procession, followed by a long line of penitents disappearing one by one in
“obscure crypts,” and then the vision of soaring cathedrals where monks
dressed in white chanted their prayers. These apparitions, supposedly
inspired by Gustave Moreau’s paintings, are then compared to the Opium
Eater’s vision triggered by a hefty “dose of opium” and his reading of
Livy. In De Quincey’s text, the scene is introduced by a sudden “clapping
of hands,” at which the “heart-quaking sound of Consul Romanus” puts a
brusque end to a lovely pageant of phantoms, and introduces a strident
military procession:
. . . [I]mmediately came ‘sweeping by’ in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or

Marius, girt round by a company of centurions, with the crimson tunic
hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmos [war cries] of the
Roman legions.62
Referring to his own obsessive visions of Episcopal processions,

Huysmans amplifies the effect of De Quincey’s nightmare:
So, des Esseintes, struck by some theological phrase would halt in

breathless awe as he pondered the flux and reflux of Nations, and beheld
the forms of bishops of other days standing forth in the lamplit gloom of
basilicas; visions like these kept him entranced, traveling in fancy from age
to age, coming down at last to the religious ceremonies of the present day,
enfolded in an endless flood of music, mournful and tender.63
There may be a lot to say about the symbolic function of the military and
religious images in these two passages insofar as they evoke the
threatening specter of the Law or the Name-of-the-Father, to use Lacan’s
terms,64 in a context in which the father figure is missing.65 Suffice it to
302 Chapter Sixteen
say that the threat is not strong enough to make the Opium Eater or des
Esseintes emerge from their imaginary drifting. What is notable in both De
Quincey’s and Huysmans’s texts is the aesthetic function of religion as
musical drama and source of intoxicating experiences, a formula that
Wagner famously exploited. In a different sense, and to reverse Marx’s
phrase—“Religion is the opium of the people”—, for writers like De
Quincey and his later imitators intoxication (opium) becomes a religion.66
Huysmans assimilates in fact his hero’s “tendencies to artificiality, his
longings for eccentricity” to “religious enthusiasms, aspirations towards an
unknown universe, towards a far-off beatitude,”67 suggesting that ecstasy
can be simulated using the intoxicated subject as a stage. Des Esseintes’s
own retreat is, among other things, meant to simulate a cloister or a sacred
space, filled with the trappings of religious piety and devotion, and the
disquieting images of punishment and damnation that could provide at will
the elements of a mystery play or a sadomasochistic fantasy.68
The conflation between religious ecstasy and intoxication, sacred
aspiration and profane enjoyment, practiced by De Quincey’s Opium
Eater, and later by des Esseintes, is quite explicit in Baudelaire’s
description of the effects of intoxication on the brain, in the chapter
entitled, “Le Théâtre de Séraphin,” in Paradis artificiels. According to
Baudelaire, through its powerful, hallucinating effects, hashish intoxication
can lead the subject to believe in its superhuman abilities of a “god made
man’ (l’Homme-Dieu).”69 Baudelaire’s lingering faith made him stop short
of embracing such demonic experiments, but the comparison between the
intoxicated brain and the “Seraphim Theater,” which staged marionette
and shadow plays for children, suggests that he couldn’t withstand the
popular attraction for illusion-making devices (such as dioramas), and that
the brain itself could function as such a device.70 De Quincey’s
“machinery for dreaming” was now available for sale, not just for the use
of some privileged consumers, but for all who could afford it.71
At the same time, both De Quincey and Huysmans seem to be aware of
the dangerous effects of such proliferating mechanisms, whose fatal,
irresistible power is evoked in the visions associated with the entrance of
Consul Romanus. This fear of endless multiplication and final disappearance
is also represented in the images that allude to Piranesi’s Carceri
d’Invenzione (“Imaginary Prisons”) in both De Quincey’s and Huysmans’s
texts, which are themselves derivative, fabricated constructions.72 The
striking element in Piranesi’s “Imaginary Prisons“ is that the architectural
space is constructed by the proliferation of stairs, which have no obvious
starting point or origin, and no definite end, unlike Jacob’s ladder to which
they may allude, and could thus stand as an apt metaphor for printing,
mechanical reproduction, and to a certain extent, for digital communication,

which is both endless and virtual.
In the case of De Quincey’s and Huysmans’s use of Piranesi’s
“Imaginary Prisons,” the endless stairs may also have a more personal
symbolic meaning, given the fact that the two authors suffered, to varying
degrees, from what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence.”73 In
this respect, the endless stairs that give shape to the “imaginary prisons”
also symbolize the nightmare that is history itself, or more precisely,
literary history and tradition out of which there is no escape, at least in the
modern artist’s view, the prison or cul-de-sac Huysmans mentioned in his
preface to À rebours. In its process of endless reproduction, modern
technology can only intensify the horror, not of the vacuum, but of supra-
saturation of images and information from which there is “no door of
escape.”
Equally horrifying for des Esseintes, and perhaps for Huysmans
himself, is that the carefully crafted retreat the hero built for himself was
not strong enough to resist the pressures of the world outside. In the end,
des Esseintes’s “ivory tower” is itself a mirage obsessively defended by
the neurotic recluse precisely because it was already “contaminated” by
the “vulgar” pleasures of the crowd. No wonder that to escape these fears
that Huysmans clearly shared, the author finally looked for protection in a
Catholic stronghold, or that Catholicism itself could serve as an an-esthetic
refuge to embattled fin-de-siècle writers.74 In spite of attempts at defying
the homogenizing, materialistic trends of the late nineteenth century, À
rebours stands as a grotesque, phantasmagoric vision of bourgeois patterns
of accumulation and consumption, which decadent artists found both
fascinating and repelling.
Epilogue
In retrospect, Huysmans offers an interesting example of the
improbable convergence of industrial artifice—the logical result of
capitalist development in its consumerist phase—and fin-de-siècle
aestheticism, a fusion that was in full display at the World Fair of 1889
and triumphed at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. To describe the
intoxicating impression made on him by the “nocturnal extravaganza”
produced by the exhibits, Gustave Geffroy, a contributor to the Exhibition
Catalog, compares the overall effect to des Esseintes’s simulated voyage to
London:
Just as des Esseintes, Huysmans’s character in A rebours, decides to make

304 Chapter Sixteen
a journey to London by arriving on Amsterdam Street with a carriage full

of luggage and by stopping in an English bar . . . so the minarets of
Trocadéro, rising against the dark velvet of the sky, the domes shaped like
Indian helmets, the upturned roofs of the pagodas, the white huts of Africa,
give to the wandering imagination the impression of far-off places, like
Tunisia and China, the Ganges and the Bosphorous.75
One shouldn’t be surprised that a year earlier Huysmans himself was

among the contributors to the Revue de l’Exposition universelle de 1889, for
the section “Promenades à l’exposition.” In his article Huysmans marveled
at the sight of the Tour Eiffel surrounded by a motley display of artifacts
coming from all parts of the world, as if to pay homage to the genius of
France and of Mr. Eiffel, the engineer who conceived its most distinctive
monument, a breath-taking combination of technical and artistic ingenuity.
Notes
1
The decadent movement was officially inaugurated by Anatole Baju’s journal Le
Décadent littéraire et artistique, first published in April 1886, but it was clearly
influenced by Huysmans’s À rebours, who seemed to have found the formula for
an aesthetic movement before it had a name.
2
For the French original text I have used the edition prepared by Marc Fumaroli,
Huysmans, À rebours, (Paris: Gallimard, 1977). I cite from J.-K. Huysmans,
Against the Grain, with an introduction by Havelock Ellis, (New York: Illustrated
Editions, 1931). I have made occasional modifications wherever necessary. Both
the original and translation contain Huysmans’s Preface to the second edition of
the novel, which appeared in 1903. For the critical reception of the book at the time
of its first publication, see François Livi, J.-K. Huysmans: À rebours et l’esprit
decadent (Paris: A, G. Nizet, 1991), 37-51.
3
For a philosophical discussion of Huysmans’s “digestive” imagery, see Silke-
Maria Weineck, “Digesting the nineteenth century: Nietzsche and the stomach of
modernity,” in Romanticism, 12, no. 1 (2006): 35-43.
4
Huysmans, Against the Grain, 57.
5
In the preface to the novel published twenty years later, Huysmans interprets the
last pages of the book as the expression of an unconscious longing for the Catholic
faith. See Against the Grain, 70.
6
The only other English version I am familiar with is Against Nature, translated by
Robert Baldick (London: Penguin Books, 1959), which is less faithful than the
earlier translation of 1931.
7
In his Preface to À rebours, Marc Fumaroli correctly observes that des Esseintes
had nothing against the consumer society that began to flourish at the time as long
as it could provide him with some of the “amenities” craved by a “splenetic
bachelor” (39). In her book, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-
Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), a study I
happened to discover after I wrote my article, Rosalind Williams refers to “elitist

consumption” among fin-de-siècle writers, including Huysmans, and interprets des
Esseintes’s “experiment” as “an ethical alternative” to the lifestyle of “the masses
and the bourgeoisie” (135-136). The author ends her analysis of a À rebours with a
conclusion that is similar to mine, namely that des Esseintes’s experiment is
“necessarily shaped” by the lifestyles he “opposed.” Everything considering, the
difference between “Decadent” and “Mass Consumption” was not as radical as it
was claimed to be by the writers themselves, since both were fuelled in large
measure by the same impulse towards “self-gratification” and “self-deception”
(141-143). I differ, however, in my interpretation of the end of Huysmans’s novel
that Williams reads as proof of the inevitable “collapse” of des Esseintes’s Dream
World, and of the “need” for “New Alternatives.” Williams’s Marxist reading,
tempting as it may be, is no longer possible, and proves again that Marx may have
been an excellent critic of industrial capitalism but was a poor predictor of its
future. Commodity fetishism, which has its origins in industrial capitalism itself,
and develops during the late nineteenth century in Europe and the United States,
has never disappeared as “a bad dream” of history. The Dream World has
continued to grow and expand, and is now close to taking over the World itself,
whose reality has become undistinguishable from the Dream.
8
For a lengthy discussion of this phenomenon see Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the
Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995). For the power and seduction of illusions, and
their relation to mass culture, see also Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities:
Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998).
9
Huysmans’s character, des Esseintes, is actually modeled on Robert de
Montesquiou, the notorious fin-de-siècle dandy and aesthete, whom Huysmans
knew personally.
10
11
For a similar argument, see Alain Pagès, “À rebours, un roman naturaliste?,” in
Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: SEDES, 1990).
12
13
Ibid., 328.
14
Ibid., 57.
15
Ibid.
16
Huysmans’s pseudo-nostalgia was clearly reinforced by his readings of
Baudelaire, whose desire for “luxury, calm, and volptuousness” are invoked in the
poem “Invitation to a Journey” (1855) in The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal
(1857) and in slightly different terms, in the prose poem by the same title, included
in The Spleen of Paris/ Le Spleen de Paris (1862). See also, Jean Borie,
“Esthétique du luxe, esthétique du simulacre: Baudelaire, Huysmans, Larbaud,” in
Huysmans: Une esthétique de la décadence. Actes du colloque de Bâle, Mulhouse
et Colmar 1984 (Genève-Paris: Editions Slatkine, 1987), 65-71.
17
See the introductory chapter, “The Implications of the Consumer Revolution,” in
Dream Worlds (Williams, 1982), and Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market:
306 Chapter Sixteen
Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2001).
18
19
Ibid., 93.
20
Ibid., 95.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
23
For Huysmans’s peculiar use of colors, and their various states of liquidity, see
Jacques Dupont, “La couleur dans (presque) tous ces états,” in Huysmans: Une
esthétique de la décadence, 155-166. Huysmans’s attraction for somber colors
suggestive of melancholia can be explained by his own condition, which he shared
with Baudelaire and other decadent writers, a condition represented by Albert
Dürer’s enigmatic figure Melancholia, which Jules Michelet read as a figure of
addiction. See Baudelaire’s essay, “L’Art philosophique,” in Oeuvres complètes, 2
vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) 2:600.
24
Huysmans, Against the Grain, 100. Emphasis mine.
25
This regressive tendency in des Esseintes’s choice of a retreat has been observed
by a number of critics, most notably by Victor Brombet, in “Huysmans et la
thébaïde rafinée,” Critique, 330 (Nov. 1974). For a lengthier, psychoanalytical
discussion of this tendency, see Laurence M. Porter, “Huysmans’s ‘À rebours’:
The Psychodynamics of Regression,” in American Imago, 44 (1987): 51-65.
26
27
Ibid. 78-79.
28
It is interesting to note that the dark womb-like structure in which des Esseintes
enjoys his simulated voyages is not unlike Plato’s cave or a the cave-like space of a
modern theatre, which Jean-Louis Baudry associates with Freud’s concept of the
unconscious, and the dream-space created by the cinematographic apparatus. See
Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” in Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected
Writings, ed. by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 41-62.
29
30
I have discussed this literary syndrome in my article, “The Debt of the
Translator,” Symploke, 5, Nos. 1-2: 7-26.
31
For a comprehensive study of the use of drugs by French writers, see Max
Milner, L’Imaginaire des drogues: De Thomas De Quincey à Henry Michaux
(Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
32
In Paradis artificiels (1860), Baudelaire discusses at length the effects of drugs
in creating what he calls “the artificial ideal,” but avoids referring to his own
experiments. He uses other “witnesses,” and in particular De Quincey, to illustrate
the benefits and dangers of drugs likes hashish and opium.
33
Huysmans, Against the Grain, 104. For Baudelaire, see “Eloge du maquillage,”
in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” Oeuvres complètes, 2:714-718.
34
35
Ibid., 103.
36
In translating De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in Paradis
artificiels, under the title “Un mangeur d’opium” (“An Opium-Eater”), Baudelaire
maintains De Quincey’s division between “The Pleasures of Opium” (“Voluptés de

l’opium”) and “The Pains of Opium” (“Tortures de l’opium”).
37
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., 224-225.
42
Ibid., 333.
43
Ibid., 338.
44
Ibid., 96.
45
Ibid., 107
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid., 128
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid., 129.
50
Ibid., 57.
51
In En route, Durtal has relinquished his sinful ways, embodied by des Esseintes,
and like Huysmans himself, he is looking for salvation in the Catholic church.
52
Thomas De Quincey, The Confessions of an Opium-Eater, in The Works of
Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 2:12.
De Quincey uses the word “dreams” to cover not only the sleeper’s dreams but
also semi-conscious reveries that opium induces, especially in the early stages of
addiction.
53
Ibid. De Quincey’s own citation is misquoted from Ecclesiasticus 38:5.
54
Marcel Proust was quite familiar with De Quincey’s Confessions and an admirer
of Baudelaire. Although too complicated to argue here, De Quincey had an
unmistakable influence on Proust’s conception of involuntary memory. Cocteau
was a well-known opium addict and a fan of De Quincey’s writings.
55
La décadence, imagined as the decline of an imperial age (in this case France’s
own), was on everybody’s mind, but the reactions to it differed widely, from those
on the right of the political spectrum who pleaded for stringent actions meant to
save the nation, to those who saw no escape and enjoyed the license that such
periods bring, to those who embraced anarchism and were eager to put a violent
end to the staggering, corrupt state in which they felt trapped. Most fin-de-siècle
writers and artists chose to escape the present by identifying with what they both
dreaded and enjoyed, decadence itself, modeled on the image of the late Roman
Empire. Inevitably, they also adopted the decadent practices that were in fashion at
that time, including the consumption of drugs and the indulgence in exquisite or
perverse pleasures.
56
Joséphin Péladan, Le Panthée (Dentu: 1892), 283.
57
See also Arnould de Liederke, La Belle Epoque de l’Opium (Paris: La
Différence, 2001).
58
On Huysmans ’s extensive use of pharmaceutical products, see Edmond Leclair,
“La Pharmacologie, la Thérapeutique,” in Bulletin des Sciences Pharmacologiques,
26 (Jan. 1919).
308 Chapter Sixteen
59
This period of intense research on the human brain coincides with the development
of psychology as a science, and is most noted for its not-so-scientific use of
hypnosis and other forms of psychical research. See chapters on “Psychology” and
“Psychical Research,” in The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880-
1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
60
See Michel Foucault, “La Culture de soi,” in Histoire de la sexualité: Le souci
de soi, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 53-85 and “Technologies of the Self,” in
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. by Luther H.
Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Masachussets
Press, 1988), 16-49.
61
Huysmans, Against the Grain, 165. Emphasis mine.
62
De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 68.
63
64
In Lacan’s writings, the Name-of-the-Father stands primarily for the
fundamental signifier that controls the process of identification and signifies the
Oedipal prohibition. For des Esseintes’s castration fantasms, see Laurence Porter’s
article mentioned in Note 13.
65
Both De Quincey and Huysmans lost their fathers at an early age.
66
De Quincey called opium the “great elixir of resurrection” that had “the keys to
Paradise,” and later in his life proclaimed himself the Pope of this new religion.
67
68
See, in this respect, Patrick Soler, “Le Bazar de Satan: inventaires et diabolisme
dans A rebours,” in Joris-Karl Huysmans (1990), 235-259.
69
See “Le Poème du hachish,” in Paradis artificiels, Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes,
1:426-437.
70
In his Salon de 1859, after passing in review the works of the painters in the
exhibition, Baudelaire ends by giving preference to unabashed artifice: “I long for
the return of the dioramas whose enormous, crude magic subjects me to the spell of
a useful illusion.” Oeuvres complètes, 2:668.
71
In Suspiria de Profundis, a later sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-
Eater, De Quincey talked at length about dreams and their production in terms that
anticipate Freud’s concept of the Unconscious and used similar mechanistic and
optical metaphors. See “The Dream Work,” in A Genealogy of the Modern Self,
90-111.
72
On the popularity of illusion-creating devices in the nineteenth century, see
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
73
The influence of Piranesi on French Romantics and later fin-de-siècle writers is
in fact mediated by De Quincey’s Confessions, through Musset’s translation,
L’Anglais Mangeur d’opium. See Luzius Keller, Piranèse et les romantiques
français (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1966).
74
See Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard
University Press, 1997).
75
Gustave Geffroy, “Promenade à l’Exposition,” in l’Exposition universelle de
1900, Les Beaux-Arts Décoratifs (Paris: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1900), 36.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FRENCH SYMBOLISM:
DECADENT HEROES, IDEALIST PROBLEMS
MARY TRAESTER
I.
While it has been customary to speak of Symbolism in terms of its “big
four” (I borrow the term from Anna Balakian), Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Verlaine, and Mallarmé, the difficulty of limiting the movement to a
definite historical moment or technique has offered continued ground for
controversy over what lends Symbolism its cohesiveness. As Kenneth
Cornell notes, “In March 1867, when Verlaine’s first volume of verse
appeared, Rimbaud was a 12 year old [sic] schoolboy in Charleville
studying Latin versification, and Baudelaire, who had been brought to
Paris from Brussels in 1866, was lying mortally ill.”1 Extended more
broadly, Symbolism could be said to reach from 1857 (the year of
publication of Les Fleurs du Mal) to 1930 and the work of T. S. Eliot. The
spatial and temporal separation between the group members themselves
belies the neat categorization of a movement. In terms of technique,
Symbolism is often discussed as synonymous with, or differentiated from,
Decadence. The differentiation, when it is made, often proceeds on the
basis of determining lineage, or on which style begets the other,2 which
reintroduces temporal considerations.3
Attempting to delimit Symbolism as either a movement or a style
inevitably leads to the coordinates of space and time, which are the very
coordinates that are used and stretched in the experimentations of this
literature. Indeed, struggles with ruptures in time and space reverberate
throughout much of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing,
as it comes to terms with the limitations of such a duality to describe or
chart modern experience. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s study of the impact of
the railroad upon early nineteenth-century thought in his Geschichte der
310 Chapter Seventeen
Eisenbahnreise (The Railway Journey, 1979) provides an eminently

readable account of this new phenomenon:
‘Annihilation of time and space’ is the topos which the early nineteenth
century uses to describe the new situation into which the railroad places
natural space after depriving it of its hitherto absolute powers. Motion is no
longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on a mechanical
power that creates its own new spatiality.4
Such ruptures provide the justification and appeal for a new literary art
that would not be confined in time and space and that would participate in
creating this “new spatiality.” In a similar spirit, August Strindberg states
in the preface to his Dream Play (Ett Drömspel, 1901): “The laws of space
and time have been abolished, reality contributes only a slight foundation
upon which fantasy works and weaves new patterns . . . but one
consciousness stands above all else: that of the dreamer.”5 As space and
time are “annihilated,” technological and imaginative advances open beyond
“natural space” and “reality.”
In the following, I consider Symbolism as interested in this elevation
of one “consciousness” above “reality.” I will use this concern to
differentiate Symbolism from Decadence, which is often discussed as the
“antithesis of naturalism,”6 a movement represented by reversal. Symbolism
instead involves a vertical displacement, and often takes on positive, even
heroic, connotations in contrast to Decadence.7 Jean Pierrot, for example,
follows Guy Michaud in discussing Symbolism as the “positive,”
“intellectual” aspect of a movement whose negation and pessimism would
come to be expressed by Decadence.8 I propose to consider this interest in
ascension in terms of “idealism,” one of the more vague descriptors often
attached to Symbolism.9 Following Paul de Man, I will consider this
idealism not necessarily as German Idealism, though there are important
lessons to be learned from such a comparison, but as the positing of a
“pure intellect . . . entirely separated from the material world, from
sensory experience.”10
The present essay negotiates the extent of the connection between
Symbolism and idealism through the example of J.-K. Huysmans’s A
rebours (1884). I argue that far from being a question of influence, of
casual appropriation—or misappropriation—of philosophy,11 the proposal
to separate the intellect from the material world is a literary pursuit, one
that is productive of a series of irreducible difficulties. A first difficulty is
that if the project is to separate the intellect from “nature” by escaping to a
world of “artifice,” the line between these designations constantly breaks
down; death and disease pose a real threat to the would-be artificer. And a
French Symbolism: Decadent Heroes, Idealist Problems 311
second, more insidious difficulty is that this new “progress” carries with it
large doses of misogyny, elitism, and anti-democratic thinking. If we are
to take seriously some of the claims for Symbolism’s reach—that it, for
example, began “with Baudelaire and influenced the whole of European
literature at the end of the nineteenth century”—we do well to consider the
question, What is idealism in Symbolist literature, and what are its
consequences?12
II.
The separation between the intellect and the material world is
expressed through two interrelated turns in A rebours. First, there is a turn
away from nature as “reality” where the protagonist seeks to transcend
space and time. Second, there is a move away from nature as productive,
or reproductive, where the protagonist replaces nature’s slow change with
the instantaneity of artifice. The departure from nature in terms of space
and time is largely expressed in Huysmans’s novel in the move away from
society and contemporaries, one’s companions in time. The epigraph to
the novel announces a primary displacement: “I must rejoice beyond the
bounds of time . . . though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its
coarseness know not what I mean”13 For Léon Bloy, in one of the first
published reviews of A rebours, the epigraph is an important indication of
Huysmans’s authorial intentions. Huysmans is, for Bloy,
formerly a Naturalist, but now an Idealist capable of the most exalted

mysticism, and as far removed from the crapulous Zola as if all the
interplanetary spaces had suddenly accumulated between them. Just read
the haughty and abolishing epigraph of his book.14
In a move similar to Strindberg’s, in which one consciousness is elevated

over the rest of society, Huysmans declares the intention to rise above
time, above coarseness from the outset.
At the start of the novel, the protagonist Jean Floressas des Esseintes
takes up residence at a secluded estate by the name of Fontenay, where he
goes to great lengths to ensure that he neither hears nor sees another
human being. His elderly servants are reduced to communicating via an
elaborate system of pulleys; velvet slippers muffle even the incidental
noise of their footsteps. He protects himself against the commonplace
sight of his female servant beyond the window by supplying her with a
Flemish costume that would remind him of convent life.
Des Esseintes quickly turns from the domestic scene to replacing
nature itself by means of multiple experiments. Nature both bores and
irritates him: “What a commonplace display of mountains and seas!” he

cries, and shuts the windows of his laboratory to recreate the odors of a
country landscape indoors.15 His manufactured version is complete with
the taint of industrial pollution. One of his inspired schemes involves
creating natural flowers that would imitate fakes, which they do in fairly
startling putrescence:
Where [nature] had not found it possible to imitate the work of human
hands, she had been reduced to copying the membranes of animals’ organs,
to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendors of
their gangrened skin. 16
The centrality of nature is effectively replaced by a vision of an artist

bending natural law to his will.
But it is just as des Esseintes would claim his success that the
unleashing of destructive processes flourishes and will not be met by a
return of the regenerative possibility of nature. Lulled into sleep by the
heat of his greenhouse, des Esseintes falls prey to a nightmare in which the
Pox (La Grande Vérole) stalks him. The androgynous figure arrives riding
green and malevolent through the streets, nostrils “breathing twin jets of
vapor that stank of phenol.”17 In a panic to escape this figure, des Esseintes
moves through a dream landscape and is startled by a shape moving on the
ground. He recognizes the naked woman moving beneath him to be the
Flower (la Fleur).18 But as he watches, the Flower is overtaken by the
horrible metamorphosis of the virus: blisters open around her mouth,
stems that turn into arms pull him into her embrace, and a blossom bursts
from between her thighs. He is powerless to escape as the sword-like stalk
moves toward him. Though des Esseintes awakens from the dream at just
this point, he never recovers, and is henceforth afflicted with a nervous
disorder, possibly syphilis.
III.
In the above example, disease turns the positive vertical displacement
of the intellect over material into reversal. The pure intellect is met by the
intractability of death, the infectious quality of dreams. Early critics of
Symbolism and Decadence often engaged in vigorous criticism of the
disease and gender reversals present in the literature, but this emphasis can
miss discussions of style internal to the works. Arthur Symons, in his
influential The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), is chief among
early readers of A rebours to attribute the disruptions in des Esseintes’s
experience to physiological cause:
Disturbing physical symptoms harass him from time to time, but they pass.
It is an effect of nerves that now and again he is haunted by remembrance;
the recurrence of a perfume, the reading of a book, brings back a period of
life when his deliberate perversity was exercised actively in matters of the
senses.19
The relationship between art and life as characterized by Symons contains

the same preoccupation with sickness and health as Max Nordau’s
Degeneration (1892) without its strict note of condemnation. For Nordau,
the fin-de-siècle attitude involves turning away from a still-flourishing
natural world to no good purpose; it is the result of a diseased and passive
mind that requires rehabilitation to, above all, an idealized form of
masculinity. In his surprisingly energized prose, he describes the fin-de-
siècle mood as:
the impotent despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in
the midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently for ever. It is the
envy of a rich, hoary voluptuary, who sees a pair of young lovers making
for a sequestered forest nook; it is the mortification of the exhausted and
impotent refugee from a Florentine plague, seeking in an enchanted garden
the experiences of a Decameron, but striving in vain to snatch one more
pleasure of sense from the uncertain hour.20
These otherwise dissimilar critics both identify the sickness of the artist as
a primary stimulant to creation.21 While Nordau places Huysmans in this
category, the author provides his own discussion of style, and the origins
of poetic inspiration, in Chapter 14 of A rebours, in which he instead
stresses the sickness of the age as a primary stimulant to creation. Des
Esseintes attributes poetic creation to the “vague migratory longings” that
beset an artist in a dull age.22 Flaubert, for example, “leaving our petty
modern civilization far behind . . . conjured up the Asiatic glories of
distant epochs.”23 Goncourt, meanwhile, created La Faustin out of
nostalgia for the eighteenth century, out of the “longing to return to the
elegant graces of a society that had vanished forever.”24 Des Esseintes
explains that the case was different for Zola, declaring that while he and
Flaubert and Goncourt chose a life of minds, of ancient civilizations, over
life in the present day, Zola, with “his sturdy, powerful temperament,” was
alienated from past, “effeminate” civilizations.25 And so:
On the day when he too had been afflicted with this longing, this craving
which in fact is poetry itself, to fly far away from the contemporary society
he was studying, he had fled to an idyllic region where the sap boiled in
the sunshine.26
In this assessment, which becomes slightly more hyperbolic, it is possible

to read a veiled critique of Zola, who was, according to des Esseintes,
dreaming of “fantastic heavenly copulations, of long earthly ecstasies, of
fertilizing showers of pollen falling into the palpitating genitals of
flowers,” and who praised “living animate matter” in a style “whose broad
patches of crude color had something of the weird brilliance of Indian
paintings.”27 Des Esseintes is clear that he is not, for his part, seeking this
blissful union with “living animate matter” complete with its floral and
phallic imagery, but is instead seeking “intellectual communion,” “spiritual
collaboration” with other emigrants in time. 28
It is clear from other experiments he performs in A rebours that des
Esseintes is very interested in bodily sensation: his work with colors,
perfumes, even sound that can be sipped from vials all aims at producing
an effect on the body. But he is most interested in using the stimulation of
the senses, which he can gain from his own synaesthetic creations, or from
Baudelaire’s “solid, sinewy style,” in order to gain access to a spiritual,
inexpressible, world.29 At home in his library, des Esseintes seeks
a work of art both for what it was in itself and what it allowed him to
bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a
friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations
would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which
he would strive patiently and even vainly to analyze.30
He does not long to reestablish connection with the “society of his day,
which he regarded with ever-growing horror”;31 instead, he hopes that in
reading these works, he can enter
into complete intellectual fellowship with the writers who had conceived
them, because at the moment of conception those writers had been in a
state of mind analogous to his own.32
The positive intellectual portion of this movement is found in the

possibility of transfer from the jostling crowd, the jolts of modernity,
through disembodied connection with past ages, with other thinkers
through a shared intellectual space.
If the union is to be between spirits, rather than between the
consciousness and nature, or society, there is a strong indication that the
desire in Huysmans’s novel is to avoid a return to materiality. Death is not
given a positive creative valence, but instead marks the finitude of artistic
possibility and is thus to be avoided. We might say this differentiates his
pursuit from Baudelaire’s. It is the union of consciousness with a natural
object that forms the basis of the return to materiality that de Man locates
in Baudelaire’s poetry. The poet is, of course, highly praised in A
rebours,33 and there is in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) a similar movement
away from the material world. His perfumes—old, uncorked flasks—are
redolent of dreams and memories and lead away from the present to
another world. This movement is figured in terms a setting off from the
physical, living world towards new shores. “Le Voyage,” for example,
concludes:
O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre!

Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillons!
Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l’encre,
Nos cœurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!
Verse-nous ton poison pour qu’il nous réconforte!

Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?
Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!
[O Death, old captain, it’s time! weigh anchor!

This country bores us, O Death! Cast off!
If the sky and sea are black as ink,
Our hearts, you know, are full of light!
Pour us your poison; let us be restored!

This fire burns so in our brains, we want
To plunge into the depths of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, who cares?
To the depths of the Unknown to find the new!] 34
In Baudelaire’s poem, the path through the abyss promises to cancel the
oppositional pairs: black and white, poison and cure, fire and water,
heaven and hell, life and death. These pairs are reconciled, unified in the
“new,” which is necessarily beyond life. The “new” is also the poetry
itself, however, which must in part be read as the product of this very
search, what lasts after the annihilative pursuit of the author. This suggests
that there is a return to materiality in Baudelaire, through natural objects to
writing. It is this return that is consistently problematized by Huysmans
through the groaning protests of des Esseintes, whose body resists
reversal. As the object that resists, the body of the protagonist takes on
heightened significance.
It is not only the voyage that differs in Baudelaire and Huysmans; the
comparison between the two writers also allows us to view how the
symbol is rendered radically different in Huysmans’s novel. We can take a
useful definition from “The Double Aspect of Symbolism” (1988),35
where de Man notes that the symbol functions by
conferring upon a purely mental consciousness, by means of a mere act of

symbolic language, the very quality which one feels to be the essence of
matter: weight and opacity, eternal stability, whatever contrasts most with
the fleeting transparency of a subjective awareness such as ‘memories.’36
De Man offers a line from Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” as an example: “Et

mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourdes que des rocs.” [And my precious
memories are heavier than stones.]37 In de Man’s reading of Baudelaire’s
poem, “weight and opacity” are conferred onto memory by natural objects,
the rocks of the poem. For de Man, the return to the materiality of the
natural object signals the closing of the gap between object and
consciousness; unity is restored. But in Huysmans, the essence of matter is
conferred onto mental consciousness by recourse not to natural objects,
but by the body of the artist.
The body attributes physical qualities to what we gone to some length
to establish as the purely mental consciousness of literature as espoused by
Huysmans’s novel. “French literature,” muses des Esseintes,
a literature attacked by organic diseases, weakened by intellectual senility,

exhausted by syntactical excesses, sensitive only to the curious excesses
that excite the sick, and yet eager to express itself completely in its last
hours, determined to make up for all the pleasures it had missed, afflicted
on its death-bed with a desire to leave behind the subtlest memories of
suffering, had been embodied in Mallarmé in the most consummate and
exquisite fashion.38
This is also the “quintessence” of Baudelaire and Poe, whose “refined and
potent substances” indicated the “death-agony of the old tongue which,
after going a little greener each century, had now reached the point of
dissolution.”39 Having already announced himself as one of their party, des
Esseintes finds himself in his own final paroxysms at the start of the next
chapter, suffering in the “final stages” of his own illness. Far from
indicating the sickness of an author, the physical properties of an
individual body are borrowed to symbolize the sickness of an age, the end
of a literature, the end of language.
IV.
The revolution Huysmans hereby announces recalls an earlier
revolution in philosophy, but with new emphasis on gender, and gender
reversals, that remain to be analyzed. Just as Kant inaugurates his
revolution whereby neither God nor soul will be necessary to experience,40
Huysmans inaugurates his own revolution where “nature” is replaced by
an individual body through which the materiality of language is
expressed.41 Kant’s revolution can also be compared to Huysmans’s
because he is credited with the replacement of realism with idealism, and
the achievement has also been described in natural terms. For example,
Schopenhauer, in his “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy” (1819), uses
the following analogy to describe the revolution introduced by his
predecessor:
The same thing must once have happened in nature, when a great
revolution altered the whole surface of the earth, sea, and land changed
places, and the scene was leveled for new creation. It was then a long time
before nature could produce a new series of lasting forms, each in harmony
with itself and with the rest. Strange and monstrous organisms appeared
which did not harmonize with themselves or with one another, and could
not last. But it is just the remains of these, still in existence, which have
brought down to us the memorial of that wavering and tentative procedure
of nature forming herself anew.42
While Schopenhauer predicts a return to the usual as nature returns to

form “herself anew,” the “monstrous organisms” of the interim period
recall the gangrenous flowers des Esseintes produces in his greenhouse.
Schopenhauer predicts a return to the positive, affirmative control of
nature, while Huysmans asserts the unleashing of a new creative process
that proposes to incite nature’s demise.
There is a gendering to the reproductive process des Esseintes claims.
Is it in des Esseintes’s greenhouse and laboratory that we see a shift to
more masculine forms of reproduction, thus severing the link with nature?
Is it simply because he is a man that his creations are regarded as
“perverse,” the word Max Nordau uses in Degeneration? Obviously there
are problems with this assertion: one need only recall the persecution and
condemnation of Oscar Wilde to shy away from such a conclusion. But
there is in Huysmans’s novel evidence of a strongly misogynistic stance
that remains to be justified. Des Esseintes’s project of separating the
intellect from materiality is accompanied by a quite aggressive turn
against the female body. Is it a necessary consequence of the aesthetic goal
he has in mind? I will first consider why the move away from materiality
is particularly problematic for women, and will, in a second section,
consider why this poses difficulties for the artist protagonist of A rebours
as well.
Des Esseintes creates hideous flowers in his laboratory as a slap in the
face to nature, whom he nicknames “the old crone.”43 And he can’t seem
to stop the stream of name-calling:
Stubborn, muddle-headed and narrow-minded though she is, she has at last
submitted, and her master has succeeded in changing the soil components
by means of chemical reactions, in utilizing slowly matured combinations,
carefully elaborated crossings, in employing cuttings and graftings
skillfully and methodically, so that now he can make her put forth
blossoms of different colors on the same branch, invents new hues for her,
and modifies at will the age-old shape of her plants.44
Des Esseintes proposes to go much further than Baudelaire, who journeys

to “those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetation of the sick
mind flourish,”45 in that he proposes to leave nature altogether as a
creative active space. He decides nature has had her day, and that “the
time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible.”46
Any natural object, des Esseintes boasts, can be flawlessly reproduced,
even women, and he provides the example of two new trains to prove his
conjecture.47
In a novel that features few women—and between the examples of a
dominatrix ventriloquist, an elderly female servant desexualized and
hidden from view by the costume of the convent, and a hungry hoard of
prostitutes—the female body, the Flower, becomes a symbol not of
regenerative capacity, as in Zola’s example, but instead a symbol of
nature’s death. Women are saddled with the death of something predicted
to have no afterlife. Women are consistently linked with corporeality and
are humiliated in that embodiment rather than accorded the possibility of
transcendence, of accessing a spiritual world. As Robert Baldick notes, in
A rebours and En rade women were depicted as “unclean and diseased,”
and, in an article on Degas in Certains,
Huysmans congratulated the artist on his courage in showing the idolized

creature “tubbing herself in the humiliating postures demanded by her
toilet,” in depicting her “frog-like and simian attitudes,” and in laying bare
“the humid horror of a body which no washing can purify.”48
Modernity, in des Esseintes’s imagination, is a “ruthless machine”

chewing up those unfortunate enough to be in its path.49
The turn against the female body in the new style has been
documented by Pierrot, who writes, “The artist, the dandy, will accept
Woman in her pure carnal existence, and will use her body alone as a
springboard to the aesthetic world.”50 The use of individual bodies as
symbols uncomfortably blurs the line between reality and the imaginary,
between the real persecution of women and the imaginative creation of a
new style.
V.
For Schopenhauer, it is the separation between ideal and real that Kant
introduces that leads to the independence of the intellect from the material
world. Confounding the two once again is what post-Kantian interpretations
get wrong, according to Schopenhauer:
now if, in accordance with the above, the distinction of the phenomenon
from the thing-in-itself, and hence the doctrine of the complete diversity of
the ideal from the real, is the fundamental characteristic of the Kantian
philosophy, then the assertion of the absolute identity of the two, which
appeared soon afterwards, affords a melancholy proof of the saying of
51
Goethe.
The saying from Dichtung und Wahrheit runs, “just as the water displaced
by a ship immediately flows in again behind it, so, when eminent minds
have pushed error on one side . . . it naturally closes in behind them again
very rapidly.”52 For Schopenhauer, this distinction between the
phenomenon and the thing-in-itself was Kant’s principal merit.53 The
result of this separation, on Schopenhauer’s reading, is that being is
dispensed with. He writes: “This world that appears to the senses has no
true being, but only a ceaseless becoming . . . its comprehension is not so
much a knowledge as an illusion.”54 In contrast to all previous philosophers,
Kant, in Schopenhauer’s reading, shows that laws “that appear to rule with
inviolable necessity” are not, after all, absolute.55 What Kant introduces is
a new intermediary, the importance of the subject’s way of knowing in
order to construct the laws that govern the world’s—and the subject’s
own—existence. With his revolution, Kant throws into question the
veritates aeternae common to all dogmatic philosophy, which are now
seen to originate “in man’s head, . . . [to] spring from the forms properly
belonging to it.”56 A new unity is broached in the place of nature with all
of its laws, and it is the unity imposed by the subject, primarily in terms of
mental operations. The coherence of the world is shifted from forms found
in the object to the forms found in the mind.
Des Esseintes’s experimentations suggest a similar belief in the
separability of the ideal from the real world. Insofar as des Esseintes
replaces the creative-active force of nature with his own will, the reader
might expect that he will similarly replace natural law with an artificial
law, and that, as its author, he will master these rules in order to lend
coherence and stability to his own fancy. The beginnings of this control
are present in the novel, as des Esseintes succeeds in manipulating color,
taste, and perfumes in his laboratory. What quickly becomes apparent,
however, is that the artist can indeed create an artificial world, but he is
wholly incapable of controlling it. This lack of command can be seen in
the transports to which des Esseintes falls prey. In the course of
concocting melodies from liquors with his “mouth organ,” des Esseintes is
“forcibly”57 removed from the fire-lit warmth of his armchair to the
painful memory of a tooth extraction.58 From the assault of these
memories, he stands up in order to break the “horrid fascination” of the
vision.59 His imaginative production is constantly limited by a return to his
senses and a return to the present; the form of his imaginings has not, in
fact, broken free of space and time so as to proceed unimpeded by sensory
recall to the present. In this, des Esseintes’s aspirations to the infinite are
met with second-rate results, and he is returned from the unlimited reach
of the mind through time to the limitations of the individual body as a
source of coherence.
In the breakdown of this control, we come to the importance of
primary and secondary qualities of objects. For what des Esseintes proves
capable of manipulating in his laboratory work are the secondary qualities
of objects. In his “Criticism,” Schopenhauer notes that Locke is the source
of this discrimination, which provides Kant with the means to differentiate
the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.60 Locke had shown that the
secondary qualities “sound, odor, color, hardness, softness, [and]
smoothness . . . founded on the affectations of the senses, do not belong to
the objective body, to the thing-in-itself.”61 What the artist has not been
able to create, or control, are the primary qualities of objects, “space and
impenetrability, and so extension, shape, solidity, number, [and] mobility.”62
Even at the far remove of Fontenay, these qualities are still firmly
within the purview of nature. As des Esseintes regains his bearings after
his nightmare, he becomes aware of a dread for his tortoise, whose
carapace he had earlier coated in gold and precious jewels to create a
pleasing effect. It is dead.
VI.
In his “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” Schopenhauer is tempted
to conclude that it is possible that “the world is my representation”
because Kant fails to explain the origin of empirical perception, leaving
any impressions of “the world” on a subjective basis. Schopenhauer
remains unconvinced by Kant’s repeated insistence that “The empirical
part of perception is given from without.”63 He concludes: “Empirical
perception actually is and remains our mere representation; it is the world
as representation.”64 This forms one of his chief critiques of Kant.
However, empirical perception in Kant’s First Critique is based on the
stability of substance, which depends upon qualities in the unknowable
things-in-themselves, rather than the finite mind or will.
Kant makes frequent recourse to the immutability of substance in the
critique. For the philosopher, “the proposition, put forward by some
ancient schools, that everything in the world is in flux and nothing is
permanent and enduring cannot be upheld once one assumes
substances.”65 One of Kant’s more striking passages illustrates this point:
Suppose that cinnabar were now red, then black, now light, then heavy; or
that a human being were changed now into this then into that animal shape;
or that on the longest day of the year the land were covered now with fruit,
then with ice and snow. In that case my empirical imagination could not
even get the opportunity, when presenting red color, to come to think of
heavy cinnabar. Nor could an empirical synthesis of reproduction take
place if a certain word were assigned now to this and then to that thing, or
if the same thing were called by this, and now by another name, without
any of this being governed by a certain rule to which appearances by
themselves are already subject.66
For Kant, nature uniquely exhibits repetition, pattern, and stability, qualities
that are necessary in order to obtain any sense of it at all.67
Constant flux, immediacy of change, such as what des Esseintes
creates as an affront to nature, presents severe obstacles to perception.
While the possibility of cinnabar being red one minute and black the next
cannot exist in nature, one might bring this very effect about through
alchemy, as delightfully and destructively explored by des Esseintes. But
his aim is revealed to be contradictory when he attempts to do away with
the fixity and stability he associates with nature and tradition and to
replace them with his own caprice. His conception of an imaginative
mobile order is brought to a halt by the heady decline of disease. Steeped
in the impermanence of a non-phenomenal world, des Esseintes has no
choice but to submit to the whims of time, and finally, to confront his own
finitude.
VII.
From his hero des Esseintes onwards, Huysmans writes consciousness
from the point of view that the supreme literary, existential moment is the
moment of the final agonies, the point at which the pain is nearly
unbearable. Huysmans’s works express a consistent desire to move
beyond the suffering of this sensual world to another, whether imaginary,
aesthetic, or even mystic, as his later conversion sequence shows.68
Through its gross caricature and fixation on the bodily trials undergone by
those who would banish corporeal form—the case of St. Lydwine offers a
particularly nauseating narrative of the worm-eaten saint—Huysmans’s
work suggests the tragic comedy of such an attempt. We have seen the
idealism of Symbolism in the proposal to separate the intellect from the
material world, in the refusal to return to the materiality of a natural world,
and in a return instead to the materiality of the body. The body, as an
object of resistance, becomes central, becomes a symbol. And yet, in its
relentless reference to the real world, the body creates real problems in this
position, as the protest of a feminine body, reduced to a form that is highly
sexualized, syphilitic, and silenced, indicates. The primary stimulus to
heroic elevation of the intellect over materiality was the sickness of the
age, the overtaking of nature by modernity. But in the return of nature,
which we witnessed in the space of dreams as well as of creation, we are
called on to reconsider the logic of the initial move. It is in the
reconsideration of the idealist move that we can understand how a literary
proposal to dispense with a view of literature as mimesis might end with
literature as “ideology.” And, out of the contradictions of these aims, we
might find a new route forward. That is assuming, of course, that we
would like to head forward, and not back.
Notes
1
Kenneth Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1951), 1.
2
For Michael Gibson, “Decadence” is the “issue” of Symbolism. Symbolism
(Köln: Taschen, 1999), 27. For Jean Pierrot, “Décadence et Symbolisme sont, non
pas deux écoles, comme on tend généralement à le faire croire, mais deux phrases
successives d’un même mouvement, deux étapes de la révolution poètique.”
L’Imaginaire Décadente 1880-1900 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1977), 13.
3
It also, as is clear from the above quote, introduces a biological metaphor. This is
discussed in Riffaterre’s essay, “Decadent Paradoxes.” Perennial Decay: On the
Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, Matthew
Potolsky, Eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 65.
4
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and
Space in the 19th Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Books, 1979),
13.
5
Quoted in George L. Mosse’s introduction to Max Nordau’s Degeneration, trans.
George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), xxix. See Martin
Esslin, Das Theater des Absurden (Hamburg, 1965), 271-2 and August Strindberg,
Five Major Plays, trans. Carl R. Mueller (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2000).
6
See Charles Bernheimer, “Unknowing Decadence”: “In French literary history,
critics often present decadence as the antithesis of naturalism, subscribing to
Huysmans’s claim, in the preface he wrote twenty years after the book’s
publication, that A rebours made a complete rupture with its naturalist precedents.”
Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, Matthew Potolsky, eds., Perennial Decay: On the
Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1999), 58.
7
This movement is neatly encapsulated in Liz Constable’s introduction to
Perennial Decay, where she discusses decadence, from the Latin decadere, as
decline, decay, and loss of traditional values. Liz Constable, ed., Perennial Decay:
On the Aesthetics & Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1999), 2.
8
Pierrot, L’Imaginaire Décadente 1880-1900, 13.
9
Pierrot, for example, counts idealism among attributes of Symbolism:
“importance de la musique, adoption du vers libre et fréquence des discussions
techniques, idéalisme philosophique, goût pour l’univers du rêve et des légendes,
enfin abondance d’oeuvres à double sens.” Ibid., 14. He later returns to it as an
especially confusing term, meaning: “idéalisme transcendental niant la possibilité
pour l’homme de connaître le monde extérieur et l’enfermant dans la cage du
solipsisme, la croyance en une rationalité du monde susceptible d’être mise en
évidence par le langage, et les rêveries confuses ou les pratiques suspectes des
tenants d’un occultisme multiforme.” Ibid., 14-15. Lehmann examines the
philosophical connection in detail. His discussion of what idealism meant in
France between 1880-90 begins on page 39 of The Symbolist Aesthetic in France:
1885-1895, 2nd Ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). The collection of
essays in Lost Paradise use the term more loosely, as the antithesis of naturalism,
the turn from materialism, or the suspension of reason. Jean Clair, Lost Paradise:
Symbolist Europe. (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995), 183, 233,
267. This is the definition more likely to be taken up in general introductions. The
introduction to Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Eve Futur, for example, notes that
“positive idealism . . . contrasts absolutely with the grubby colors, shapes, and
smells, and much more painfully with the ignoble compromises—of this low world
in the here and now.” And: “Idealism is expressed not in seeking the best of
pragmatic values, but in rejecting them all for something more spiritual, less easily
definable, closer to the absolute. Both idéal and azur imply, as much as aspiration
upward, abhorrence of materiality” (xxi). See also Evelyn Bristol, “Idealism and
Decadence in Russian Symbolist Poetry,” Slavic Review 39.2 (June 1980): 269-
280 and Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New
York: New York University Press, 1977). Here I am interested in a definition that
might both encompass and help clarify the various disparate meanings of the term.
10
Paul de Man, “Kant and Schiller,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 146.
11
While it might appear odd to call literature to task for incorrectly interpreting
philosophy, there is some precedent for this. A. G. Lehmann argues that French
Symbolists were interested in imported German ideas for their “potential for
polemic,” for the possibility that these “high-sounding propositions” might cause a
stir in an age occupied with more scientific pursuits. He does not, in his own study,
explicate literary examples. The Symbolist Aesthetic in France: 1885-1895, 47.
12
Paul de Man, “The Double Aspect of Symbolism,” in “Phantom Proxies:
Symbolism and the Rhetoric of History,” special issue, Yale French Studies 74
(1988): 4. Arthur Symons, in his influential study, made an even grander claim,
setting out from the statement that there is no literature without symbols. The
Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1971), 1.
13
Joris-Karl Huysmans, A rebours, ed. Marc Fumaroli, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard,
1977). “Il faut que je me réjouisse au-dessus du temps . . . , quoique le monde ait
horreur de ma joie, et que sa grossièreté ne sache pas ce que je veux dire.”
Translated by Robert Baldick as Against Nature, ed. Patrick McGuinness (New
York: Penguin Books, 2003). In his notes to his English translation of the novel,
Baldick traces this quotation to Ernest Hello’s 1869 translation of Jan Van
Ruysbroeck’s (or Ruysbroeck the Admirable) Noces Spirituelles. See epigraph and
note 7 to chapter 12.
14
Baldick, Robert, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (London: Dedalus, 2006), 135.
“Naturaliste naguère et maintenant spiritualiste jusqu’au mysticisme le plus exalté,
le plus magnifiquement ambitieux et qui se sépare autant de crapuleux Zola que si
touts les espaces interplanétaires s’étaient soudainement accumulés entre eux.
Lisez plutôt la hautaine et abolissante épigraphe de son livre” (298). Baldick, in his
biography of Huysmans, quotes this passage from Bloy’s review, and chooses to
render “spiritualiste” as “Idealist.” The translation of the first sentence is Baldick; I
have appended the second sentence “Just. . . book” in my own translation.
15
Joris-Karl Huysmans. Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (New York :
Penguin, 2003), 23. "Quelle banale agence de montagnes et de mers!" Huysmans.
A rebours (Paris : Gallimard, 1977), 103.
16
Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Baldick, 101. “Quand elle n’avait pu imiter
l’œuvre humaine, elle avait été réduite à recopier les membranes intérieures des
animaux, à emprunter les vivaces teintes de leurs chairs en pourriture, les
magnifiques hideurs de leurs gangrenes.” A rebours, 192-193.
17
Huysmans, Against Nature, 90. A rebours, 197. "Soufflant deux jets de vapeur
qui puaient le phenol.”
18
Against Nature, 91. A rebours, 198.
19
Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 245.
20
Nordau, Degeneration, 3.
21
It should be understood that Symons speaks of des Esseintes as the artist in his
own discussion, while Nordau focuses on the health of the author.
22
Huysmans, Against Nature, 166. A rebours, 297. “De confus désirs de
migration.”
23
Against Nature, 167. A rebours, 298. “Loin de notre vie mesquine, il évoquait
les éclats asiatiques des vieux âges.”
24
Ibid. “La nostalgie du siècle précédent, un retour vers les élégances d’une
société à jamais perdue.”
25
Against Nature, 168-169. A rebours, 301."Son tempérament, puissant, solide."
26
Against Nature, 169. A rebours, 301. “Le jour où lui-aussi, il avait été obsédé
par cette nostalgie, par ce besoin qui est en somme la poésie même, de fuir loin de
ce monde contemporain qu’il étudiait, il s’était rué dans une idéale campagne, où
la sève bouillait au plein soleil.”
27
Against Nature, 169. A rebours, 301."Fantastiques ruts du ciel, à de longues
pâmoisons de terre, à de fécondations pluies de pollen tombant dans les organes
haletants des fleurs" and "dont les larges teintes, plaquées à cru, avaient comme un
bizarre éclat de peinture Indienne."
28
Against Nature, 183. .” A rebours, 301, 320. “La matière, animée, vivante” and
“une communion de pensée, une collaboration spirituelle."
29
Against Nature, 134. A rebours, 254. “Langue musculeuse et charnue,”
“l’inexprimable.”
30
Against Nature, 165. A rebours, 296. “Une œuvre d’art et pour ce qu’elle était
pour elle-même et pour ce qu’elle pouvait permettre de lui prêter ; il voulait aller
avec elle, grâce à elle, comme soutenu par un adjuvant, comme porté par un
véhicule, dans une sphère où les sensations sublimées lui imprimeraient une
commotion inattendue et dont il chercherait longtemps et même vainement à
analyser les causes.
31
Against Nature, 165. A rebours, 296. “Monde contemporaine qu’il tenait en une
croissante horreur.”
32
Against Nature, 166. A rebours, 297. “En complète communion d’idées avec les
écrivains qui les avaient conçues, parce qu’ils s’étaient alors trouvés dans une
situation d’esprit analogue à la sienne.” The tenor of this quote is carried nearly
unchanged into Modernism with Stephen’s words in Ulysses: “When one reads
these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who
once.” James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 40.
33
Chapter 12, in particular, contains a long appreciative passage (see Husymans,
Against Nature, 132-34). Baldick also notes in his biography that Huysmans
“described Redon as one of Baudelaire’s spiritual offspring and added: ‘With him
we delight in loosing our earthly bonds and floating away into the world of
dreams, a hundred thousand leagues away from all schools of painting, ancient or
modern.’ Soon Huysmans, too, was to look to Baudelaire for inspiration, to seek to
escape from his ‘earthly bonds,’ and to turn from the student of contemporary life
to an exploration of the world of dreams.” The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 111.
34
Translation mine.
35
The manuscript of this essay was transcribed and edited by Thomas Pepper, who
notes it was likely written between 1954 and 1956.
36
De Man, “The Double Aspect of Symbolism,” 7.
37
Ibid. De Man’s translation.
38
Against Nature, 184. A rebours, 321. “Une littérature, irréparablement atteinte
dans son organisme, affaiblie par l’âge des idées, épuisée par les excès de la
syntaxe, sensible seulement aux curiosités qui enfièvrent les malades et cependant
pressée de tout exprimer à son déclin, acharnée à vouloir réparer toutes les
omissions de jouissance, à léguer les plus subtils souvenirs de douleur, à son lit de
mort, s’était incarnée en Mallarmé, de la façon la plus consommée et la plus
exquise.”
39
Against Nature, 184. A rebours, 321. “Fines et puissantes substances,” “l’agonie
de la vieille langue qui, après s’être persillée de siècle en siècle, finissait par se
dissoudre.”
40
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36.
41
Despite its obvious faults—such as the decision that Symbolists, Decadents, and
pornographers or realists are all degenerate—Nordau’s Degeneration is actually
very good on the linguistic nature of Huysmans’s work, describing in lavish detail
the large sores Huysmans made to hang on the Latin tongue. See 32, 300. In his
notes to the reprint of Baldick’s 1956 translation of A rebours, Patrick McGuinness
notes that, during the period in which Huysmans was writing, Decadence referred
to innovations in language, and was thus thoroughly anticlassical (see fn. 1, 232).
Weir also discusses how decadence pursues an escape from nature through
language: “The language, in fact, manifests the two directions away from the
natural or normative state of being which the decadent, in his attempt to escape
from nature, may pursue.” David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 93.
42
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J.
Payne (Indian Hills: The Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958), 1:426.
43
Against Nature, 23. A rebours, 103. “Cette sempiternelle radoteuse.”
44
Against Nature, 88. A rebours, 194. “Si entêtée, si confuse, si bornée qu’elle
soit, elle s’est enfin soumise et son maître est parvenu à changer par des réactions
chimiques les substances de la terre, à user de combinaisons longuement mûries,
de croisements lentement apprêtés, à se servir de savantes boutures, de
méthodiques greffes, et il lui fait maintenant pousser des fleurs de couleurs
différentes sur la même branche, invente pour elle de nouveaux tons, modifie, à
son gré, la forme séculaire de ses plantes, débrutit les blocs, termine les ébauches,
les marque de son étampe, leur imprime son cachet d’art.”
45
Against Nature, 132. A rebours, 252-53. "avait abouti à ces districts de l’âme où
se ramifient les végétations monstrueuses de la pensée."
46
Against Nature, 23. A rebours, 103. “Le moment est venu où il s’agit de la
remplacer, autant que faire se pourra, par l’artifice.”
47
Ibid.
48
Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 210.
49
Ibid.
50
Pierrot, L’Imaginaire Décadente 1880-1900, 158. “L’artiste, le dandy,
accepteront la Femme, dans sa pure existence charnelle, et utiliseront son seul
corps comme un tremplin vers l’univers esthétique.”
51
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 418.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid., 417.
54
Ibid., 419.
55
Ibid., 420.
56
Ibid., 421.
57
Against Nature, 45, 47. A rebours, 133, 136. “Orgue à bouche,” “forcément.”
58
The “involuntary” nature of memory here is closely related to Proust’s
researches in time. McGuinness notes the frequency of critical connections
between Proust and Huysmans in this regard. Against Nature, xxix. See also
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life:
Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2006).
59
Against Nature, 49. A rebours, 139. “Assaut,” “l’horrible charme.”
60
Schopenhauer, “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” 417.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid., 438.
64
Ibid., 436, 445.
65
Here Kant presents a critique of Epicurus. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of
Practical Reason (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1996), 405.
66
Ibid., 154.
67
While I gloss it here, the argument is familiar, and crops up in such works as
Paul Valéry’s “Method of Leonardo da Vinci” and Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage
Mind.
68
En route (1895), which, along with Là-bas (1891) and La cathédrale (1898),
forms this largely autobiographical sequence, details faithfully the virtuous path of
Trappist monks working to subordinate the body to the mind, even as this task is
revealed to involve nearly obscene repression and deprivation. The Catholic
Church condemned En route for this.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM, PATER,
AND THE HARD, GEMLIKE FLAME
WARREN JOHNSON
The histrionic cry of the protagonist at the conclusion of Villiers de

l’Isle-Adam’s Axël, “Living? The servants will do that for us,”1 encapsulates
Villiers’s rejection of the basely material in favor of imaginative illusion.
As the Count Axël d’Auërsperg and his beloved Sara contemplate
escaping the gloom of Axël’s castle in Villiers’s posthumously published
1890 drama, the Count’s aristocratic disdain of the outside world leads
him to understand that any realization of their plans of distant travels
would bring only disappointment compared with the exaltation of their
dreams, and so the only solution is to eternalize those dreams in mutual
suicide.
Far more muted in tone, Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885)—
whose nebulous narrative structure distinguishes it as starkly from the
realist novel as Villiers’s grandiose, Wagnerian magnum opus differs from
the conventional turn-of-the-century boulevard play—follows a similar
pattern of thesis, antithesis, and momentary synthesis that can only lead to
death. The juxtaposition of these two texts, nearly contemporaneous but
each unique as fin-de-siècle responses to modernity, throws light on the
project at the heart of Symbolism to situate the individual at an
aestheticized distance from the positivistic materialism of the late
nineteenth century while at the same time seeing the connection to the
spiritual realm as partaking of a complex of fluid correspondences rather
than of fixed doctrine. Villiers’s ambiguous reaction to technology and
modernity, his elusive relation to the spiritual, and his “illusionism” that
requires a duality of perspective can be seen as parallel to Pater’s religious
doubt and self-questioning about solipsism that are inextricably bound to
his aestheticism. Reading Villiers through Pater helps us see how Villiers’s
illusionism, like Pater’s pursuit of the beautiful as substitute religion,
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Pater, and the Hard, Gemlike Flame 329
depends on an intense hesitation, on maintaining in suspension disparate

ideas in a heightened aesthetic experience.
The carefully constructed, diaphanous prose of Pater’s first of several
volumes of essays and lectures, The Renaissance (1873), retains its
capacity to entice, and the famous Conclusion puts forth in succinct and
dangerously seductive form the major tenets of his aestheticism that will
be gradually modified later. Beginning with the observation that the
inconstancy of life is a commonplace of modern thought, Pater goes on to
claim that this flux is further restricted by the confines of the “thick wall of
personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to
us.”2 Immured within ourselves, we cannot apprehend ideal essences—
Kant provides a modern corrective to Pater’s instinctive Platonism—and
so what is most valuable is not understanding, but our inner experience of
the outside world. “A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a
variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in
them by the finest senses?”3 Concentrating vital forces within the
experience, focusing them and sustaining them, is the goal. “To burn
always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in
life.”4
The brevity of the Conclusion to The Renaissance required expansion
and modification in Marius the Epicurean. The historical setting of the
novel in the second century AD allows Pater to cast off the disparaging
modern connotations of the term epicurean and to emphasis the
movement’s contribution to refining the energy of individual experience.
While becoming close to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and hence the very
center of power, Marius is indifferent to the political sphere, like his
creator, instead opening himself to the competing philosophical stances
surrounding him while finally rejecting the negativity of a vision of the
world as mere flux in favor of a cultivation of his own experience.
Although an important influence on his Oxford students, notably Oscar
Wilde, Pater did not begin to be translated into French until the Symbolist
movement was already spent (the first of his works to appear in French,
Imaginary Portraits, came out in 1899), and his impact in France during
the lifetime of Villiers, who died in 1889, was essentially nil. The first real
attention paid to Pater in the French press (after a brief mention by Paul
Bourget in 1887) was a series of articles by Teodor de Wyzewa beginning
in the January 1889 issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes. As Ruth Z.
Temple points out, most influence during the Symbolist period was from
France to England, rather than the other way around. John J. Conlon notes
that while Pater was much influenced by Baudelaire and the literary
portraits of Sainte-Beuve and had a complex admiration for Flaubert, he
330 Chapter Eighteen
chose not to write on more contemporary figures, even refusing to see

Verlaine read when the Symbolist poet was in Oxford. The historian and
classicist Pater, despite his knowledge of French and travels on the
Continent, was almost certainly unfamilar with Villiers although he did
meet Mallarmé—a meeting where both men sat in absolute silence, despite
their mutual admiration. To evoke Pater in discussing Villiers’s illusionism
(to use A. W. Raitt’s term in his seminal study of the relations between
Villiers and Symbolism) is therefore to make a claim not of influence, but
of the confluence of two distinct but related responses to similar intellectual
currents in the 1870s and 80s, specifically, the inadequacy of materialism
and positivism (even of Matthew Arnold’s injunction to “see the object as
in itself it really is”), and of a naturalistic aesthetic that subsumed the
individual psyche to the instinctual or collective bête humaine.
That imperative of illusion in Villiers—the necessity of maintaining in
suspension two seemingly incompatible notions, a disabused awareness of
eternal flux and the falsity of appearances and a concomitant belief in the
reality of invisible essences, while at the same time sustaining a belief in
what is known to be false—is apparent early on, in “Véra” (originally
published 1873, collected in the Contes cruels (Cruel Tales) in 1883).
Plunged into melancholy by the death of Véra, his wife of only six months,
the Comte d’Athol attempts to maintain the fiction of her live presence to
himself and his servant, until the truth slips from him—“But you are
dead!” he cries out5—and the illusion vanishes, to his chagrin. Negatively—
and most of the Cruel Tales are a frontal assault on materialism and
positivism—“Le désir d’être un homme” (The Desire to Be a Man)
describes the frightful crime that a former actor commits in an attempt to
feel an authentic emotion, remorse, and his failure to evoke any feeling. As
Pater says, not experiencing the sort of heightened sensation he advocates
is “to sleep before evening,”6 so the actor’s inner vacuity means he has
been an emotional somnambulist. This dualistic illusionism contrasts with
simple trickery, such as the various gadgets enumerated in “La machine à
gloire” (The Glory Machine) that assist those hired to applaud at a theatre
in order to give the impression of a popular success.
The early Contes cruels constitute a necessary clearing of an
imaginative space free of the deceptions of the dominant ideologies in the
last decades of the nineteenth century. In their mordancy, these tales
distance the reader from the characters who are hardly more than straw
men, leaving little room for the second, countervailing element in
Villiers’s illusionism, an aspiration toward an ideal realm that will sustain
a belief in a perfection that is unachievable on earth. That balancing force
of illusion is the subject of Villiers’s only completed novel, L’Eve future

(Eve of the Future Eden, 1886).
The Thomas Edison of the novel, who both is based on the living
figure and distinct from him, decides to assuage the disappointment of his
friend Lord Ewald, who is troubled that the banal character of his beloved
Alicia Clary does not match her physical beauty. The solution will be to
create an android perfectly resembling Alicia, but whose “golden
cylinders” house a repertory of recordings that give the illusion of an
exalted soul. For Ewald, whose eroticism is already imbued with an
aesthetic impulse to combine the physical and the spiritual, and who is led
to be further disabused by Edison’s cynical revelations of the perfidy of
women, no living companion will be adequate to his dreams.
The necessity of believing in the fiction of the android while at the
same time recognizing its falsity, of maintaining in suspension the
awareness of the android’s mechanical nature and the wish to believe in its
reality, is key to the success of Edison’s project. Such a suspension—a
“willing suspension of disbelief” as it were—means that the body of the
android acts like a literary text that is both known to be invented and yet in
which the reader feels an involvement as if the characters were real.7 The
duplicitous status of the character of Edison, as both modeled on a real
individual and as fiction, reinforces the elision between the android and
text of L’Eve future, making both into “correspondences” that mediate
between the material world and the spiritual ideal. As in the process of
reading the novel itself, the illusion of the android depends on an aesthetic
response that is fundamentally unique to Ewald as it is to each individual
reader of the literary text, and it is only partially conditioned by narrative
codes, generic conventions, and the like.
For Pater, it is futile to discuss aesthetic theory in the abstract,
believing as he does instead in the primacy of the individual experience
faced with the work of art; the goal of criticism, and an enlightened
experience of the work whether expounded in writing or not, is to refine
that experience, to chisel away commonplace responses in order to reach
the authenticity of the way the work affects the individual. As catalyst to
the aesthetic experience, the work must both attract our affective energies
and maintain a distance that allows a detached contemplation.
The android, as a work of Edison’s art, exists not as mechanical toy—
the idea of mass producing them evokes a sardonic laugh in the inventor—
but as a device to help bridge the material and spiritual. The site of that
connection will be in the aesthetic response of Lord Ewald. Pater’s
emphasis on the inner response of the individual to the work of art, a
radical displacement from the traditional location of aesthetic value in the
object of contemplation itself, parallels therefore this shift toward dualistic

illusionism.
Certainly important differences exist between the relative passivity of
Pater’s aestheticism and the intense nervous energy underlying Villiers’s
illusionism. Pater’s Marius begins his journeys with a desire to see clearly,
refine, and select—or what Pater calls discriminate—what is worthy and
beautiful from what is not, and his contacts with Cyrenaicism, Stoicism,
and finally Christianity in a sense only strengthen his impulse to see the
aesthetic experience as breaking apart and defining, which rather than
being a sterile formalism maintains the constancy of the “hard, gemlike
flame” of aesthetic experience. For Villiers, the urge to ridicule is strong,
and must be counterbalanced by an equally intense will to believe—
whence the double dedication of L’Eve future to “mockers and dreamers.”8
Villiers’s illusionism depends on a deliberate decision to act as if. But the
crucial displacement of aesthetics from the object to the observer, a key
moment in the modernist sensibility, nonetheless links these two figures,
as does the dualism of the conscious self acting on its own impressions of
the outside world.
That sensibility for Pater is founded not merely on the recognition that
the world is in constant flux—a notion whose modernity is relative, as
Pater points out, since its philosophical origins lie in Heraclitus—but on
the refusal of negativity that can arise when confronted with impermanence.
Pater’s Marius finds himself first attracted to the Cyrenaics, whose
response to this flux is selfish indulgence, then compelled to reject it as
equally meaningless as the inconstant material world. Villiers’s Ewald,
despairing of the radical dissociation between physical beauty and spiritual
emptiness, has to be led from suicidal depression by the mechanically
assisted fantasy life that Edison offers. Both Pater and Villiers (at least in
this text) suggest that the proper response to inconstancy is a kind of
Pascalian wager, not necessarily that a superior being exists, but that we
must act as though the ideal realm can be imaginatively, that is,
aesthetically, attained. Villiers’s contradictory relation to conventional
Catholicism has been analyzed by Sylvain Simon, who notes that from an
adolescent rejection of faith, Villiers attempted a synthesis of Hegelian
idealism, occultism, and Christianity early in his career, only to impose a
more orthodox religious tone on his revisions of his texts later in life as he
grew closer to the Church. Pater, as a classicist much attracted to
Platonism, and Villiers, as ardently attached to divine revelation but, like
Pater, touched by the theological doubts of his times and alternate
philosophical approaches to religious questions, feel the pull of an ideal
sphere that may have no numenal reality, but that compels belief if one is
to cultivate the ideal beauty that is the ultimate goal of existence.
That ideal world is emphatically not congruent with temporal power in
Villiers, as the parallels between L’Eve future and Axël make clear. Axël
d’Auërsperg not only inhabits an impressive castle, but the forests
surrounding, as we learn, are filled with thousands of his loyal subjects
ready to obey his every command. Edison’s compound at Menlo Park is
protected by walls and various high tech devices that discourage the press
and other interlopers. Both of these men, who know themselves to be
superior beings, use spatial isolation, a favorite Symbolist topos, to
maintain their sense of power, yet in both cases, that distance and that
power ultimately fail to give them direct access to the ideal sphere. Edison
must create an android that he personally cannot invest with the cathexis
that only Ewald can muster, and Axël finally is reduced to living and
dying in the dreams of Sara, the refugee from the convent who has rejected
one kind of spirituality for another. Both Edison and Axël finally are
compelled to accept a vicarious grasping toward the ideal—not only do
their servants do their living for them, but others do their dreaming for
them as well.
The aesthetic ideal in Villiers, as in Pater, is closed off to those who
believe themselves masters in their realm. Marcus Aurelius, whose power
is unquestionably real, leads in fact a barren existence in keeping with his
Stoic beliefs, deprived not only of his personal wealth, which goes to the
war effort, but a sense of inner richness that sustains Marius. The forces
that the powerful direct outward must be, Pater and Villiers believed,
instead turned inward, compressing, forcing rough coal into diamonds
through the action of the consciousness and the will, purifying by the
gemlike flame. But the inward turn of mind is also constrictive of the self
at the same time as that self seeks to refine its sensations and aesthetic or
spiritual responses to the world. Pater’s “thick wall of personality” is
echoed in Edison’s remark to Ewald that “Man moves about in vain in the
moving prison of his EGO.”9 How to avoid the Scylla of solipsism while
distancing oneself as far as possible from the Charybdis of a deluded
investment in the material world is a central concern in Pater and Villiers,
as in the Symbolist movement as a whole. One escape route is precisely in
the constricting force of the self. Pater warns that this intensity must be
authentic, that the intensified experience must emanate from the true,
genuine passion, and the “poetic passion,” the desire for beauty, is the
finest, the only one that can give the highest satisfaction of each passing
moment “and simply for those moments’ sake.”10 For Villiers, the most
insidious constraints come from abandoning one’s own beliefs and sense
of self in favor of the doxa of the crowd, for demos is for the Count
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, intensely proud of his noble ancestry, almost by
definition always wrong. Merely isolating oneself either physically or
morally, however, is at best a half step. One must go beyond pure
negativity to attain—through the crystallizing process of the dreamer of
the ideal—a sphere that is necessarily a construct of the individual
imagination.
Despite the flaccidness of the narrative line in Marius the Epicurean
and the mellifluous meandering style in Pater’s other writings, underlying
Pater’s aestheticism is a combination of Dionysian and Apollonian forces.
While he strongly appreciates the “sweetness” of Michelangelo (and the
Renaissance in general), he also admires the strength (or what he calls
“convulsive energy”) that is the contribution of the Middle Ages to the art
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Villiers’s illusionism is likewise
dependent on a striving for an unattainable ideal that is channeled by
aesthetic constraints. Too much Dionysian force (even for the ideal) is
potentially self-destructive, as Lord Ewald contemplates suicide; too much
Apollonian control, like Axël until the conclusion of the play, is merely
vacuous. The two forces in Villiers must be maintained in suspension, in
constant tension, in order for that particular brand of aestheticized
satisfaction called illusionism to function. Maître Janus, the spiritual leader
of Axël, encourages his pupil to “develop in meditation, to purify, by the
fire of trials and sacrifices, the infinite influence of your will.”11 For Pater,
the greatest art, and the greatest appreciation of it, comes from the
authentic intensity arising from the meeting of expansive and constrictive
forces within the self—the hard gemlike flame.
In their searches for the ideal—emphatically aestheticized in the case
of Pater, spiritualized in the case of Villiers—both fin-de-siècle figures
seek to expand inner space while disparaging the deceptions of
materialism and of positivism. As Axël in the end comes to recognize,
abandoning the treasure hidden by his father at the moment of finding it,
“Man takes with him in death only what he renounced possession of in
life. In truth—we leave here only an empty shell. What makes the value of
this treasure lies in ourselves.”12
Bibliography
Conlon, John J. Walter Pater and the French Tradition. Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1982.
Johnson, Warren. “Machines and Malaise: Technology and the Comic in

Villiers and Allais.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 24 (1995-6):
192-202.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1910.
—. Marius the Epicurean. London: Macmillan, 1910. Two volumes.
Raitt, A. W. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam et le mouvemente symboliste. 2nd ed.
Paris: José Corti, 1986.
Simon, Sylvain. Le chrétien malgré lui, ou la religion de Villiers de l’Isle-
Adam. Paris: Association Découvrir, 1995.
Temple, Ruth Z. The Critics’ Alchemy: A Study of the Introduction of
French Symbolism into England. New York: Twayne, 1953.
Seiler, R. M., ed. Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1980.
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste. Œuvres complètes, edited by Alan Raitt
and Pierre-Georges Castex, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris:
Gallimard, 1986. Two volumes.
Notes
1
Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Œuvres complètes, ed. Alan Raitt and Pierre-
Georges Castex, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1986) 2:672. All
translations from the French are my own. “Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour
nous.”
2
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1910), 235.
3
Ibid., 236.
4
Ibid.
5
Villiers, Œuvres complètes, 1:560. “Mais tu es morte!”
6
Pater, Renaissance, 237.
7
In fact, some of Hadaly’s utterances are inspired by the ghostly Sowana, the
spiritual presence of a true wife abandoned by her husband for a false mistress.
8
Villiers, Œuvres complètes, 1:766. “Aux rêveurs, Aux railleurs.”
9
Ibid., 1:840. “l’Homme s’agit en vain dans la geôle mouvante de son MOI.”
10
Pater, Renaissance, 239.
11
Villiers, Œuvres complètes, 2:637. “développer dans la méditation, à purifier, au
feu des épreuves et des sacrifices, l’influx infini de ta volonté!”
12
Ibid., 2:674. “L’homme n’emporte dans la mort que ce qu’il renonça de posséder
dans la vie. En vérité—nous ne laissons ici qu’une écorce vide. Ce qui fait la
valeur de ce trésor est en nous-mêmes.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ AND SELF-PORTRAIT
IN DISGUISE
ROSINA NEGINSKY
Mallarmé’s poem Hérodiade was the poet’s life work. He started it at

the age of 22, in 1864, and died while working on it, in 1898, at the age of
56. Jean-Luc Steinmetz in Stéphane Mallarmé: L’absolu au jour le jour
(Stéphane Mallarmé: The Absolute from Day to Day) writes:
Even if there is a question in appearance of a woman, would Mallarmé

similar to Flaubert state: ‘Hérodiade is me,’ or should we understand that in
the risky place of Saint John the Baptist, it is appropriate to see him,
Mallarmé, as a herald in a desert of the new poetry?”1
Bertrand Marchal asserts that “Hérodiade is first of all a drama of spiritual

mutation, the drama in which those who wish will recognize Mallarmé.”2
Helen Zagona believes that “Hérodiade is the first major effort in which
Mallarmé attempted to project himself into a work in terms of an
extraordinary symbol.”3 Is this fatal poem Mallarmé’s self-portrait and, if
so, in what way?
The finished version of the poem Hérodiade consists of three parts:
“Overture” (“Ouverture ancienne”) — the Nurse’s monologue at the dawn
hour; “Scene” (“Scène”), a dialogue between Hérodiade and her Nurse,
which is the main part of the poem; and a short poem “Saint John’s Chant”
(“Le Cantique de saint Jean”), spoken by the decapitated head of St. John
the Baptist. During Mallarmé’s lifetime, only “Scène” was published, first
in the 1871 collection of poetry Le Parnasse contemporain (The
Contemporary Parnassus), and then in 1887 in the collection, Poetry
(Poésie). “Ouverture ancienne” and the third part, “Cantique de saint
Jean,” were published in 1926 and 1913, respectively, long after
Mallarmé’s death. However, these parts are inseparably connected and
they represent one story, painted in three panels—a triptych. They are also
part of the unfinished larger poem, Herodias’s Wedding (Les Noces
Stéphane Mallarmé and Self-Portrait in Disguise 337
d’Hérodiade), that was intended to encompass them. In 1898, when

Mallarmé was reworking Hérodiade into Les Noces d’Hérodiade, he
changed the structure of his poem, and clarified his message.4 In the final,
unfinished version of the poem, Mallarmé introduced the notion of viol
occulaire (visual rape), which corresponded to the metaphorical “love
affaire” between Hérodiade and John the Baptist. The clearer structure of
this version conveyed best Mallarmé’s message and the abstract nature of
his philosophy of creativity. Les Noces d’Hérodiade was also designed to
be the first part, or “Overture,” to Mallarmé’s Livre, Grande Oeuvre, the
Book that he dreamt of but did not have a chance to bring to life.
***
In one of the letters to his friend, Henri Cazalis, in 1864, before he
began to write Hérodiade, Mallarmé explained that he encountered the
Void (Néant). For him the Void meant the loss of faith in God and the loss
of faith in the typical romantic role of the poet—the poet was perceived as
a herald of divine reality on earth. But the Void, for him, also meant the
encounter with the Absolute, the perfect world, but not the divine one,
whose mystical experience and earthly loss led toward the feeling of
Nothingness (Néant).
Brent Judd in his thesis William Faulkner and the Symbolist Movement,
describing Thomas Williams’ depiction of mystical experience in his book
Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism, writes that the mystic and
mystical experience can be determined by a sense of the loss of a primeval
wholeness. He notes:
The mystic is one who has had an intense personal experience of the actual
Oneness of all things, leading to an acute awareness of the fractured nature
of reality in its present state.
As Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden of Eden and lost their
ideal (whole) relationship with God, the mystic, through an extraordinary
personal encounter, experiences the wholeness of this Ideal state of life
before losing it again and returning to the everyday world with an
awareness of what has been lost. . . .
The mystic returning from his mystical experience, experiences a
tremendous sense of loss. What he or she is left with is reduced to nothing
in comparison to the infinite. So the mystic comes to encounter the
Nothing, and by living in this Nothing, however excruciating such an
encounter may be, the mystic emerges with a new identity. The spiritual
masters of the past spoke of such an encounter with the Nothing as being in
a state of desolation. It is the feeling that one has been completely
abandoned by God. One feels as if everything that used to give life
338 Chapter Nineteen
meaning has been suddenly and violently ripped away.5
One can imagine that this may have been the experience that Mallarmé
went through when he began his Hérodiade. While writing, Mallarmé
decided that although God did not exist and the poet did not represent God
on earth, the poet was still a herald. The question for him was, then, the
herald of what? Through his mystical experience, Mallarmé came to the
conclusion that the poet was a herald of the Absolute. The Absolute then
became for him an embodiment of the ideal Beauty, the incarnation of the
sublime through poetry. Mallarmé wrote in July of 1866 that after he found
Nothingness, he found Beauty.6 On May 14, 1867, he reaffirmed his ideas:
I made a quite long descent to Nothingness to be able to talk with certainty.

There is only Beauty and only It has a perfect expression, Poetry.
Everything else is a lie.7
Thus for Mallarmé, the work of art, the poem, in order to represent the
Absolute or at least to aspire to that, must be beautiful. The poem then
becomes a symbol of Beauty, which in its turn when it is in its ideal state
becomes the symbol of the Absolute.
Mallarmé believed that poetry’s role is “To paint not the object, but the
effect it produces,”8 that “The verse should not be composed of words, but
of intentions, and all the words are wiped out by the sensation.”9 From
1864 on, Mallarmé searched for artistic ways to express these ideas.
Hérodiade is the work that is destined to bring metaphorically to life his
philosophy. At the same time, through that poem, Mallarmé aspires to
create a metaphorical self-portrait of his poetic soul, an image of his inner
world, that is involved in the process of creation, separation from, and then
reunion with his work of poetic art. As Charles Mauron wrote,
Herodiade, despite its verbal wealth, seems to be the most strange, the
most clumsy poem, and if I can use that term, the most “sub-marine” of the
French language. It can be understood fully only when we understand that
the poet is in communication with the depths of his subconscious.10
As Wallace Fowlie pointed out:
Hérodiade is not only an early poem which Mallarmé recast at the end of
his life. It is a poem he lived with or rather struggled with all his life, and it
illustrates perhaps better than any other piece Mallarmé’s intense love for a
poem and the desperate difficulty he underwent in achieving it, in finding
for it a form or expression suitable to translate the idea. On one level of
interpretation, Hérodiade is a cold virginal princess who stands aloof from
the world of men, but she may also represent the poem itself, so difficult to
seize and possess that the poet ultimately despairs of knowing it. Hérodiade
is therefore both a character whom Mallarmé tried to subdue, and a
mythical character whose meaning goes far beyond the comprehension of
the poet. She presides over Mallarmé’s life as poet in a dual role of
princess and myth, of character and symbol.11
The main character in the central part of the poem, “Scène,” is a

beautiful young blond princess, Hérodiade. Mallarmé explains in his
preface that by renaming Salomé Hérodiade, he hoped to put his character
apart from the biblical story and the stories built around the biblical story
of Salomé.
I left the name of Hérodiade to be able to make her clearly different from
Salomé who I would call modern or exhumed with her archaic crime—the
dance etc, to isolate her from the solitary paintings, expressing the event,
horrible and mysterious, and to make reflect what probably followed—
appearing with its attribute — the head of the Saint — the demoiselle
represents the monster of vulgar lovers of life — that adornment was
disturbing.12
Robert Cohn believes, though, that Hérodiade sounds like the French
words rose, Eros, and héros,13 and it could be one of the reasons why
Mallarmé preferred the name of Hérodiade to Salomé.
The kind of images and stories of Hérodiade/Salomé that Mallarmé
describes became widespread in nineteenth century art. In the Middle
Ages, there was a confusion between the roles of the mother and the
daughter. The daughter would often be named by the mother's name and
vice versa. The painter Henry Regnault, a friend of Mallarmé, killed
during the Prussian war in 1870, was the first in the nineteenth century to
paint his Salomé, who he called Hérodiade, as a young girl, a gypsy, the
central and the only figure in his painting. Although she holds the plate
with the sword, her plate does not contain the head, but only the weapon. It
makes the girl, Hérodiade/Salomé—not the head of John the Baptist—the
center of attention in Regnault's painting. This painting, in which
Hérodiade/Salomé is represented for her own sake, and not anymore as an
attribute of John the Baptist’s story, starts a new tradition in the history of
a femme fatale in art.
Mallarmé, however, follows that tradition only in appearance, since in
reality his purpose is to bring to the image of his Hérodiade another, more
important, personal meaning. His intention is to stress not her fatal dance
and the role she played in John the Baptist’s beheading, but rather her
character as he paints her in his poem. It is her character as a metaphor that
becomes essential in Mallarmé's poem. Under the guise of a femme fatale,

Mallarmé creates a vivid picture of Hérodiade’s unusual beauty and of her
inner being in order to make her the metaphor of his philosophy of
creation, the double symbol of the work of art, embracing both the poem
and the poet.
At the same time, the purpose of the unfinished Les Noces d’Hérodiade
was to metaphorically reflect the artist’s inner search for the poetic image
of the creation of the perfect work of art. That perfect work of art, the
perfect poem, the symbol of a perfect Beauty, would be the embodiment of
the Absolute.14 Les Noces was aimed at expressing symbolically the
moment when the artist merges with the Absolute and becomes inseparable
from it. For Mallarmé, he and his poem are one in the ideal world. In his
letters to Cazalis he writes:
Since our spirit is absolute, and since nothing can exist outside of the
Absolute, what is thought will make unity with the being who thinks; that
object is the shape of the thought itself, the action through which the
thought is produced. The idea . . . is above all. . . . In its essence it is what
the thinking is.
The goal to which the Absolute aspires, going from one state to another
is to arrive to the state, in which it will be identical to itself, the state in
which . . . the being would make one with the thought, the idea with the
reality, in which . . . the Absolute will recognize itself as an Absolute,
because it will know itself as such, and because to know itself as an
Absolute, means to be an Absolute. . . . The consciousness, says Hegel, is
aware of itself, and the consciousness that is aware of itself is the
Absolute.15
How can the character of Hérodiade be a reflection of both the poet and
the poem, and in what way is Les Noces, metaphorically speaking, a
spiritual path of the poet toward the achievement of the Absolute?
In the “Ouverture ancienne” and especially in the “Scène,” Mallarmé
creates the metaphor of a poet through an image of Hérodiade as a young,
beautiful, and unusual princess who rejects the outside world and feels at
home only with the world of her own. That image is painted through
Hérodiade’s monologues and dialogues with the Nurse and through the
contrast in the personalities of both women.
The Nurse symbolizes the ideas of the past. Her age is an implication
of her inability to belong to the new era and new perception of the world.
She represents the older generation, the generation of the “fathers” who
are often unable to understand the “sons.” But she is also the embodiment
of the old dead religion and of an old magic. She is a metaphor for both the
traditional religion and the traditional art that Mallarmé rejected when “he
discovered the Void while 'digging' the verse” (il a trouvé le Néant en
creusant le ver).16
Bertrand Marchal points out that “The first period of the drama
[“Overture”] is dedicated to the abandonment of the religious aspirations,
symbolized by the fires of the dawn and the decoration by the magicians in
the room of a shape of the Church.”17 The Nurse is depicted as a
personification of the ghost of Sybille, who comes out of the tapestry to
play the role of birds who predict evil when they encounter things they do
not understand. Bertrand Marchal writes: “From the abolished Nurse
whose dress melts with the decoration of the tapestry, there is only the
ghost of the dead religion who is left.”18
For her, from her early age, Hérodiade is a mystery, and the Nurse does
not understand her and her world.
The princess is an unusual child, she is

the child exiled in her own precious heart
like a swan veiling its eyes in its plumage
as the old swan plunged them there, and passed through
from the perturbed quills into the timeless avenue
leaving all hope, to see the diamond prize
of a star that no longer shines, but dies.19
As is often the case, that lack of understanding makes one — in this case,
the Nurse — see a dark cloud in Hérodiade’s future. “Will he [Herodiade’s
father] return some day from the Cisalpine lands! Soon enough? For all
things are bad dreams and ill omens!”20
Herodiade, in contrast to the Nurse, becomes the symbol of the new
religion that Mallarmé discovered, the religion of Beauty aspiring toward
the Absolute, incarnated in mystery and created through the special sounds
of poetic music. Like Mallarmé, Hérodiade belongs to the new generation,
new ideas and new art. She is an embodiment of a new era, of times to
come.
Hérodiade, as a metaphor for a poet, fits within Mallarméen philosophy,
which he stated in his article “Hérésies artistiques: L’Art pour tous”
(“Artistic Heresies: Art for Everybody”). In that article, Mallarmé expands
on his concept of art. He believes that, “Everything sacred and that would
like to remain sacred wraps itself in mystery.”21 Mallarmé despised crowds
and popularity, because for him true art could not be exposed to “profane
minds incapable of disinterested contemplation of its deepest significance.”22
He wrote:
That a philosopher searches for popularity . . . but that a poet — the

admirer of beauty inaccessible to vulgarity — does not limit himself for the
suffrages of the Sanhedrin of art, irritates me, and I do not understand it.
A man can be a democrat, but the artist doubles himself and must
remain an aristocrat.23
His princess, already inaccessible to the mind of a common person,

personified in her Nurse, is Mallarmé himself, a poet, “the admirer of
beauty inaccessible to vulgarity.”
If in “Ouverture” Mallarmé depicts Hérodiade as a person predisposed
toward the unusual—a metaphor for the poet who is in the process of
growing and becoming aware of who he is — in the second part, “Scène,”
through the character of Hérodiade, Mallarmé creates the next stage of the
creative process. He creates the image of the poet, himself, in the process
of creating his work of art, his poem, before he gives it birth and releases it
to the world of readers.
Hérodiade’s withdrawal within herself, her aspiration to live in
solitude, her contempt for the outside world and for everything banal in
that world, are metaphors for the poet, Mallarmé. Mallarmé believes that
in order to be creative and independent of the influences of the world, in
order to be the herald of the supreme and pure Beauty that he must create
through his art, he has to endure the solitary path of withdrawal within
himself. In a way, his path should be the path of Narcissism, because only
then, when he looks into himself, can he find the right words to create the
images of the Beautiful.
Like the poet whose work of art is constantly in the process of
becoming, Hérodiade’s aspiration is toward the horizons that vanish upon
approach, because for the poet, complete and total fulfillment is not
possible on earth. In earthly existence the Absolute is inaccessible.24 That
is why in the poem, Beauty is identified with Death: “One kiss would kill/
if beauty were not death. ”25
Death in this case represents the Ideal, the world beyond, inaccessible
to the earthly world; the only world where the perfect and ideal Beauty can
exist or be achieved. It is toward that world that Hérodiade, the symbol of
the poet, aspires, and it is that world that constantly escapes her. Judd
observes that
In conflating beauty with death, Mallarmé articules the central paradox of

the poet. Only in death can one escape the physical world, the source of all
corruption. Such an escape is what the mystic desires. Yet the poet must
invoke physical objects as a means of representing Beauty.26
Thomas Williams points out:
When Hérodiade said that beauty was death, she recognized that to
maintain a perfect vision of beauty involved dying to oneself as an artist,
that the role of mystic and maker are irreconcilable in any absolute sense.
Even in the purest work there must always remain the barest tincture of
failure.27
Hérodiade belongs to some “unknown era.” That is why the Nurse tells her
at the beginning of “Scène”:
You are alive! Or do I see the ghost of a princess?

Cease walking in some unknown era; let me press
your fingers and their rings to my lips . . . 28
This “unknown era” is the symbol of a world open only to a few selected
and initiated, to so-called spiritual aristocrats. It is unremembered by the
common, the uninitiated, like the Nurse, a symbol of the banality of life
with its everyday preoccupations and aspirations of the common.
Like the poet who constantly struggles with the constraints of worldly
existence and an easily accepted traditional type of art, Hérodiade
constantly struggles with her Nurse and constantly strives to escape from
the world that the Nurse wants to impose on her. The Nurse tempts the
princess with the banal existence of a commonplace life like the world
tempts the poet. That existence is embodied in a banal union with a
common man, an existence unacceptable to the princess.
N.
Will he be here some time?
H.
O you pure
stars, do not listen!
N.
How, except among obscure
terrors, can we envisage the divinity
still more implacable and like a suppliant
whom all the treasures of your beauty must await!
For whom would you, consumed by pangs, keep the unknown
splendour and the vain mystery of your being?
.............................
H.
Go, spare your pity and your irony.
N.
Yet tell me this: oh! no, your triumphal disdain,

your poor innocent child, will some day surely wane.
H.
But when lions respect me, who would dare touch me?
Besides, I long for nothing human; if you see
me like a statue with eyes lost in paradise,
that is when I recall the milk you gave me formerly.29
The princess, like the poet, rejects those impositions and remains faithful
to herself, her nature, and her aspirations.
In “Ouverture” and in “Scène,” Hérodiade is also a metaphor for a
poem. While constructing the image of his princess as a poem, Mallarmé
loosely follows the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,
with which he was clearly familiar through the literature that popularized
Hegelian ideas. For example, Scherer in his article “Hegel and
Hegelianism” explains that the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis is based on the dialectical movement of three stages. He writes:
According to the law of dialectical movement, every affirmation expects a

negation, as any existence has a limit. To say what one thing is would
mean that it is not any other thing. On the other hand, the result is that the
negation will not negate the previous affirmation; the negation would
simply limit it; it will modify the previous affirmation and would force us
to embrace one and the other in its unity, to reconcile them. . . . The
reconciliation occurs by the intermediary of the third notion which contains
two previous notions, combined and absorbed. Nonetheless, that new
notion goes through the same experience as the experience of the previous
phenomena: it will not be affirmed until the contradiction that it carries
within itself is cleared up. The contradiction will push this notion in its
turn, toward the transformation. That is, according to Hegel, the law of the
movement. . . . The affirmation, negation, conciliation — thesis, antithesis,
synthesis — here is a succession of stages through which the idea realizes
itself through transformation.30
Austin quotes a letter in which Mallarmé describes the thesis, antithesis,

and synthesis of the transformation of Beauty throughout centuries. It
metaphorically depicts the three stages Beauty (and then the poem)
undergo in order to achieve the synthesis.
The Beauty, complete and unconscious, unique and unchanging, or the

Venus of Phidias, the Beauty which was bitten in the heart by the Chimera
since Christianity, and coming back to life in pangs with the smile full of
mystery, but with the forced mystery that she feels being the condition of
its being. Finally, the Beauty, which through the man’s science, fount in the
entire Universe its correlative phases, having had the supreme word from
it, remembered the secrete horror which forced it to smile—at the time of
Vinci, and to smile with mystery — but now it smiles with mystery from
happiness and the eternal tranquility of the Venus of Milo who knew the
idea of mystery of which only Jaconda knew the fatal feeling.31
At first, in the “Ouverture” when Hérodiade as a poem is still the part

of the “unknown era,” she is “The Serene Beauty” (la Beauté sereine), a
poem that has not yet been born, but already lives in the soul of the poet as
an idea. Then, in “Scène,” when metaphorically the poem is in the process
of being created but has not yet been born and separated from its creator, it
looses its stage of serenity. It becomes “troubled” Beauty. Finally in the
third part, “Cantique de Saint Jean,” the Beauty goes through the synthesis
and becomes the perfect Beauty.
***
In “Scène,” Hérodiade has a virginal and pure nature. Her invisibility

to the outside world, her stunning beauty, and her constant expectation of
something that would lead her to another state of existence, which would
liberate her from her self-imposed isolation, makes her a symbol of a
poem, awaiting and at the same time apprehensive of being released into
the world. When the Nurse asks her:
For whom would you, consumed by pangs, keep the unknown

splendour and the vain mystery of your being?
Hérodiade answers:
For myself alone.

.............................
I long for nothing human; if you see
me like a statue with eyes lost in paradise,
that is what I recall the milk you gave me formerly.
.............................
Yes, for myself alone I bloom, in isolation!
.............................
I love the horror of being virgin.
.............................
I wait an unknown thing.32
Hérodiade's subconscious expectation of “an unknown thing” (une

chose inconnue), of the possible passage from one state of existence to
another, is the symbol of the process of maturity of the work of art whose
next stage after being created is separation from its creator, the poet, in
order to be exposed to the world of readers.
On a literal level, Hérodiade is troubled by her Nurse, who is both a
symbol of a common life and the one who nurses the princess, the poem,
and helps her reach maturity. But metaphorically, Hérodiade is troubled
because as a poem, she is in the process of being born and maturing, and
she is waiting to be released to the world and separated from her creator. It
is a frightening and painful process.
In a later unfinished version, Les Noces d'Hérodiade, for the “chose
inconnue,” Mallarmé explored the encounter of Hérodiade with St. John
the Baptist, depicted as a viol occulaire, her reaction to this encounter, and
then her passage from one state of being to another. As with everything in
Mallarmé, this encounter bears a double meaning. On the one hand, it is an
intrusion into Hérodiade’s mystery, and even its violation, at least from
Hérodiade’s perspective. This is why Hérodiade as a character wishes
John's execution. On the other hand, it is an initiation of Hérodiade into
the world of John the Baptist’s mystery, which would eventually initiate
her into the world of the Absolute, and can only occur when John the
Baptist reaches the appropriate state, the state beyond physical existence.
For Hérodiade as the symbol of a poem, John's execution is necessary.
It is only in the ideal transcendental world, the symbol of the Absolute,
that the free and total initiation into each other's supreme mystery—the
Noces, the synthesis, the perfect work of art—is possible. That encounter,
that viol occulaire, transforms Hérodiade, as a character and as a poem
undergoing constant change, into “The Troubled Beauty” (la Beauté
troublée). That Beauty embodies the poem, a work of art, which has not
yet achieved its supreme state of purity, since it is still in a state of
constant change and constant evolution of the creative process.
Nonetheless, that encounter is Hérodiade's first stage of being initiated as a
character and as a poem in the world of John the Baptist, the mystery that
belongs to the Absolute.
***
In the finished version of “Scène,” through the imagery and a metaphor
of hair, Mallarmé introduces the concept that, although the ideal work of
art does not exist on earth and it is only in the process of being created, it
still could become visible as a reflection through the perfect mirror,
Hérodiade's hair.
The symbolism of hair was widely used in the nineteenth century by
both poets and painters. Baudelaire, for example, who was the idol of
Mallarmé when Mallarmé wrote his “Scène,” wrote the poem “Head of
Hair” (La Chevelure). In that poem, he glorifies hair as an embodiment of
beauty that takes the lyrical hero to the exotic world of unreal beauty,
sensuality, and passion.33 The English Pre-Raphaelite painters, especially
Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, painted most of his femmes fatales with long
seductive hair, often red. The English poet Robert Browning used the
image of hair in his poem “Porphiria’s Hair” to describe the lover who
strangles his beloved with her own long hair, the symbol of his torturous
lust for her. Hair is a symbol of the destructive beauty of woman, of
earthly lust that is often mistakenly taken by the seduced to be a symbol of
perfect beauty.
But in Mallarmé’s case, hair has a different meaning. He attributes the
qualities of a perfect mirror to Héridiade's beautiful hair and uses
extensively the symbolism of hair, metals, and precious stones to convey
this idea. In “Scène,” there is a constant reference to Hérodiade’s hair that
is like the metal and gems that create a reflection. It makes her a beautiful
reflection of the ideal Beauty, the beauty that on earth can be only
reflected, as the work of art that on earth is only a reflection of the poet’s
search for the Absolute.
Her hair is long, immaculate, and immortal. It reflects the beauty of the
infinite and is the symbol of the immortal, because hair “does not partake
of the transient, mortal character of the rest of the body.”34 The immaculate
aspect of Hérodiade’s hair is a symbol of the purity of art. These are the
reasons for which Hérodiade is ready to endure the horror of being
wrapped in her blond hair. She wishes it to remain immaculate and
immortal, although it has an effect of horror when her body is wrapped in
that “blond torrent” (“white stream”).
Stand back there!

Even the strong blond stream of my unspotted hair
bathing my solitary body freezes it
with terror, woman, and my hair entwined and knit
with bright light are immortal.35
For Mallarmé, woman’s hair is almost always like Hérodiade’s, blond.

When Mallarmé commented on the poetry of his friend, des Essartes, he
explained the importance of blond hair for him: “the ideal of a woman—I
mean that facet of the beauty, that diamond—is not the brunette. . . . The
blondness, which means gold, light, richness, dream, shining.”36 Thus, for
Mallarmé, blond is associated with the light and the color of precious
metals, such as gold, and with the precious stones such as the diamond that
he also uses extensively in his poem in order to create the magic of the
work of art, of the beauty that he knits through the words of his poem. The
imagery of precious stones in the poem is a reminder that the work of art is
a precious stone, and the poem is a “divine gem capable of seizing and
reflecting the elusive light of eternal truth.”37 The ideal work of art has the
pure beauty of a diamond, to which one might compare the image of
Hérodiade and her hair. As a symbol of a poem, however, Hérodiade
endures the torturous process of finding a way of reaching the reflection of
the ideal work of art, and her hair is a symbol and a tool that helps her in
the endeavor of reflecting the ideal.
***
“The Chant of Saint John” (Le Cantique de saint Jean), the third part of
the finished version of the poem, although very different from the “Scène”
stylistically, structurally, and in terms of color, is the panel of the triptych
most closely corresponding and linked to the “Scène.” “Le Cantique” is a
final, short finished poem, and metaphorically, it is a path toward the third
stage of the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, a
metaphorical path taken toward the achievement of the “perfect” Beauty.
Mallarmé's unfinished version of his poem, Les Noces, attempts to
convey that Hérodiade, the poem, through discovering the mystery by the
intermediary of the viol occulaire—the encounter with John the Baptist—
and later through her union with him, becomes “Perfect Beauty” (la
Beauté parfaite), which finds its state of serenity.38
“Le Cantique de Saint Jean,” like Hérodiade, is a metaphor. At the
most obvious level, the John the Baptist figure mirrors Mallarmé’s
perception of who the poet is. Through the image of John the Baptist,
Mallarmé describes his own mission as a poet. Historically, John the
Baptist was a prophet and an embodiment of the martyr. John the Baptist
was the precursor of a new religion: he was the precursor of Christ. Like
John, Mallarmé, in his turn, was a founder of a new style of poetry, of a
new poetic language and poetic philosophy, and like John, his ideas at that
time could be adapted and understood only by a few. Nonetheless, like
John, Mallarmé knew that his time would come and his ideas would find
followers and would bring him the halo of recognition, as they did to John.
Like the character of Hérodiade in “Scène,” in “Cantique” John is also
a double metaphor for the poet and the poem during the creative process,
but at a stage different from the one of “Scène.” In “Cantique,” Mallarmé
metaphorically portrays his relationship to the poem when the poem is
already completed and is ready to start its independent existence in the
world of readers; then, once it is released and its earthly mission of being
read and recognized is fulfilled, the poem is ready to merge with the poet
again to become a perfect harmonious unity, this time in the world of the
Absolute. In “Cantique,” Mallarmé’s poem becomes the voice of a poet,
singing his prophetic truth about the Absolute.
Mallarmé conveys it through the very striking and skillfully painted
imagery of the beheading of John the Baptist, the separation of the head
from his body, which is a metaphor of the separation of the poem from the
poet. The first stanza of “Cantique” sets up the time of decapitation and the
connection between “Scène” and “Cantique,” which in appearance seem to
be disconnected. In “Cantique,”
The sun that was exalted

when it miraculously halted
is once more sinking low
brightly aglow39
In this stanza we see the sun interrupted in its course and the head of St.
John the Baptist at the moment of decollation. The beheading takes place
at the solstice, when the sun reaches its peak, seems to stop for a moment,
and then descends in an incandescent light. The feast of John the Baptist
takes place on June 24, which is very close in date to the solstice. That
feast is directly associated with the ”love affair” legend, which presumes
Salomé being in love with John and beheading him for not responding to
her love advances. It places the reader within that context and implies that
John in the poem is beheaded because of the encounter he had with
Hérodiade and feelings that he inspired in her.40 Thus, by giving the time
of John’s execution, Mallarmé establishes the connection between the
“love story” of Salomé and John’s beheading, or between Hérodiade and
John.
The second and third stanzas of “Cantique” paint, in a metaphorical
way, the relationship between the poet and the poem. It states the
following:
I seem to shadowy
wings unfurl in my vertebrae
which are shuddering one
and all in unison
and my head now full-blown

a watchman on its own
in the victory flights made
by the scythe's blade41
The imagery in these stanzas is the metaphor for the creative process at the
point when the poet and the poem are “severed” from each other. The head
is a poem, severed from the whole body, which united the poet and the
poem. That process of separation is very painful, although necessary. Once
severed from the body, the head, the poem, will have to exist on its own
and be exposed to the world of readers until it meets the poet again and
becomes one with him in the ideal realm of the Absolute.
In the poem, the hymn is spoken by the head of John the Baptist while
it is severed from his body. When the head is separated from the body, “the
primordial clash with the flesh” is no longer there. When the body and the
head were connected, the harmony between these two did not exist, as the
harmony would not always exist between the poet and his poem while the
poet gives birth to his work of art. The separation between the head, the
bearer of mind, of creativity, and the body brings some peace, but at the
same time it is very painful. It is a beheading.
***
Already in 1865, in Mallarmé's poem “Gift of the Poem” (Don du

poème), he depicts his theory of the creative process that we encounter in
“Cantique.” “Gift of the Poem” (Don du poème) could be perceived as a
preface to Hérodiade, especially because it was written in 1865, when
Mallarmé began working on Hérodiade and was thinking about imagery
that could metaphorically express the birth of a poem.
The title “Gift of the Poem” refers to the birth of a poem. The poem
begins with the stanza: “I bring you this child of an Idumean night!”42 In
this stanza, Mallarmé, by calling the child the child of an Idumean night,
alludes to Cabal’s story, in which Idume is the country of Edom, the
country of monstrous Esau, who ruled over the pre-Adamique people.
There all inhabitants were asexual and reproduced without women.43 The
child in the poem, thus, is a creation of one person, of a poet. At its birth,
this child is ugly and covered with blood. Mallarmé describes it as a
bleeding bird: “black, with featherless wings bleeding and nearly white.”44
When the father, the poet, sees his child, a “relic,” his poem, his feeling of
sterile solitude, induced by a long and lonely night, when he tried to write
his poem, trembles:
. . . and when it [dawn] showed that relic

to this father attempting to unfriendly smile,
the blue and sterile solitude shivered all the while.45
At first, the poet sees in his creation an enemy, because the process of
creativity, a birth, is very painful, but it is also a loss and in a way a

betrayal, since through its birth, the poem separates itself from its creator
with whom it lived for a long time until its birth, and now it leaves him
alone, abandoned. Once the birth is complete, the child is given to a nurse
(to readers) and she (a reader) nurses it with her milk (care) and songs
(recitations). The poem, like a child, begins its own life, separate and
independent from the poet: “Woman lulling your little daughter, greet/a
cruel birth, with the innocence of your cold feet.”46
The poem needs an audience, a reader. The singer, the woman lulling,
la berceuse, the nurse (a reader) will warm up the child (the poem) by
reciting it (by bringing it to the world). The poet expresses the hope that
the child, the poem, will be nursed and will acquire its own life through
the reading and recognition, the nourishment of the poem.
And your voice which both viol and harpsichord invest,

will you with shriveled fingers press the breast
from which flows woman, Sibylline and white,
for lips starved of the virgin azure light?47
***
We see a similar process in “Cantique.” But in “Cantique,” Mallarmé goes

further. He depicts not only the process of separation of John's severed
head, the poem, from his body—in its integrity the poet represents the
body and the head—but he metaphorically paints the process of
recognition and of the initiation of John's severed head, of a metaphorical
poem, in the world of the Absolute.
As we saw in the earlier stanza, when the head is severed, it is thrown
upward. Once that occurs, the saint expresses a wish:
rather than drunk with fasting

commit itself to lasting
pursuit of its pure sight
in some wild flight
on high where the perpetual

coldness cannot endure that all
of you O frozen glaciers
are its superiors48
He wishes to continue to look up toward eternity and the coldness of the

sky and to search for the perfect, the Absolute. At the end of the poem,
John the Baptist's head sings:
but as an act of baptism my

head was illuminated by
the principle of my salvation
and bows in salutation.49
It is through beheading, through metaphorical separation of the poem from

the poet and the exposure to the world, the second baptism, that salvation
comes: right at the moment when the saint’s head expresses his wish, the
head acquires a halo, the sign of holiness and recognition. That head then
has a double meaning: it is a poem and the poet at the same time.
For John the Baptist the body had been always an obstacle. St. Paul
says:
but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and
making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?50
Hence, the liberation from the body is the Baptist’s and poem’s freedom.
In the unfinished Noces d'Hérodiade, the connection between “Scène”
and “Cantique” is much clearer than in the finished version of the triptych,
which is difficult to understand without knowing Mallarmé's intentions.
Sylviane Huot, Lloyd James Austin, and other scholars demonstrate that
“Scène” and “Le Cantique” in Les Noces d’Hérodiade are linked through
the glance of John the Baptist, le viol occulaire. The following quote from
Robert de Montesquiou seems to be central in understanding of the idea of
the Mallarmeen synthesis.
The secret … that was shared with me by the poet himself, is of the future
violation of the mystery of her being through the glance of John who
would notice her, and would pay by his death that only sacrilege, since that
savage virgin would feel herself intact again and fully reconstructed to her
integrity only at the moment when she would hold between her hands the
decapitated head in which dared to be perpetuated the memory of the
momentarily seen virgin.51
The importance of the glance becomes apparent in the final unfinished

versions of Les Noces. By his glance, John the Baptist in a way “fertilizes”
Hérodiade. That glance troubles Hérodiade, because she perceives his
glance as an attack on her virginity and purity, as a rape.52 Austin calls it
the violation of Hérodiade’s Mystery, but it can also be perceived as an
encounter of Hérodiade with Mystery, embodied in the glance of John the
Baptist. That glance and Hérodiade’s reaction to it is the “love affair”
between her and John the Baptist that leads to John’s decapitation, and
later to the purification of Hérodiade through the glance of the decapitated

John, which becomes the symbol of the Ideal, because he is liberated from
the chains of physical existence.
Her perception of being violated through a glance can also be seen as
the first encounter of the poem and the poet with a reader, when Hérodiade
is perceived as both, a poem and a poet. It is that encounter that transforms
Hérodiade into the troubled Beauty. Eventually, that encounter leads
toward the union, toward Les Noces, of the “unpolished” Beauty,
Hérodiade, with Mystery, John the Baptist's head. The final result of this
union is a Perfect Beauty, the embodiment of the Absolute. Les Noces take
place in the world to which both aspire and which represents each other.
John aspires toward
The sparkling cold of your pale clarity

You who die, you who burn of chastity,
White night of ice and of cruel snow,53
which is also the image of Hérodiade. Hérodiade aspires to something

similar, to something that is also elsewhere but at the same time represents
the image of John the Baptist, the Mystery:
Mild seas
are swaying and, beyond, you may know some terrain
where the sinister sky’s glances are hated by
Venus who burns among the leaves at evening:
there I would go.54
That perfect Beauty, the result of the wedding, the union of Beauty with
Mystery, was supposed to be achieved in Mallarmé’s Grand Oeuvre, since
for him “the entire universe exists to achieve a Book”55 and his Final Book
(Livre definitif) that he dreamt of was meant to be “l’hymn . . . harmony
and joy . . . of the relationships between everything.”56
In this poem, through a very complex metaphor, Mallarmé attempts to
convey the idea that he expressed earlier in life:
Since the spirit is absolute and since nothing can exist outside of the
Absolute, the object thought will make one with the being who thinks; that
object is the shape of the thought itself, the action through which the
thought is produced. That idea . . . is above all. . . . In its essence it is what
the thinking is.57
That idea was his spiritual path throughout his entire life, the path that he
has chosen to fulfill using the characters of the story of the dance of
Salomé and the beheading of John the Baptist. That story mirrors
Mallarmé's soul and his creative search. Mallarmé endowed both
Hérodiade and John with his own very personal meaning. He was at the
point to fulfill his path as a poet when he died.
Notes
1
“Même s’il est question, en apparence, d’une femme, Mallarmé serait-il fondé à
dire, à l’instar de Flaubert: ‘Hérodiade c’est moi’, ou bien devons-nous pressentir
qu’à la place risquée de saint Jean-Baptiste, il convient de le voir, annonciateur
dans le désert de la poèsie nouvelle?” Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Stéphane Mallarmé:
L’absolu au jour le jour (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1998), 108–109. All
translations from French are mine unless otherwise noted.
2
“Hérodiade, c’est d’abord le drame d’une mutation spirituelle, drame où
reconnaitra qui veut celui de Mallarmé.” Bertrand Marchal, Lecture de Mallarmé
(Paris: José Corti, 1985), 56.
3
Helen G. Zagona, The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art’s Sake
(Genève: Droz, 1960), 49.
4
The final structure of the work was intended to be the following: “Prélude”
(instead of Ouverture), “Cantique de saint Jean,” “Scène,” “Scène intermédiaire,”
“Finale” (I: Finale/monologue; II: Finale/nourrice). Among these pieces only
Cantique de saint Jean was finished. It was probably written in 1896. In the final
version of Les Noces, Mallarmé planned to place Cantique in the beginning of the
poem, before the Finale, as if Cantique was a vision that Hérodiade had, before
John’s decapitation occurred. The new location of Cantique within the poem and
its premonitory meaning might make us think of Gustave Moreau’s water color and
then oil painting, The Apparition, in which the head of John the Baptist appears to
Salomé, possibly as a premonition.
5
Brent Ronald Judd, William Faulkner and the Symbolist Movement: Absalom,
Abasalom! as a reflection of Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune
(Springfield: University of Illinois at Springfield, 2007), 20–21.
6
“Après avoir trouvé le Néant,” il avait “trouvé le Beau.” Lloyd James Austin,
“Mallarmé et le rêve du livre,” Essais sur Mallarmé (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 1995), 77.
7
“J’ai fait une assez longue descente au Néant pour pouvoir parler avec certitude.
Il n’y a que la Beauté—et elle n’a qu’une expression parfaite: la Poèsie. Tout le
reste est mensonge.” Ibid.
8
“Peindre, non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit.” Paul Bénichou, Selon
Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 38.
9
“Le vers ne doit … pas … se composer de mots, mais d’intentions, et toutes les
paroles s’effacent devant la sensation.” Ibid.
10
Henry Nicolas, Mallarmé et le symbolism (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1986), 35.
11
Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953),
125–126.
12
“J’ai lassé le nom d’Hérodiade pour bien la différencier de la Salomé je dirai
moderne ou exhumée avec son fait divers archaique—la danse etc., l’isoler comme
l’ont fait des tableaux solitaires dans le fait même terrible, mystérieux—et faire
miroiter ce qui probablement hanta—en apparue avec son attribut—le chef du saint
—dût la demoiselle constituer un monstre aux amants vulgaires de la vie—parure
genait.” Mallarmé, Poesies (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1989), 151.
13
Judd, William Faulkner and the Symbolist Movement, 24.
14
Lloyd James Austin in his article “Mallarmé et le rêve du livre,” 77, writes:
Mais quel est cet Absolu que Mallarmé croyait incarner? Scherer, dans
sa critique de la philosophie de Hegel, affirme que l’Absolu de Hegel
équivaut au Néant. Vraie ou fausse, cette interpretation semble bien avoir
été celle de Mallarmé. Scherer écrit en effet:
L’absolu est donc une notion purement négative; seulement, cette
notion négative est conçue comme une affirmation, présentée comme une
réalité et une substance. L’absolu, pour qui le regard regarde derrière les
mots, c’est le néant personifié, c’est-à-dire la contradiction même. Or
l’hégélianisme n’est pas autre chose que la philsoophie de ce néant.
15
Ibid., 76–77.
Puisque l’esprit est absolu, et qu’il ne peut rien y avoir en dehors de
l’absolu, la chose pensée ne fera qu’un avec l’être qui pense, elle sera la
forme même de la pensée, l’acte par lequel la pensée se produit. . . . L’idée
. . . est antérieure à tout . . . c’est elle au fond qui se pense.
Le but auquel tend l’absolu est d’arriver, de manifestation en
manifestation, à une forme dans laquelle . . . l’être ne fasse plus qu’un avec
la pensée, l’idée avec la realité, dans laquelle l’absolu, parce qu’il se
connaîtra comme tel et parce que se savoir absolu, c’est être absolu. . . . La
conscience, dit Hegel, a conscience de soi, et la conscience ayant
conscience de soi, c’est l’absolu.
16
See endnote 6.
17
Austin, Essais sur Mallarmé, 56.
18
Bertrand Marchal, Lecture de Mallarmé (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1985), 40.
“De la Nourrice désaffectée (sa ‘gorge ancienne [est] tarie’) dont la robe se fond
dans le décor des tentures, il ne reste plus que le fantôme d’une religion morte.”
19
Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse. New translations by E.H.
and A.M. Blackmore with parallel French text. Intro. Elizabeth McCombie
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 196–197.
l’enfant, exilée en son coeur précieux,
Comme un cygne cachant en sa plume ses yeux,
Comme les mit le vieux cygne en sa plume, allée,
De la plume détresse, en l’éternelle allée
De ses espoires, pour voir les diamants élus
D’une étoile, mourante, et qui ne brille plus!
20
Ibid., 196. “Reviendra-t-il un jour des pays cisalpins! Assez tôt? car tout est
presage et mauvais rêve!”
21
Cited in Zagona, The Legend of Salome, 47. “Toute chose sacrée et qui veut
demeurer sacrée s’enveloppe de mystère. Les religions se retranchent à l’abri
d’arcanes dévoilés au seul prédestiné: l’art a les siens.”
22
Ibid.,
23
Ibid.,
Qu’un philosophe ambitionne la popularité … mais qu’un poète, un
adorateur du beau inaccessible au vulgaire,—ne se contente pas des
suffrages du sanhédrin de l’art, cela m’irrite, et je ne le comprends pas.
L’homme peut être démocrate, l’artiste se dédouble et doit rester
aristocrate.
24
The passage from Scherer’s article “Hegel and Hegelianisme,” published in la
Revue des deux mondes (cited in Austin, Essais sur Mallarmé, 80), which
Mallarmé read, states:
C’est dire que rien n’existe, ou que l’existence est un simple devenir. La
chose, le fait, n’ont qu’une réalité fugitive, une réalité qui consiste dans
leur disparition aussi bien que dans leur appartition, une réalité qui se
produit pour être niée aussitôt qu’affirmée. Tout n’est que relatif, disions-
nous tout à l’heure; il faut ajouter maintenant: tout n’est que relation.
This passage certainly expresses the idea of becoming in the process of
creativity that we can find in the character of Hérodiade and that Mallarmé was
able to express metaphorically.
25
Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 28–29. “O femme, un baiser me
tuerait/ Si la beauté n’était la mort.”
26
Judd, William Faulkner and the Symbolist Movement, 25.
27
For Thomas Williams' citation, see Mallarmé and The Language of Mysticism
(Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1970), 71.
28
Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 29.
Tu vis! Ou vois-je ici l'ombre d'une princesse?
A mes lèvres tes doigts et leurs bagues, et cesse
De marcher dans un âge ignoré …
29
Ibid., 33, 35. See French version on pages 32, 34.
30
Austin, Essais sur Mallarmé, 78
31
Ibid., 78–79. “La Beauté complète et inconsciente, unique et immuable, ou la
Vénus de Phidias, la Beauté ayant été mordue au coeur depuis le christianisme par
la Chimère, et douloureusement renaisssant avec un sourire remplie de mystère,
mais de mystère forcé et qu’elle sent être la condition de son être. La Beauté, enfin,
ayant par la science de l’homme, retrouvé dans l’Univers entier ses phases
corrélatives, ayant eu le suprême mot d’elle, s’étant rappelé l’horreur secrète qui la
forçait à sourire—du temps du Vinci, et à sourire mystérieusement—souriant
mystérieusement maintenant, mais de bonheur et avec la quiétude éternelle de la
Vénus de Milo retrouvée ayant su l’idée du mystère dont la Jaconde ne savait que
la sensation fatale.”
32
Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 35, 37, 39. For the
French version see pages 34, 36, 38.
33
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil. A new translation with parallel French
text. Trans. with notes by James McGowan. Intro. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 51, 53. For the French version see pages 50, 52.
34
Zagona, The Legend of Salome, 51.
35
Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 28–29.
Reculez.
Le blond torrent de mes cheveux immaculés
Quand il baigne mon corps solitaire le glace
D’horreur, et mes cheveux que la lumière enlace
Sont immortels.
36
Zagona, The Legend of Salome, 51. “l’idéal de la femme—c’est- à -dire d’une
des facettes de la beauté, ce diamant, —n’est pas la brune. … La blondeur, c’est
l’or, la lumière, la richesse, le rêve, le nimbe.”
37
Ibid., 51.
38
39
Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 213.
Le soleil que se halte
Surnaturelle exalte
Aussitôt redescend
Incandescent
40
The legend of Salomé’s passion for John the Baptist and her rejection came to
life in the twelfth century in the writings of a canon and scholasticus of St.
Pharaildis in Ghent, Nivardus. The patroness of his Church was St. Verelde, or
Pharaildis in Latin. St. Verelde was directly connected to Salomé, or Herodias, the
name that many Church fathers continued to use while referring to Salomé, a
young virgin dancing before Herod. In medieval German mysteries Salomé was
equated with the old, Germanic storm goddess, Frau Hulda, Fru Helle, or Fru
Helde, because in some German legends, “she was blown into the sky by a blast of
air miraculously rushing forth from the mouth of the Baptist’s head” as a
retribution for her being an indirect conspirator in John the Baptist’s execution.
Therefore, she was given a place in Wild Hunt (Wilde Jagd or Wildes Heer), riding
the clouds by night. In that capacity she was worshiped from the tenth to the
twelfth century. Traditionally the Wild Hunt is supposed to take place at the
solstice, on 21 June, the day dedicated to the feast of St John the Baptist.
Nivardus transformed the story of the death of the Baptist into a love story, in
which Salomé, although she is called Herodias, “was madly in love with the
Baptist and vowed not to marry any other man.” Nivardus tells us that it is out of
jealousy that Herod executes John and it is out of amorous despair, because John
rejected her, that Salomé requests his head and then:
She embraces it with her ‘soft arms,’ drenches it with tears and
attempts to kiss it. But the head shies away from her and sends her up into
the air. Pursued by the spirit of him who had refused to reciprocate her
love, she suffers for a long time, comforted only by the veneration of
millions. But ultimately (perhaps because she, like the genuine Pharaildis,
had been faithful to a vow of virginity) she comes to be revered as a saint:

“Now known as Pharaildis—once Herodias—
Unrivaled as a dancer now and evermore.”
See Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian Mostly Iconographic (New York: New
York University Press, 1969), 45.
The “love” story between Herodias/Salome and John the Baptist appears in
Heinrich Heine’s poem Atta Troll (1847). In this poem during the Wild Hunt
Herodiade/Salome carries, plays with and cries over the head of John the Baptist,
who was executed as a result of her amorous despair. Heine’s poem was translated
in French and was well known in French artistic and intellectual circles.
41
Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 215.
Je sens comme aux vertèbres
J'éployer des ténèbres
Toutes dans un frisson
A l'unisson
Et ma tête surgie
Solitaire vigie
Dans les vols triomphaux
De cette faux
42
Ibid., 27. “Je t'apporte l'enfant d'une nuit d'Idumée!”
43
See Wallace Follie, Malarmé (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 146,
note 9. In this note Follie cites the article by Denis Saurat, Perspectives (Paris:
Stock, 1935), 113–116. That article emphasizes the Cabalistic tendencies of the
poem. Saurat says that the kings of Edom were sexless and reproduced without
women. The poet also produces his poem alone.
44
Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 27. “Noire; à l'aile saignante et
pâle, déplumée.”
45
Ibid., 27, 29.
… et quand elle [aurore] a montré cette relique
A ce père essayant un sourire ennemi
La solitude bleue et stérile a frémi.
46
Ibid., 29. “O la berceuse, avec ta fille et l'innocence/ De vos pieds froids,
acceuille une horrilbe naissance.”
47
Ibid., 29.
Et ta voix rappelant viole et clavecin,
Avec le doigt fané presseras-tu le sein
Par qui coule en blancheur sibylline la femme
Pour des lèvres que l'air du vierge azur affame?
48
Ibid., 215.
Qu'elle de jeûnes ivre
S'opiniâtre à suivre
En quelque bond hagard
Son pur regard
Là-haut où la froidure
Eternelle n'endure
Que vous le surpassiez
Tout ô glaciers
49
Ibid., 215.
Mais selon un baptême
Illuminée au même
Principe qui m'élut
Penche un salut.
50
Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, VII, 23-4. The Holy Bible (Cleveland and
New York: The World Publishing Company, 1961), 147.
51
Austin, Essais sur Mallarmé, 151. “Le secret … que je tiens du poète lui-même,
n’est autre que la future violation du mystère de son être par le regard de Jean qui
va l’apercevoir, et payer de la mort ce seul sacrilège; car la farouche vierge ne se
sentira de nouveau intacte et restituée tout entière à son intégralité, qu’au moment
où elle tiendra entre ses mains la tête tranchée en laquelle osait se perpétuer le
souvenir de la vierge entrevue.”
52
For more about the power of a glance see Theophile Gautier, Le Roi Candaule
(Paris: Librairie des amateurs, A. Perroud, Libraire-editeur, 1893) and Theophile
Gautier, Jettatura (Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., Publishers, 1904).
53
Le froid scintillement de ta pale clarte
Toi qui te meurs, toi qui brules de chasteté,
Nuit blanche de glacons et de neige cruelle!
54
Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 38–39.
Des ondes
Se bercent et, la-bas, sais-tu pas un pays
Ou le sinistre ciel ait les regards hais
De Venus qui, le soir, brule dans le feuillage:
J’y partirais.
55
Austin, Essais sur Mallarmé, 81. “tout univers existe pour aboutir à un livre.”
56
Ibid. “l’hymne … harmonie et joie ... des relations entre tout.”
57
Ibid., 76. “Puisque l’esprit est abolu, et qu’il ne peut rien y avoir en dehors de
l’absolu, la chose pensée ne fera qu’un avec l’être qui pense, elle sera la forme
même de la pensée, l’acte par lequel la pensée se produit. … L’idée … est
anterieure à tout … c’est elle au fond qui se pense.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
MALLARMÉ’S “SECTARIAN GAME”:
THE LATE MARDIS (1890-1898)
PATRICK THÉRIAULT
The growth and progressive internationalization of the Symbolist

movement owe more to the swarming network of artistic friendships and
acquaintances favoured by fin-de-siècle Paris than to official institutions
offered by what was then the undisputed “meridian” of the “World
Republic of Letters”1.
The weekly gatherings that the poet Stéphane Mallarmé organized at
his Parisian home for about fifteen years, from 1884 to his death in 1898,
played a major role in the building of this strategic Symbolist sociality.
The legendary Mallarmé’s “Mardis” (Tuesdays), as they rapidly came to
be called, federated a wide cross section of late nineteenth-century French
writers, painters, and musicians, and fostered some of the most promising
talents of the beginning of the next century.
Mallarmé’s intelligence and affable character, widely and unanimously
praised, do not suffice to account for the popularity and longevity of the
Mardis, nor do they explain by themselves the strong and enduring
influence exerted by the cenacle on the institutional development of
Symbolism. Alongside these human factors, some specific features of the
Mardis’ institutional organization and sociological mode of functioning
seem to explain the substantial symbolic benefits the group provided to its
host, its participants and, more generally, to Symbolism as a movement.
My goal here is to outline some of these features as they appear most
clearly in the institutional and sociological dynamic that prevailed in the
group during its late period, spanning from 1890 to 1898, which
eventually lead Mallarmé and his disciples to play what I shall describe as
a “sectarian game”.
Mallarmé’s “Sectarian Game”: The Late Mardis (1890-1898) 361
Satisfying the Desire for Transcendence

As former participants started to break a more or less formal “law of
silence”2 and to deliver testimonies of their experience, the veil of mystery
that enshrouded the content and the general organization of the Mardis
during Mallarmé’s life gradually disappeared. Critics can now claim to
have provided a fairly clear view of what took place at the poet’s
apartment on the rue de Rome throughout these years. Artists and writers
gathered there to discuss, debate, smoke and, first and foremost, listen to
their host’s refined speech. Mallarmé is thought to have discoursed on a
variety of subjects, both light and serious, some of which he decided to
develop in the critical essays that were to be collected under the title
Divagations.
By all accounts, Mallarmé was gifted with a charismatic personality.
His influence over his friends was great, even though he achieved
notoriety only in the mid-eighties. Those who attended these meetings
proved just as instrumental as Mallarmé himself in building the legend of
the Mardis. The number and the composition of the group varied over
these fifteen years. The second wake or generation of “Mardists,” which
one can associate with the last decade of the century, was composed for
the most part of young and talented artists such as Paul Claudel, André
Gide, Pierre Louÿs, Camille Mauclair, and Paul Valéry. 3
With this second wake of Mardists, the gatherings took a different
turn: they became less interactive and less spontaneous than before;
conversely, they became more ritualized and centered on Mallarmé. The
poet filled his young and devoted audience with a type of extreme
admiration that paralysed conversation.4 It is in this context that the
Mardis became a somewhat secret and select group magnetized by the
poet’s speech and charisma and characterized by an “almost religious
atmosphere”5 reminiscent in many respects of a sect.
Historically, the sectarian dynamic that marked these years might be
regarded as an extreme expression of the Symbolist desire for an art-
inspired religion. The fever of excitement for Mallarmé’s work and
persona seems indeed to have taken on and radicalized the enthusiasm
triggered just a few years before by Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. More
than any other personality of this period, Mallarmé seems to have been
considered as the spiritual master of the “kind of religion”6 that the rising
generation of Symbolists, avid for transcendence, longed to establish.
362 Chapter Twenty
A Domestic/Spiritual Arcane
A short note written by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, a loyal
disciple of Mallarmé, provides a good illustration of the enthusiastic mood
that prevailed in Mallarmé’s circle by the end of the century. One night in
November of 1891, the famous painter posted this message to the poet to
let him know that Oscar Wilde was likely to show up at the next Mardi:
Access [to the Mardis] is a privilege and a proof of value. It is a distinction

that we are proud of. And the door of the Master must not to be kicked
open by any joker who crosses the Channel in order, later, to show off in
retailing cheaply the nice flowers of conversation and the serious truths
that our Poet uses in good mood!7
This message highlights what can be viewed as the main feature of the
Mardis on the sociological level; that is, their restrained accessibility.
Access to the Mardis was conditional on being invited by Mallarmé
himself, and newcomers were received in a quite ritualised way.8 For those
who were duly invited to the rue de Rome—about a dozen people each
week; that is, the capacity of Mallarmé’s living room—what mattered was
to secure the value of their “privilege” by preventing it from becoming a
common thing. As Whistler’s testimony suggests, the accredited disciples
were prompted to draw and continually reinforce a clear yet imaginary line
between themselves, the insiders, and the undesirable group, or the
outsiders, as if Mallarmé’s speech (its “nice flowers of conversation” and
its “serious truths”) were a sort of symbolic currency that had to be strictly
controlled in order to avoid any devaluation. A flamboyant society
character like Oscar Wilde could then be identified and feared as a
dangerous spendthrift.
Although they are grounded in their historical context, the late Mardis
appear in this light to have constituted the main piece of an institutional
mechanics of selection or “distinction,” as Pierre Bourdieu would put it.9
They reveal, on the part of their participants, a significant need for cultural
identification and symbolic recognition.
Two related biographical documents offer a very evocative, and
somewhat ironical, illustration of the Mardis’ function on the symbolic
level. The first is a letter written by the poet Pierre Louÿs to André Gide in
1891. After praising himself for having been invited and received for the
first time by Mallarmé, Louÿs declares to his correspondent, who could
not attend that week’s Mardi, “To tell you what happened in this circle is
maybe useless or at least untimely.” [Te dire ce qui s’est passé dans ce
cénacle, c’est peut-être inutile ou tout au moins inopportun.]10 But Louÿs
has a second and more personal interpretation of his inaugural Mardi, as a

note taken the same night in his diary clearly shows. Indeed, while
implying to Gide that what took place at Mallarmé’s is beyond speech or
at least is incommensurable with the conventional format and the ordinary
language of a letter, he notes for himself: “Mallarmé plays the pontiff in
an unbearable way.” [Mallarmé pontifie d’une façon insupportable.]11
These contradictory assessments suggest that Louÿs did not primarily
value the aesthetic or spiritual experience with which he elliptically
associated the night at Mallarmé’s, but rather the prestige that the
cenacle’s selective and distinctive membership conferred on him at an
institutional level. Beyond the more or less malicious intent of making a
peer drool over a missed chance, the poet’s attitude reveals that the
sectarian game taking place inside and outside Mallarmé’s domestic
arcane was fundamentally motivated by symbolic interests.
Achieving a “Superior Invisibility”

From a critical perspective, the most interesting fact, perhaps, is that
this institutional game does not seem to have been solely conditioned by
Mallarmé’s zealous, ambitious disciples or to have been beneficial only to
them. Indeed, some elements of Mallarmé’s public character and
biography, which are relevant enough to describe briefly, allow one to
think that the poet himself played an active role in cultivating the sectarian
dynamic that dominated the last period of his cenacle and that he himself
managed to draw substantial symbolic capital from this dynamic.
After having idealized and eulogized Mallarmé for more than half a
century as an icon of poetic purity and textual closure, critics have come to
stress, in the last twenty years or so, the poet’s tendency and ability to
control his public image and his continual concern with self-fashioning.12
Recent research has shown that Mallarmé’s life, social network, and
relationships with the institution at large demonstrate, on his part, an acute
understanding of the symbolic issues. This “sense of play”13 led him to
assert his presence on the social scene of literature but also, paradoxically,
to do so under the guise of secrecy and mystery, as if his intent were to
show himself to the public precisely in order to demonstrate that publicity
was not his domain. By staging such a disappearance—which is certainly
not extraneous to the “elocutory disappearance” theorized in his
poetics14—Mallarmé succeeded in inciting the curiosity of the public and
in making his work and character related objects of interrogation and
desire.
364 Chapter Twenty
The critic Pascal Durand synthesizes the institutional strategy of this

“homo totus ambiguous,”15 both salient and self-effacing, through an
expression that captures its paradoxical articulation: he refers to an
“ostentatious” or “participative withdrawal.”16 It is only when contextualized
within this institutional strategy that the late Mardis fully make sense.
They then appear as a symbolic device designed primarily to stage the
poet’s public disappearance and to create an imaginary smoke screen, both
obfuscating and attractive, between him and the general public.
The famous yet unrealized project of the Book (Livre) offers an
evocative and complementary illustration of another Mallarmean
institutional device apparently conceived to create symbolic value. For
more than thirty years, the poet announced to his friends and colleagues
the imminent arrival of what was supposed to be the historical incarnation
of all books, the total or definitive Work or, in his own words, the “orphic
explanation of the universe.”17 Even before he came to Paris, having yet to
publish a substantial book, Mallarmé was known as the (virtual) author of
the Book. The elliptic Book soon became an “obsessional object of
discussion” within the social universe of literature.18 Thus, although (or
precisely because) it never took any definitive shape, the Book proved
very beneficial to Mallarmé, who used it as a “tool for collective
hypnotization”19 and, accordingly, for self-promotion.
The most spectacular use of this symbolic tool did not take place at the
outset of the poet’s career, however. It occurred during the mid-eighties,
when Mallarmé achieved notoriety through the publication of his real first
book of poetry. The strong emphasis the poet put then on the Book, while
downplaying the importance of his just recently published poems by
referring to them as a “collection of worthless rags,”20 does not seem to
have been accidental: by all appearances, as Bertrand Marchal suggests, it
was part of a strategy of diversion meant to secure and even reinforce the
aura of mystery around the poet’s persona:
At a time [around 1885] when the public at last has access to his work,
when this work becomes visible, if not legible, Mallarmé, with a
Frenhofer-inspired gesture, decides to move the public’s gaze by pointing,
behind this new visibility, to the invisibility of an unknown masterpiece:
“I’ve always dreamt of and tried something else… [that is the Book].” At a
moment when the poet barely comes out from his invisibility, he gives
himself a superior invisibility.21
Marchal's depiction of this impressive act of social magic allows one to

consider anew, far from the stereotyped image of the “pure” thinker cut off
from any kind of institutional interest, Mallarmé’s public character. The
mystery and, by extension, the sacrality that the poet attributed to the
nature of his artistic enterprise appears, at least primarily (if not
exclusively) to have been a desired effect of his general and paradoxical
strategy of public presentation.
Not only did the late Mardis appear to have been perfectly adapted to
the production of the “superior invisibility” on which Mallarmé counted to
trigger the public’s curiosity, but the sectarian dynamic with which they
became associated seems to have been stimulated expressly as a way to
create symbolic value. Their secret dimension set the perfect milieu for the
cultivation of the half-light in which the poet sought public recognition
and through which, as a matter of fact, he ultimately gained it. Never as
well as the leader of this influential yet restricted formation did Mallarmé
reveal himself as the “absolute master”22 or the “great initiated”23 that he
came to embody in the eyes of his contemporaries and of posterity. And
never as well as in this equivocal role did he become one of the most
authoritative representatives of Symbolism.
Notes
1
Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 2008
[1999]).
2
Patrick Besnier, Mallarmé, le théâtre de la rue de Rome (Paris: Éditions du
Limon, 1998), 40.
3
Gordon Millan, Les ‘Mardis’ de Stéphane Mallarmé: Mythes et réalités (Paris:
Nizet, 2008), 34.
4
Ibid.
5
André Gide, Si le grain ne meurt (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 1:229.
6
Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 1:694.
7
Millan, Les ‘Mardis’ de Stéphane Mallarmé, 73. All translations of Millan are
my own.
8
Pascal Durand, Mallarmé: Du sens des formes au sens des formalités (Paris:
Seuil, 2008), 187.
9
Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale et jugement (Paris: Éditions de
Minuit, 2007 [1979]).
10
Millan, Les ‘Mardis’ de Stéphane Mallarmé, 64.
11
Ibid., 65.
12
Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1999), 1.
13
Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, (2003 [1997]).
14
Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris:
Gallimard, 2003), 211.
15
Roger Dragonetti, Le Fantôme dans le kiosque: Mallarmé et l’esthétique du
quotidien (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 17.
366 Chapter Twenty
16
Durand, Mallarmé: Du sens des formes au sens des formalités, 186.
17
Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard,
1998), 788.
18
Eric Benoit, Mallarmé et le mystère du “Livre,” (Paris: Champion-Slatkine,
1998), 11.
19
Michel Brix, “Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarmé,” in Stéphane Mallarmé: Colloque
de la Sorbonne du 21 novembre 1998, ed. André Guyaux (Paris: Presses de
l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), 24.
20
Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, 789.
21
Mallarmé, Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de Dés, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris:
Gallimard, 2003), ix.
22
Besnier, Mallarmé, le théâtre de la rue de Rome, 46.
23
Bourdieu 1998, 455. Bourdieu, P. (1998 [1992]). Les Règles de l’art. Genèse et
structure du champ littéraire, Paris, Seuil.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LES NABIS AND DRAMATISTS À L’ŒUVRE:
REFLECTIONS ON THE DECORATIVE
FROM MAURICE MAETERLINCK
TO ALFRED JARRY
CLÉMENT DESSY
In October 1893, actor Aurélien Lugné-Poe established the Théâtre de

l’Œuvre (Theater of the Work) in Turgot Street, only steps away from Paul
Fort’s defunct Théâtre d’Art (Theatre of Art). Painter Édouard Vuillard
and writer Camille Mauclair also played an official role in this
foundation.1 This combination of an actor, painter, and writer offered an
avant-garde theatre at the crossroads of painting and literature, reminiscent
of what poet Paul Fort had already experimented with in the establishment
of his own institution, the name of which, “Art,” was purposefully chosen.
L’Œuvre, the theatre’s name, is itself notably polysemous. The choice of
this name is anecdotally attributed to Vuillard.2 This programmatic title is
particularly expressive: L’Œuvre, which can be read as either a theatrical
or literary work of art, was established as a project merging painting and
literature.
This represented a revolutionary standpoint compared to what
subsidised theatres usually practiced. These other theatres still placed great
emphasis on the actors in their scenery and were thus declamatory in
nature. This principle resulted in a lack of attention to scenery; in most
cases, pieces of scenery were reused from play to play. The extreme
emphasis placed on the actor led to a devaluation of the art of scenery.
This, in turn, did not make the function of decorator very attractive to
experienced painters who were searching for symbolic recognition in the
artistic field. Theatrical decoration was seen as a minor art compared to
painting.3
A new way of considering the art of scenery appeared at the end of the
nineteenth century at Antoine’s Théâtre Libre (Free Theatre). However,
368 Chapter Twenty-One
the scenery, tailored to be as realistic as possible and operating on the

trompe-l’œil principle, left no leeway for conceptual art. As a result,
Antoine only gave audacious painters the opportunity to express
themselves in the making of his presentations’ programs, but rarely in that
of the scenery itself.4
In contrast, those theatres that espoused an idealist tendency introduced
a real novelty about that point: they asked for painters to realize their
sceneries. Both the Théâtre de l’Œuvre and the Théâtre de l’Art sought out
les Nabis painters in particular to accomplish this task. This was a
straightforward demonstration of the ideas that animated both theatres;
they wished to see different means of artistic expression functioning
together. Les Nabis, who were staunchly opposed to academic models of
artistic careers and generic categories, saw in this collaboration a way to
demonstrate their anti-conformity. They brought their knowledge and
know-how from painting into decoration. Since the role of scenery
designer was depreciated, les Nabis showed their anti-academism by
establishing themselves in a minor artistic genre, scenery design, within
emerging institutions: avant-garde theatres (then called à côté).
Two Major Dramatists à l’Œuvre: Maeterlinck and Jarry

The Théâtre de l’Œuvre’s repertoire included many foreign authors.
Among them, Maurice Maeterlinck occupied a special position. Although
he was Belgian, the fact he used the French language provided him with
direct access to the French literary domain. He realized, in France, the
dramaturgical renewal for which Paul Fort and Lugné-Poe attempted to
create an adapted scenic space. The performance of Pelléas et Mélisande
(Pelleas and Melisande), staged by Lugné-Poe on May 17, 1893, may be
considered the beginning of the Théâtre de l’Œuvre.5 This was a real
success, and it motivated the producer to open a regular theatre.6 Alfred
Jarry also played an important role in the history of the Théâtre de
l’Œuvre. His play Ubu Roi (Ubu King) was staged there on December 10,
1896.7 The scandal of the play stayed for a long time in people’s minds
and closed the Symbolist adventure of the theatre.8 Furthermore, the first
performance of Ubu Roi constituted a climax in the relationship between
L’Œuvre and les Nabis. Between the performances of Pelléas et
Mélisande and Ubu Roi, les Nabis frequently created scenery, most often
together. In the case of Ubu Roi, many Nabis took part in staging. Lugné-
Poe wrote that Bonnard, Vuillard, Lautrec, Sérusier, and Ranson all played
a part in creating the decoration and scenery9. After this tumultuous
performance, les Nabis would reduce their collaboration significantly, as if
Reflections on the Decorative from Maurice Maeterlinck to Alfred Jarry 369
this last show, in which they had invested so much, had fully concretized
their projects.
Parallels have already been established between Maeterlinck and Jarry
concerning their dramaturgical principles, particularly their predilection
for puppet theatre.10 Jarry himself supported Maeterlinck’s position. In an
unpublished text about dramatic art, Jarry explains that we can see, at the
end of the nineteenth century, a real
naissance du théâtre, car pour la première fois il y a en France (ou en

Belgique, à Gand, nous ne voyons pas la France dans un territoire inanimé
mais dans une langue, et Maeterlinck est aussi justement à nous que nous
répudions Mistral) un théâtre ABSTRAIT11.
[birth of theatre, because, for the first time, an ABSTRACT theatre takes
place in France (or in Belgium, in Ghent, we do not see France in a lifeless
territory but in a language, and Maeterlinck belongs to us as sure as we
renounce Mistral)]
Both authors, Maeterlinck and Jarry, gathered les Nabis. The performances
of their plays mark the beginning and the end, respectively, of les Nabis’
participation in Lugné-Poe’s theatre. Because of this collaboration, it is
interesting to compare the artistic language used by the different writers
and painters.
Maeterlinck: An Ornamental Language Dedicated

to an Open Work
Since the first years of the group, even before the Théâtre d’Art was
created, les Nabis staged some puppet shows themselves. In 1891,
Maurice Denis designed the scenery for a play written by his friend
Gabriel Trarieux, Le songe de la belle au bois (The dream of the sleeping
beauty), performed in Lady Finaly’s salon.12 On March 22, 1892, les
Nabis also produced one of the first stagings of Maeterlinck’s Les sept
princesses (Seven princesses). It took place in the house of State
Councillor Coulon and his wife on April 10, 189213 and was performed
with the medieval Farce du pâté et de la tarte (Farce of the pâté and the
pie) (Fig. 21-1). Jan Verkade conceived the curtain design,14 Édouard
Vuillard and Paul Sérusier designed the scenery, Paul Ranson created the
program (Fig. 21-2), and Maurice Denis designed the costumes. Shortly
after Octave Mirbeau introduced him to the French public in Le Figaro on
August 24, 1890, Maeterlinck received the admiration of les Nabis. The
imperative simplicity of les Nabis’ synthetic painting could be seen, in
fact, as a pictorial counterpart to the dramatist’s writings.

The text of Maeterlinck’s Les sept princesses is characterized by its
brevity. The whole action is condensed in one act. Later, Maeterlinck will
denounce this play, partly because of this feature.15 It is nevertheless a
particularity of the play that must have attracted les Nabis. We could
compare it to some synthetic paintings from a purely materialistic point of
view. At the same moment, the size of the Nabi canvas remained quite
reduced. For instance, Pierre Bonnard’s La Revue (The review) (1890) is
no larger than 23 by 31 centimetres,16 Maurice Denis’s Taches de soleil
sur la terrasse (Sun spots on the terrace, 1890) is 24 by 20.5 centimetres,17
and the famous Bois d’amour (Forest of love, also called Talisman,
1888)18 of Paul Sérusier is 27 by 27 centimetres. The vogue for Japanese
prints certainly influenced the preference for small compositions. In the
first Nabi paintings, it leads to a reduction of the framing and some abrupt
cuts in the subject of the canvas.19
These pictorial tendencies can be related to the action of Les sept
princesses, which is indeed extremely condensed. The play corresponds to
a fragment excerpted from a more extensive, intertextual story that refers
to the tale of The Sleeping Beauty.20 In Maeterlinck’s work, only the return
of Prince Marcellus, who must marry the sleeping Princess Ursule, is
represented. The story of this event (the return) hides a narrative past that
the lector, or the spectator, must imagine and build himself by following
the intertextual link. Nothing in Les sept princesses explains why the
Prince left or why he has been absent for seven years, nor does it relate the
beginning of the seven princesses’ eternal sleep. In this way, the story
represented by the Symbolist dramatist is shown as the essential moment
of this well-known legend. It constitutes a textual fragment that becomes
even more expressive because the ending is modified: the princess does
not come back to life.
The expressivity of this theatrical short piece is also present in the
language of the play. Repetitions are systematic here, as in Maeterlinck’s
style as a whole:
La Reine: Où est-il! Où est-il?—Est-ce lui ?—Je ne le reconnais plus! …

Si, si, je le reconnais encore! Oh! qu’il est grand! qu’il est grand! Il est au
bas de l’escalier ! … Marcellus! Marcellus! Est-ce vous? Est-ce vous?—
Montez! Montez! nous sommes si vieux nous autres! … Nous ne pouvons
plus descendre! … Montez! montez! montez!21
[The Queen: Where is he! Where is he?—Is it him?—I don’t recognize

him anymore! Yes, yes, I recognize him yet! Oh! he is so big! he is so big!
He is downstairs! … Marcellus! Marcellus! Is it you? Is it you?—Come
upstairs! Come upstairs! We are so old! … We can’t go downstairs

anymore! … Go upstairs! Go upstairs! Go upstairs!]22
The frequent repetitions in Maeterlinck’s theatre constitute the most

apparent element of a new dramaturgical language and bring us far from a
realistic mimesis;23 they are not really founded on the referential function
of the language to “reality.” According to Gérard Dessons, they demonstrate
that “the speech cannot be reduced to a simple content.”24 On the contrary,
the “signification of the language is not based on the [linguistic] sign.”25
The repetitions carry other meanings than the content to which the words
refer. This trope points in fact to an internal movement, a prosodic rhythm.
In this context, Maeterlinck often makes use of assonance and
alliteration. These poetic strategies not only contribute to the establishment
of the internal rhythm that we see above, but they also draw attention to
the expressivity of the signifier. In La Princesse Maleine (1889), the
author’s first play, the prosodic sequence MAL is associated with the
French term malade (ill). “Maleine m’a l’air un peu malade” (Maleine
seems to be a little ill) is a good example of Maeterlinck’s poetics.26 This
opens new ways of signification. Expressivity is sought through the
signifiers. Maeterlinck builds formal links between words (Maleine-m’a
l’air-malade), and so between signifieds. We could sum this up merely by
saying that the sound proximity between words suggests an association of
meanings.
In painting, the expressivity of prosodic rhythms can be connected to
les Nabi’s research of expressive lines. If we focus on the material aspects,
line and color are, schematically, to the painting composition what words
and sentences are to the writing. As we have observed, Maeterlinck’s use
of assonance and alliteration creates a repetitive rhythm. This is echoed,
interestingly, in the arabesque line, which plays a very important role in
the art of Gauguin and les Nabis. The arabesque structures Nabi
compositions through the creation of a visual and emotive rhythm made of
“repetitive” curves and counter-curves.27 This conceptual hypothesis is
also based on Maurice Denis’s theoretical texts, in which the painter
explains the role of the decorative line. He gives to the line an expressive
strength, signifying by itself without link to the subject of painting. 28
Both Maeterlickean language and the linear arabesque refer to a
structuring rhythm, thanks to their formal expressivity. The program for
the presentation of Les sept princesses (Fig. 21-2), drawn by Paul Ranson,
is structured by arabesques. These follow and overrun the shape of the
sleeping princess. The program for Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), created
by Maurice Denis (Fig. 21-3), submits to similar decorative rules. On this
stonecutting, we can see a woman’s head turned downwards (suggesting a
pensive attitude). Her thoughts are represented above her hair. The wavy
lines between the bottom and the top portions of the composition allow the
spectator to link, plastically, the material world with her dreams. In the
same way, Maeterlinck’s repetitions reveal the other side of words through
formal proximity. The Nabi pictorial art and the Maeterlickean text thus
present similar forms of expression; both tend to exceed the simple
referential function of their own “signs” to subjects.
In theatrical art, where literary text and visual representation are
strongly connected, the expressive and decorative line finds another
equivalent in the stylized shape of the actor as an “arabesque line.” In
1894, for La Gardienne by Henri de Régnier, Lugné-Poe asks several
actors to act without saying a word. They had to stay between a curtain of
tulle and a canvas painted by Vuillard, while other actors, hidden in the
orchestra pit, read the dramatic poem29. It is reminiscent of Pierre
Quillard’s wish, expressed in his paper about scenery. The poet imagines
the staging as “une pure fiction ornementale qui complète l’illusion par
des analogies de couleurs et de lignes avec le drame.” [A pure ornamental
fiction, which completes the illusion by analogies of colors and lines with
the drama.]30 The image of the actor has to take part in this ornamental
fiction.31 Using puppets in Les sept princesses, les Nabis followed the
subtitle of the play (which designates that it is intended for puppets) to
divert the public from the referential function of the actor (which refers
too nearly to a human character). The actor was indeed considered by
Maeterlinck as a form of mimicry:32 in this way of thinking, a man (actor)
represents another man (character). In order to avoid this other form of
trompe-l’oeil, les Nabis concretized the idea of a theatre of puppets,
according to their own artistic principles.
Jarry: Another Theatrical Language for an Open Work

Jarry discovered les Nabis and the literary symbolist milieus in 1892.33
He became an early, fervent supporter of Paul Gauguin. Dario Gamboni
analyzes how Jarry paid homage to the painter in his first texts.34 We may
consequently think that the principles of les Nabis soon influenced Jarry’s
artistic proceeding35.
In 1896, Jarry staged his famous play Ubu Roi in the Théâtre de
l’Œuvre with the help of his Nabis friends: Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard,
Édouard Vuillard, Paul Ranson, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. This text
completely reconstructs theatrical language. Jarry simplifies language and
deforms words such as the famous merdre and oneilles, whose deformations
can be heard. In other instances, such as the word phynance, changes to
words could only be represented graphically. According to Henri Béhar,

the deformation of words reveals an appropriation of vocabulary by the
creator.36 Personal accents and deformations would not be really funny,
but would only aim to recreate a language. The dramaturge uses language
as a malleable material by producing neologism such as cornegidouille.
Beyond these aspects of raw language, Jarry makes use of many
figures of speech in Ubu Roi. The repetitions, as in Maeterlinck’s plays,
are numerous:
Père Ubu: Si! Si! Arrivez. Je suis pressé, moi! Arrivez, entendez-vous!
C’est ta faute, brute de capitaine, si nous n’arrivons pas. Nous devrions
être arrivés. Oh oh, mais je vais commander, moi, alors! Pare à virer! À
Dieu vat. Mouillez, virez vent devant, virez vent arrière. Hissez les voiles,
serrez les voiles, la barre dessus, la barre dessous, la barre à côté. Vous
voyez, ça va très bien. Venez en travers à la lame et alors ce sera parfait.37
[Pa Ubu: Yes! Yes! Arrive. I am in a hurry! Arrive, do you hear me? It’s
your fault, you savage of a captain, if we don’t arrive. We should have
been arrived. Oh oh, but I’m going to order by myself, then! Ready to turn!
God willing. Drop, turn! head wind, turn! rear wind. Hoist the sails, tighten
up the sails, helm up, helm down, helm in the middle! You see, that goes
very well. Cut across into the trough and that’ll be perfect.]
There are also lists of assonanced insults, such as this famous one in
the second scene of the fifth act:
Bougrelas (le frappant):

—Tiens, lâche, gueux, sacripant, mécréant, musulman!
Père Ubu (ripostant):
—Tiens! Polognard, soûlard, bâtard, hussard, tartare, calard, cafard,
mouchard, savoyard, communard!
Mère Ubu (le battant aussi):
—Tiens, capon, cochon, félon, histrion, fripon, souillon, polochon!38
[Bougrelas (striking him): Take that, coward, beggar, rascal, miscreant,

Moslem!
Pa Ubu (riposting): Take that! Polack, drunkard, bastard, hussar, tartar,
scabbard, cockroach, Savoyard, Communard!
Ma Ubu (hitting him too): Take that! Capon, pig, felon, histrion, rascal,
trollop, bolster!]
Moreover, we find many instances of onomatopoeia throughout the play.

All these elements bring into question the referential function of language.
Inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé, Jarry explains the value of rhythmic
prosodic figures in one of his “speculations,” published in the review La

Plume in 1903:
Les allitérations, les rimes, les assonances et les rythmes révèlent des
parentés profondes entre les mots. Où dans plusieurs mots, il y a une même
syllabe, il y a un point commun.39
[Alliterations, rimes, assonances and rhythms reveal deep connections

between the words. Every time there is a common syllable in some words,
there is a common point.]
Ubu Roi represents a culmination in the research of a decorative

language. Juliet Simpson has already demonstrated how this topic is put in
practise by Jarry in his first collection of poems, Les Minutes de Sable
Mémorial (The Minutes of Memorial Sand, 1894). She analyses in
particular his poem “L’homme à la hache,” dedicated to Gauguin.
According to Simpson, “internal rhyme and assonance reinforce external
rhyme … to create a decorative network of dense sound binding various
parts of the poem together.”40 She adds:
For Jarry, the decorative is a puzzle which leads to further puzzles; and
recognizing how the various parts of the puzzle fit together (if at all) only
means looking closer at the structure of the puzzle itself. … Jarry’s early
writings can be read as experiments with the paradoxical readability and
unreadability of the ornamental text41.
The idea of an expressive language is not really new, and it could have
been influenced by Maeterlinck. Jarry and Maeterlinck both consider the
language from a similar point of view. They promote a certain vision of
Symbolism, not based on allegory as in the “idealist movement,” but
rather on an expressive suggestion.42 This differentiation between allegory
and suggestive symbol also impacts the question of representation in Nabi
painting. Maurice Denis complained in La Revue Blanche about “informed
critics [who] confounded mystic and allegoric tendencies, that means a
search of expression through the subject, and the symbolist tendencies, that
means a search of expression through the work of art.”43
The Guignol puppet theatre that influenced Jarry also brought into
question the classical conception of scenery: a lonely character only
suggests crowds and a simple placard indicates scenic places. As we can
see, the rejection of trompe-l’oeil and mimicry leads Jarry to conceive
extreme opinions about theatre and its scenery.
Conclusion
Les Nabis first found a literary echo to their artistic aspirations with
Maeterlinck before their collaboration with Alfred Jarry. The latter would
align his principles with those of les Nabis during the presentation of Ubu
Roi. At that time, Jarry rethought his auctorial posture and its relation to an
artwork’s consumer, either reader or spectator. When it concerns the
reader-spectator, the artistic posture that Jarry and Maeterlinck adopted
converges with that of les Nabis.
Les Nabis no longer wanted an artwork painted from nature, and, to
follow this goal, they exploited the path of decorative art. On their part,
Maeterlinck and Jarry explore a new literary and dramatic language. The
devaluation of language’s referential function leads them to the search for
the expressivity of the signifiant, just as les Nabis were led to decorative
art and line expressivity by the devaluation of the trompe-l’oeil. Jarry and
Maeterlinck take advantage of the potential offered by a dramatic
language where the value of the signifiant is augmented. Though
influenced by Mallarmé, this position allowed for language to be given a
value especially decorative—rather than merely referential. Jarry further
defines “pataphysics” as “la science des solutions imaginaires, qui
accorde symboliquement aux linéaments les propriétés des objets décrits
par leur virtualité” [the science of imaginary solutions which symbolically
awards to lineaments the properties of objects described by their
virtuality].44
On the other hand, the denial of the artistic work’s referential value
leads us to a type of artwork that one could conceive as “open,” according
to Umberto Eco’s definition. Gorceix notes that Les sept princesses
represents the type of artwork that is “open to a reader’s imagination.”
Differing from a finished work, the ambiguity left by the author leaves the
reader to participate in building the coherence of the piece. Refusing the
reader’s passivity, the “open” artwork involves the reader as an essential
contributor to artistic creation. This principle constitutes a founding
principle of pictural synthesism. The simplification and abstraction on
which it operates requires an active role from the spectator. Paul Sérusier’s
famous Bois d’amour and Maurice Denis’ Taches de soleil sur la terrasse
illustrate the extreme application of this idea.
Jarry believed that each person could develop his or her own vision of
the drama and of the scenery. That is what he states in his article “Of
Theatre Uselessness in the Theatre”:
Et il est juste que chaque spectateur voie la scène dans le décor qui
convient à sa vision de la scène.
[And it is true that every spectator sees the scene in the scenery that
corresponds to his own vision of the scene.]

A reader’s participation is requested and remains essential to the
artistic project. Indeed, as Pierre Quillard, then Jarry would go on to
postulate, the scenery evolves independently from the drama. According to
Maurice Denis, one should find “illustration without the help of the text.”
Painters and writers abide by the same artistic principles but do not want
to step onto the other’s work. As a result, the meeting point of the different
forms of arts does not lie upstream (at the moment of creation), but
downstream, when the spectator must individually recreate theatrical
illusion through the use of ornamentation.
This formula allows for an autarkic definition of writer, director, and
decorator at a moment when Nabi painters were distancing themselves
from the “man of letters” regime.45 As for the writers, they team up with
les Nabis, avant-garde painters who rethink the way visual representation
is considered. Maeterlinck and Jarry’s dramaturgic project benefits from a
pictural endorsement that also legitimates their aspirations to an
“ornamental” or a “decorative” illusion.
Fig. 21-1. Paul Ranson, La Farce du pâté et de la tarte, 1892, stonecutting. Saint-
Germain-en-Laye (France), departemental museum Maurice Denis “Le Prieuré”.
Fig. 21-2. Paul Ranson, program for Les sept princesses, 1892, stonecutting. Saint-
Germain-en-Laye (France), departemental museum Maurice Denis “Le Prieuré”.
Fig. 21-3. Maurice Denis, Pelléas et Mélisande, 1893, drawing (pencil on paper).
Private collection © SABAM Belgium 2009 © ADAGP, Banque d’Images, Paris
2010.

Fig. 21-1. Paul Ranson, La Farce du pâté et de la tarte, 1892,
stonecutting. Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France), departemental museum
Maurice Denis “Le Prieuré”.

Fig. 21-2. Paul Ranson, program for Les sept princesses, 1892,
stonecutting. Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France), departemental museum
Maurice Denis “Le Prieuré”.

Fig. 21-3. Maurice Denis, Pelléas et Mélisande, 1893, drawing (pencil on
paper). Private collection © SABAM Belgium 2009 © ADAGP, Banque
d’Images, Paris 2010.
Notes

1
Jacques Robichez, Le Symbolisme au théâtre (Paris: L’Arche, 1957), 193.
2
Ibid., 172. See also Aurélien Lugné-Poe, La Parade, vol. 1, Le Sot du Tremplin
(Paris: Gallimard, 1930), 231.
3
For more information about Symbolist scenery, see Denis Bablet, Esthétique
générale du décor de théâtre de 1870 à 1914 (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1989); Marisa
Verna, “Vers un art total. Synesthésie théâtrale et dramaturgie symboliste,” Revue
d’histoire du théâtre 228, no. 4 (2005): 307-332.
4
Geneviève Aitken, “Les Nabis, un foyer au théâtre,” in Nabis 1888-1900 (Paris:
Réunion des musée nationaux, 1993), 400.
5
Robichez, Le Symbolisme au théâtre, 502.
6
Ibid., 158-175.
7
Ibid., 530.
8
Ibid., 357.
9
Aurélien Lugné-Poe, La Parade, vol. 2, Acrobaties (Paris: Gallimard, 1932),
175-176.
10
See, for instance, Henryk Jurkowski, Écrivains et marionettes: Quatre siècles de
literature dramatique (Charleville-Mézières: Institut International de la
Marionnette, 1991), 246-259.
11
Alfred Jarry, Œuvres complètes, ed. Michel Arrivé (Paris: Gallimard “La
Pléiade,” 1972), 1:410-411.
12
Maurice Denis, 1870-1943. Exhibition catalogue (Paris: Réunion des musées
nationaux; Montréal: Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, 2006), 152.
13
Aitken, “Les Nabis, un foyer au théâtre,” 403-406.
14
Conserved in the departmental museum “Le Prieuré,” in Saint-Germain-en-Laye
(France).
15
Paul Gorceix, Maeterlinck: L’arpenteur de l’invisible (Brussels: Le Cri,
Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises, 2005), 346.

16
Oil on canvas. Private collection.
17
Oil on carton. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
18
Oil on wood. Orsay Museum, Paris.
19
Claude Jeancolas, La Peinture des Nabis (Paris: FVW, 2002), 123-124.
20
Gorceix, Maeterlinck, 346.
21
Maurice Maeterlinck, Les sept princesses in Œuvres, vol. 2, Théâtre 1, ed. Paul
Gorceix (Brussels: Complexe, 1999), 335.
22
All of the translations in this paper are literal and my own.
23
Paul Aron, La Mémoire en jeu: Une histoire du théâtre de langue française en
Belgique (Bruxelles: Théâtre National de la Communauté française, La Lettre
volée, 1995), 77.
24
Gérard Dessons, Maeterlinck, le théâtre du poème (Paris: Laurence Tepler,
2005), 147.
25
Ibid., 80.
26
Dessons, Maeterlinck, le théâtre du poème, 93.
27
Éric Alliez, L’Œil-cerveau: Nouvelles histoires de la peinture moderne (Paris:
Vrin, 2007), 334.
28
Maurice Denis, “Définition du néo-traditionnisme,” Art et critique 65 & 66
(August 1890), reproduced in Le Ciel et l’Arcadie (Paris: Hermann, 1993), 18.
29
Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, “Reconstruire le réel ou suggérer l’indicible” in Le Théâtre
en France, ed. Jacqueline de Jomaron (Paris, Armand Colin, 1992), 212.
30
Pierre Quillard, “De l’inutilité absolue de la mise en scène exacte,” Revue d’Art
Dramatique (May 1, 1891), 181-182.
31
Didier Plassard, L’acteur en effigie. Figures de l’homme artificiel dans le
théâtre des avant-gardes historiques. Allemagne, France, Italie (Charleville-
Mézières: Institut international de la marionnette, Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme), 42.
32
Ibid., 37.
33
See Laurent de Freitas, “Léon-Paul Fargue et Alfred Jarry, autour d'une même
passion pour la peinture: 1892-1894,” L’Étoile-absinthe 103-104 (2005) and Henri
Béhar and Julien Schuh, eds, Alfred Jarry et les arts (Paris: Du Lérot/Société des
Amis d’Alfred Jarry: 2008).
34
See Dario Gamboni, “Mana’o tupapa’u: Jarry, Gauguin et la fraternité des arts,”
in Michael Einfalt et al., eds., Intellektuelle Redlichkeit—Intégrité intellectuelle:
Literatur—Geschichte—Kultur. Festschrift für Joseph Jurt (Heidelberg: Winter,
2005), 459-475.
35
Julien Schuh, “Jarry synthétiste” in Alfred Jarry et les arts, ed. Henri Béhar and
Julien Schuh, 91-104.
36
Béhar, La dramaturgie d’Alfred Jarry (Paris: Champion, 2003), 91.
37
Jarry, Ubu Roi, in Œuvres complètes, 1:397.
38
Ibid., 395.
39
Jarry, “Ceux pour qui il n’y eut point de Babel,” La Plume, May 15, 1903,
reproduced in La chandelle verte, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Henri Bordillon
with Patrick Besnier and Bernard Le Doze (Paris: Gallimard “La Pléiade”, 1987),
443.
40
Juliet Simpson, “Symbolist Aesthetics and the Decorative Image/Text,” French

Forum 25, no. 2 (May 2000), 193.
41
Ibid., 189.
42
See “Menus propos,” La Jeune Belgique (January 1891) reproduced in Maurice
Maeterlinck, Œuvres I: Le Réveil de l’âme. Poésies et essais, ed. Paul Gorceix
(Brussels: Complexe, 1999), 190. Maeterlinck distinguishes “allegory” from
“symbol”: “Le Symbole est l’Allégorie organique et intérieure ; il a ses racines
dans les ténèbres. L’Allégorie est le Symbole extérieur ; elle a ses racines dans la
lumière, mais sa cime est stérile et flétrie. L’Allégorie est un grand arbre mort; il
empoisonne le paysage. L’Allégorie est interprétée par l’Intelligence; le Symbole
est interprété par la Raison.”
43
Pierre L. Maud (alias Maurice Denis), “Notes d’art et d’esthétique,” La Revue
Blanche, June 25, 1892, 364. Partly reproduced in Maurice Denis, Le Ciel et
l’Arcadie, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon, 28 (note 43).
44
Jarry, Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, in Œuvres
complètes, 1:669. Underlined in the original.
45
These words, written by Paul Gauguin, were symptomatic of power tensions
between writers and painters, which are analyzed in Dario Gamboni, “‘Après le
régime du Sabre le régime de l’homme de lettres’: La critique d’art comme
pouvoir et comme enjeu,” in La critique d’art en France 1850-1900, ed. Jean-Paul
Bouillon, Actes du colloque de Clermont-Ferrand, 25, 26 et 27 mai 1987, Travaux
LXIII (Saint-Etienne: University of Saint-Etienne, 1989), 212.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
GREEK SYMBOLISM:
CORRESPONDENCES AND DIFFERENCES
VIA THE ANGEL’S IMAGE
MARIA AIVALIOTI
Greek Symbolism constitutes an aspect of the Greek art that has been
forgotten or neglected. There was not a keen interest in it, nor was there
a systematic and careful study in spite of the introduction of the term
“Symbolism” by a Greek poet, Jean Moreas, alias Ioannis
Papadiamantopoulos.1 The confusion and then the denial of the reception
of Symbolist works, and moreover the opinions of historians of art and art
critics, who claimed that Symbolism “shouldn’t be considered as one of
the important movements of the XIX century but as a temporary
adventure,” contributed to the delay of its study.2
Art and the New State: Greek Society at the End

of the Nineteenth Century
In Greece, the birth and development of Symbolism were shaped under
specific conditions that corresponded perfectly to social and political
conditions. Greek art did not follow the artistic tendencies that dominated
in the Occident because Byzantine art continued to proclaim a theocratic
character. Even afterwards, the Turkish occupation moved Greece away
from the cultural western centers, and the art was devoid of a clear artistic
physiognomy. Until the Revolution of 1821, the only surviving art was
popular art, mostly decorative, and religious art, which was intended to be
used as iconography in churches. It was only in 1827 that Greece became
an independent country after a long occupation, and in 1833, Othon, a
Bavarian prince, imposed himself as the first king of the Greek State. The
arrival of Othon (a great philhellene and an ardent admirer of Ancient
384 Chapter Twenty-Two
Greece) contributed to the foundation of the “School of Arts,” where

foreign professors, coming primarily from Bavaria, promoted the spirit of
European art of that period. They focused mainly on artistic tendencies
that echoed those praised by the Academy of Munich. These two historical
events constituted the two principal points in the creation of a national art
that would be capable of interpreting the history of a nation and
reinforcing the modern present time. Moreover, it would be able to
become equivalent to the rhythms of European societies, since accession to
Europe was a peremptory demand.3 On the one hand, as far as social level
is concerned, the development of a new middle class, whose ambition to
follow European tendencies extended to art as well, contributed to the
birth of an art that searched for its origins in European art, thus entrusting
artists to follow the spirit of that period in time to form Greek art, lending
a European identity to it. On the other hand, as far as politics were
concerned, the shifting of interests from the independence of the country
to an expansionist state led to a series of perpetual wars;4 these wars began
with the war in 1897, whose defeat caused the country to break apart.
Then, due to the Balkan wars and World War I, these expansionist
ambitions reached their peak along with the collapse of the Great Idea
mentality during the catastrophe of Asia Minor in 1922. That imperialistic
course and the rise of a new social class constituted the core of Modern
Greek history during the blossoming of Greek Symbolism,5 which “took
the responsibility to express the mental depression and the intellectual
worries of a difficult and bitter generation.”6
Greek Symbolism
The general belated conception of “avant-garde” movements in the
Greek artistic environment applied to Symbolism as well, which appeared
at the end of the nineteenth century and the outset of the twentieth. It
dominated until the 1930s and beyond, according to some isolated cases of
artists.7 The year 1892 was considered the “birth” of Greek Symbolism
due to the appearance of Kostis Palamas’ poem “The eyes of my soul.”
The following year, in Constantinople, Ioannis Griparis published the first
essays in the Greek language concerning French Symbolism. As far as
artistic conditions, 1898 was the determinative year when the review ȉȑȤȞȘ
(Techni-Art) was published, expressing the message of the movement and
introducing the Greek public to the works of European Symbolist artists.
Constantinos Chatzopoulos, the editor, affirmed his ambition to initiate
readers into works that perfectly corresponded to the state of their soul.8
Despite the ephemeral edition of the review (November 1898-October
Greek Symbolism: Correspondences and Differences 385
1899), in its pages appeared the first translation of Mallarmé, Maeterlinck,

Strindberg, and Nietzsche, as well as reproductions of the paintings of
Bucklin, Klinger, Franz von Stuck, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Burne-
Jones. They were accompanied by enthusiastic critiques that indicated the
taste of the public and determined the artists’ formation.9 At the end of the
nineteenth century and the dawn of twentieth, the Greek public formed its
artistic preference through the translation of specific works; the critiques
appeared in review magazines as well as in illustrated books. The
exhibitions taking place in cafes, libraries, and in photographers’ studios
did not constitute such a frequent event in the capital city, Athens, which
was the centre of cultural life.10
Greek Symbolism differs from the declining or even “demonic”
character of the corresponding European movement, and it took various
forms; it puts forward the conditions of melancholy, dreams, lost love,
sacrifice or death, giving life the conservative nature of the Greek society
where the religious element was extremely vivid and present.11 Within the
Symbolist themes, religious themes hold a significant position, and they
are presented in such a way in order to be reflected by the artists’
mentality and ideals. The angelic figure maintains this rule. The angel
retains its religious nature, the role of God’s messenger-servant, but it
simultaneously becomes an expression of personal feelings and an
interpreter of Greek history.12
The Angel as a Personal Motif

Nikolaos Gysis (1842-1901)13
The angel appears in the late works of Nikolaos Gysis, who is
considered the first Greek Symbolist painter, an ascertainment that had
been made already in the year of his death, 1901,14 and that continues to be
accepted by art historians.15 The themes and the influence of Symbolism
are detected in his last artistic period, where the angel’s image is revealed.
Abandoning genre painting during the last years of his life, from 1890-
1900, he dealt mostly with religious themes, which overcame the borders
of a simple deep faith and were changed into the mirror of his “ego.” His
faith, profound and sincere, was strictly associated with his ideal
conception of art, human beings, and the nation.16 It was the battle
between “Good” and “Evil” and the triumph of “Good” that concerned the
painter, especially taking into consideration that he died of a very serious
disease. The Worship of the Angels (1898, Fig. 22-1) was an indicative
work, the first of a series that was, in a way, considered “eschatological.”
In a composition where austerity of drawing, simplicity of form, and pure

colours dominate, the two angels, who are presented only through their
white silhouette and their wings, inspired by the wings of antique statues,
as an emblem of their nature, are shown here, as God servants. On a
second view, it is evident that Gysis represents, in a unique way, not only
the theme of adoration, but also Christ’s triumph; Christ’s figure is
represented as a source of light, thus allowing us to interpret the scene as a
kind of Last Judgment.17 The angels represent the faithful who are praising
God at the moment of the victory of “Good” against “Evil,” which is
indicated here with the picture of a snake, and thus Gysis demonstrates his
perceptions about the duality of human nature.
So, as the painter’s mystic or even existential anxieties were very acute
in the latest years of his life,18 these anxieties were especially apparent in
works where the angel’s figure appeared. The Triumph of Religion or The
Foundation of Faith (1894-1895), where the Archangel’s figure is
imposed, constitutes the example par excellence.19 For this theme, which
was never completed or exhibited, Gysis liberated himself and outlined an
angel far away from the oriented norms of his faith or his religious
education. There is no certainty about what the final version of this
painting is because Gysis executed numerous studies of that composition,
proving that the angel became a symbol and an image that was haunting
him. However, these studies don’t constitute preparatory drawings; rather,
they should be considered as completed versions that represent the
Archangel’s motif under a different angle and develop the painter’s
stylistic conceptions. In an audacious composition, full of dynamism (Fig.
22-2), the Archangel is presented through the figure of a young, nude,
muscular man, a synonym of force, that reminds us of the nude Archangel
of Franz von Stuck in the Guardian of Paradise (1889, Munich, Villa
Stuck) and the angelic imposing figure of The Expulsion from Paradise
(1891). The work of the German artist constituted a source of inspiration
for Gysis, since both painters exhibited their works in the same city and
taught at the Academy of Munich.20 However, the relationship to European
Symbolists does not end with this composition. The incorporeal figure of
the Archangel with the red hair and closed eyes21—another version of the
same painting (Fig. 22-3, 22-4), considered the final version22—shows
perfectly the “correspondences” with the European Symbolists, since the
closed eyes are a common topos in Symbolist circles, such as in the figures
of Odilon Redon’s and Edward Burne-Jones’ paintings.23
Fig. 22-1. Nikolaos Gysis, The Worship of Angels, 1898.

The Foundation of Faith, 1894-1895.
The Archangel Gabriel—an identification given by the painter

himself—became, as far as Gysis is concerned, a purely personal symbol
that expressed, in all his compositions, this relentless concern about death
and posthumous life. In all its representations, the Archangel is always a
triumphant winner (Fig. 22-5). It is indicative that, in a last study, the
angel has just declared his victory, holding his sword and referencing that
final victory against “Evil,” against death, providing an answer to that
permanent question of what happens after death. Gysis perceived the
angel-winner motif as a way to exorcise his fears about death and human
destiny, and religion served as an inspiration and support that the painter
never renounced.24 In 1890, Gustave Moreau, in his painting The Parca
and the Angel of Death (Paris, Musée Gustave Moreau), represented the
angel of death with a wreath on his head, holding a sword, expressing his
affliction about his partner’s death. According to Moreau (as opposed to
Gysis), the angel of death, a triumphant winner angel, indicates the
domination of death over human destiny. The subject of the fight remains
a favourite one among Symbolists, who used the angel’s figure in order to
express combat and the final victory of “Good,” of the spirit, of the artist
himself against “Evil,” against flesh, against society. This combat can be
seen in works such as Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon (1888, Edinburg,
National Gallery of Scotland) and Khnopff’s With Verhaeren, an Angel
(1889, Brussels, Villa Khnopff). At the end of his life, Moreau, for his
ultimate composition, The Dead Lyres (1896, Paris, Musée Gustave
Moreau), which he never finished, illustrated the figure of an archangel
who appears and dominates the composition. Interpreting this work, which
is considered the culmination of his subjects and theories of a lifetime,
Moreau, being near to death and even closer to the Christian religion, drew
the angelic figure as the central one in order to suggest the renouncement
of his pagan mythology in favour of a salvational Christian imagery,25 thus
creating spiritual and mystic relations amongst the Symbolists, here with
Gysis, through the depiction of the angel’s image.26
The Foundation of Faith , 1894-1895, oil on canvas.
Fig. 22-4. Nikolaos Gysis, Study of the head of the archangel of The Triumph of
Religion or The Foundation of Faith , 1894-1895.
Fig. 22-5. Nikolaos Gysis, The Triumph of Religion or The Foundation of Faith ,
1894-1895.
Mpiskinis Dimitrios (1891-1947)27

The angel, in the works of Mpiskinis Dimitrios, a painter who studied
at the National School of Fine Arts in Athens and afterwards in Paris, not
only expresses the painter’s piety, but also emerges as the pretence for the
announcement of his personal anguish, a move that follows, in a way,
Gysis’ steps.
The angel appears early in his works, having a double mission: that of
both a guardian angel and the angel of death in the Time of Vesper (Fig.
22-6), a work that, according to its title and its subject, recalls Millet’s
painting L’Angelus (1857-1859, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) but also Gauguin’s
Brittany Woman in Prayer (1894, Massachusetts, Clark Art Institute). The
angel, who has the characteristics of a young girl, accompanies the faithful
until the end; this work reveals the mentality of a painter who affirmed that
the meaning of life itself constitutes the constant fight against death.28 In
his works, the angel represents the perpetual anguish that haunts humans
as a result of the fall, and the figure of the angel always accompanies the
faithful through his life, until his death. That connection between the angel
of death, as a hopeful figure, and the faithful testifies to the painter’s
Christian beliefs and how, like Gysis, he uses the angel’s figure in order to
soothe his existential anguish about the endless fall and fight and, finally,
his anxiety about salvation after death.
His works are indicative: The Expulsion from Paradise (Fig. 22-7)
consists of a series of four paintings created in the 1930s.29 Mpiskinis
chooses this subject, a favourite one for Symbolists, in order to describe
the threshold of grief and human fight and finally the death that occurs as
the result of this disobedience. The angel, with four colourful wings that
invoke the Byzantine tradition, has the characteristics of a young, well,
lusty, and austere man, and it is drawn in parallel with Franz von Stuck’s
angel of Paradise Lost (1897, Gemalgegalerie Neue Meister, Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen).
Though the artist is the only one who was under the influence of Pre-
Raphaelites in the Annunciation (1930, Athens, Private Collection), a work
that reminds us of Rossetti’s painting The Childhood of Mary Virgin
(1849, London, The Tate Britain Gallery) concerning the juxtaposition of
the scene and its emblems. His image of Christ, which borrowed
characteristics of William Holman Hunt’s Christ figure (a proliferated
image) and was presented like an angel messenger, was also inspired by
Maurice Denis’ work. The artist had the opportunity to study Denis’
paintings during his stay in Paris. In his ultimate work, The Death of the
Artist (1947, Private Collection), the notions of death and catharsis
dominate, incarnated through two cherubs’ figures: the one like a skeleton
(an original image to present the angel of death) and the other one having
the characteristics of a little child, a widely-spread image for angels’
figures. In this composition, described as “the premonition of the end,”30
the artist perceived his role like that of the Messiah, whose holy mission
was to reveal the mysteries of nature through his art.31 In that dialectic of
fall and salvation, the angel who took the man out of darkness and
accompanied him to the purification was formed by Jean Delville in the
L’ange des splendeurs (1894, Private collection).
Fig. 22-6. Dimitrios Mpiskinis, The Time of Vesper, 1916.

Fig 22.7. Dimitrios Mpiskinis, The Expulsion from Paradise, 1930-1935,

The Angel as a National Emblem

Parthénis Constantinos (1878-1967)32
However, Greek Symbolism had not only individual dimensions,
expressing solely the painter’s sentimental state, but also national ones,
illustrating the sentimental conditions and the ambitions of a whole nation
during crucial historic periods. Through his work, Constantinos Parthénis
expressed political events and the mentality of the Greek people. After his
sojourn in Vienna (1897-1903)33 and his two-year stay in Paris (1909-
1911),34 he settled down in Greece definitively in 1911. The angel’s figure
was not found in his precocious works, which reflected the impact of
Vienna; it appeared for the very first time in the Annunciation (Fig. 22-8),
a series of six paintings firstly accomplished in the years 1907-1911, and it
was that painting that established his reputation in the Greek artistic
scene.35 The conception of his style testifies not to only the influence of
the Viennese experience (in particular of Klimt’s painting Music I [1895,
Munich, Neue Pinakothek; Beethoven Freeze: The Poetry, 1902, Vienna,
Secession]) but also the influence of his stay in Paris, while the curved
lines are inspired by the art of Les Nabis. In particular, Maurice Denis’
works Catholic Mystery, as well as a series on the Annunciation theme,
constituted a source of inspiration not only about the choice of the scene,
which took place outdoors in the terrace of a monastery on the island of
Poros, but also the representation of the Symbolist elements, like the lily.
His palette of pale colors, which create a spiritual and serene atmosphere,
refers us to Alphonse Osbert’s palette. Moreover, the angel’s presence as
both God’s emissary and Orpheus’ incarnation is indicated simultaneously
in Edouard Schuré’s theories, manifested in his book The Great Initiates.36
Nevertheless, the double figuration of the angel-Orpheus doesn’t simply
constitute an announcement of Schuré’s beliefs;37 rather, through him, the
notion of the continuation of Greece from the ancient times to the present
was expressed, suggesting that the angel-Orpheus, an image showing
Parthénis ethnocentrism, should become the advocate of the new social
and political conditions, a reminder of the centrality of Hellenism.38
In the following years, the artist, who had already conceived the crucial
role of art in the social and political scenes, bears witness not only to
Venizelos’ politics, but also to ethnocentrism, of the continuation of
history, expressed by the subjects’ and the angel’s figure.39 Saint Sophie
(1917-1919, Fig. 22-9) and Under the Auspices of the Patroness Virgin
(Fig. 22-10) were subjects of the crucial years of the war in Asia Minor;
the angel is associated with these events and is figured as an angelic
emissary, reminiscent of ancient art and the Byzantine tradition, which
predicts a new epopee, or the figure of a Greek soldier who represents the
whole nation, fighting for the restoration of national claims. Moreover, of
primary importance is the fact that the angel’s figure, as a soldier, portrays
the people’s mentality and points out the role of religious feeling. Twenty
years later, the angel returns in his work like a beam of light, a recollection
of the antique Victories, in order to represent an additional glorious page
of history before the German occupation: Angel Trumpeter (1940-1941,
Fig. 22-11).
Fig. 22-8. Constantinos Parthénis, Annunciation,1910-1911.

Fig. 22-9. Constantinos Parthénis, Saint Sophie, 1917-1919.
In his work, the angel does not always arrive at the moment of glory;
rather, it is also chosen to depict the impact of defeat, aiming to boost
morale. The female angel in Christ in the Garden of Agony (1930, Private
collection) and the angel-ancient hero in Athanasius Diakos’ Apotheosis
(Fig. 22-12)40—a series of three paintings that preoccupied the artist in
1930s—are the principal figures of his subjects, which are associated with
social events but which also prove that the leitmotiv of Parthenis’ painting
is always what we call the Great Idea, desiring in that way to point out the
triumphant past and unity of Greek history. Furthermore, he manifests his
strong ethnocentrism, which is incarnated in his work and especially in the
angelic figure, as in his paintings, “the Greek myth resurrects being
charged by the contemporary historical experience.”41 Parthenis, in
contrast to the other European Symbolists who used the angel’s motif in
order to describe the contemporary human condition (the fallen angel as
the alter ego of the man) or the consequences of the political choices at the
moment of national defeat and in the middle of a social crisis (judicial

angels), formed the angel’s image as a celestial being, God’s messenger
who arrives to both alleviate pain and to encourage people in their
struggles, testifying in that way his reverence. The course of his artistic
career and his multifarious political attitudes reveal that, from the 1930s,
the artist completely identified himself with the role of the painter of the
Greek race and Nation42.
Fig. 22-10. Constantinos Parthénis, study for Under the auspices of the patroness
Virgin, 1920-1922.
In conclusion, it is noted that the Greek painters did not remain

indifferent to the invitations of Symbolism, considered the “big
avalanche,”43 and they were conversant with their homologous work. In
the Greek context, the angel’s figure never abolishes its holy nature, but it
becomes the painter’s means to express both his subconscious and his
national identity, since it is not disregarded that in Symbolism, as well, the
angel never constitutes anything else but the man’s double, bringing out a
part of himself.
Fig. 22-11. Constantinos Parthénis, Angel Trumpeter, 1940-1941.

Fig. 22-12. Constantinos Parthénis, Athanasius Diakos’ Apotheosis, before 1927,

oil on canvas, 117,5x 117, Private Collection) is on the Internet site:
Fig. 22-1. Nikolaos Gysis, The Worship of Angels, 1898, oil on paper,
38cm, National Gallery –Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-2. Nikolaos Gysis, Study of the archangel of The Triumph of

Religion or The Foundation of Faith , 1894-1895,charcoal and lavis on
paper, 60x44,5 National Gallery- Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-3. Nikolaos Gysis, Study of the archangel of The Triumph of

Religion or The Foundation of Faith , 1894-1895, oil on canvas, 91x69,
Fig. 22-4. Nikolaos Gysis, Study of the head of the archangel of The
Triumph of Religion or The Foundation of Faith , 1894-1895, oil on
canvas, 46x37, National Gallery- Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-5. Nikolaos Gysis, The Triumph of Religion or The Foundation of

Faith , 1894-1895, oil, on canvas, 145x73, Koutlidis Foundation’s
Collection, National Gallery- Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-6. Dimitrios Mpiskinis, The Time of Vesper, 1916, oil on canvas,
65x85, National Gallery- Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-7. Dimitrios Mpiskinis, The Expulsion from Paradise, 1930-1935,

Fig. 22-8. Constantinos Parthénis, Annunciation, 1910-1911, oil on

canvas, 45x44, National Gallery-Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-9. Constantinos Parthénis, Saint Sophie, 1917-1919, oïl on canvas,

85x78, National Gallery-Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-10. Constantinos Parthénis, study for Under the auspices of the
patroness Virgin, 1920-1922, india ink on paper, National Gallery-
Museum Alexandros Soutzos, Athens.
Fig. 22-11. Constantinos Parthénis, Angel Trumpeter, 1940-1941, oil on

canvas, 95x90, National Gallery-Museum Alexandros Soutzos.
Fig. 22-12. Constantinos Parthénis, Athanasius Diakos’ Apotheosis, before

1927, oil on canvas, 117,5x 117, Private Collection) is on the Internet site:
Notes
1
Manifesto of September 18, 1886, which was published in the inset of Le Figaro,
under the title “Le Symbolisme” and focused on literary symbolism.
2
Tonis Spiteris, “The Symbolism in Painting,” Nea Estia (Christmas 1953), 196.
ȉȫȞȘȢ ȈʌȘĲȑȡȘȢ, «ȅ ȈȣȝȕȠȜȚıȝȩȢ ıĲȘ ȗȦȖȡĮĳȚțȒ», ȃȑĮ ǼıĲȓĮ (ȋȡȚıĲȠȪȖİȞȞĮ,
1953), 196.
3
Chrisanthos Christou, The Greek painting, 1832-1922 (Athens: National Bank of
Greece, 1981), 15. ȋȡȪıĮȞșȠȢ ȋȡȒıĲȠȣ, Ǿ İȜȜȘȞȚțȒ ȗȦȖȡĮĳȚțȒ, 1832-1922
(ǹșȒȞĮ, ǼșȞȚțȒ ȉȡȐʌİȗĮ ĲȘȢ ǼȜȜȐįȠȢ, 1981), 196.
4
“Introduction,” in The Hellenism in the 19th century: Ideological and Aesthetics
Quests, ed. Pantelis Voutouris and Georgios Georgis (Athens: Ȁastaniotis, 2006),
9-11. ȆĮȞĲİȜȒȢ ǺȠȣĲȠȣȡȒȢ, īȚȫȡȖȠȢ īİȦȡȖȒȢ, «ǼȚıĮȖȦȖȒ», ȆĮȞĲİȜȒȢ ǺȠȣĲȠȣȡȒȢ,
īȚȫȡȖȠȢ īİȦȡȖȒȢ (İʌȚȝ,) ȅ İȜȜȘȞȚıȝȩȢ ıĲȠȞ 19Ƞ ĮȚȫȞĮ.ǿįİȠȜȠȖȚțȑȢ țĮȚ ǹȚıșȘĲȚțȑȢ
ǹȞĮȗȘĲȒıİȚȢ (ǹșȒȞĮ, ǼțįȩıİȚȢ ȀĮıĲĮȞȚȫĲȘ, 2006), 9-11
5
Constantinos Chatzopoulos The Tower of Akropotamos, ed. Giorgos Veloudis,
(Athens, Odisseas, 1986), 36. ȀȦȞıĲĮȞĲȓȞȠȢ ȋĮĲȗȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ, ȅ ȆȪȡȖȠȢ ĲȠȣ
ǹțȡȠʌȠĲȐȝȠȣ, İȚıĮȖȦȖȒ, ĳȚȜȠȜȠȖȚțȒ İʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮ īȚȫȡȖȠȢ ǺİȜȠȣįȒȢ (ǹșȒȞĮ,
ȅįȣııȑĮȢ, 1986), 36. The Great Idea the name to the national ideology in place
from the end of the nineteenth century until 1922, which incarnated the Greeks’
dreams and ambitions to reconquer the territories that formerly belonged to the
Byzantine Empire, primarily the territories of Minor Asia, where the Greek
presence was very acute and forceful.
6
I. M. Panagiotopoulos, “The symbolism and the modern Greek lyric poets,” Nea
Estia (Christmas, 1953), 109. I.M. ȆĮȞĮȖȚȦĲȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ «ȅ ȈȣȝȕȠȜȚıȝȩȢ țĮȚ ȠȚ
ȞİȠȑȜȜȘȞİȢ ȜȣȡȚțȠȓ», ȃȑĮ ǼıĲȓĮ (ȋȡȚıĲȠȪȖİȞȞĮ, 1953), 109.
7
Evgenios Matthiopoulos, The Art is Formed under Suffering Conditions (Athens:
Potamos, 2005), 11-12. ǼȣȖȑȞȚȠȢ ȂĮĲșȚȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ, Ǿ ȉȑȤȞȘ ʌĲİȡȠĳȣİȓ İȞ ȠįȪȞȘ
(ǹșȒȞĮ, ȆȠĲĮȝȩȢ, 2005), 11-12.
8
Techni (ȉȑȤȞȘ) 1, 1898, 1.
9
Characteristically, Emmanouel Roidis, writer and reviewer, in his newspaper
Acropolis (ǹțȡȩʌȠȜȚȢ), suggested that Greek painters take Böcklin’s works as
examples. Acropolis, June 1896, 25 (ǹțȡȩʌȠȜȚȢ, ȚȠȪȞȚȠȢ 1896, 25) reproduced in
Antonis Kotidis, Modernism and Tradition in the Greek Art during the Mid War
(Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 1993), 173. ǹȞĲȫȞȘȢ ȀȦĲȓįȘȢ
ȂȠȞĲİȡȞȚıȝȩȢ țĮȚ ȆĮȡȐįȠıȘ ıĲȘȞ İȜȜȘȞȚțȒ ĲȑȤȞȘ ĲȠȣ ȝİıȠʌȠȜȑȝȠȣ (ĬİııĮȜȠȞȓțȘ,
University Studio Press 1993), 173.
10
Konstantinos Baroutas’ book, The Artistic Movement and the Aesthetic
Education in Athens in XIX century (Athens: Smili, 1990). (ȀȦȞıĲĮȞĲȓȞȠȢ
ȂʌĮȡȠȪĲĮȢ Ǿ İȚțĮıĲȚțȒ țȓȞȘıȘ țĮȚ Ș ĮȚıșȘĲȚțȒ ʌĮȚįİȓĮ ıĲȘȞ ǹșȒȞĮ ĲȠ 19ȠĮȚȫȞĮ,
[ǹșȒȞĮ, ȈȝȓȜȘ, 1990], is the rendition par excellence of artistic life in Athens in
the nineteenth century.
11
It is necessary to remark that the continual presence of the Church in everyday
life, the Greeks’ profound religious feelings, and furthermore, the fact that the
State, until the current time, is not separate from the Church contributed to the
creation of a particular character of Symbolism.
12
The angel, in Greek contemporary literature, does not become a motif of
predilection, capable of incarnating the man and the artist at the same time or
appearing under controversial forms that are not consistent with his divine status.
The Greek angel, we could say, borrows prudent roles without provoking, and it
appears in various popular beliefs, in which it is presented as fulfilling the role of
the guardian or the psychopompe. It became the symbol of supreme beauty, which
touched the limits of the divine one, as well as the symbol of purity. As a result,
terms invented in order to describe innocence, human purity, or absolute beauty
made indirect references to the word ‘‘angel’’ and implied that the human being’s
image is similar to the angel’s one; ‘‘Beautiful, moral world created in an angelic
way’’ proclaims the Greek national poet, Dionysios Solomos in his poem “For
Fragkisa Fraiser” (1849), which became a hymn of the archetype of the ideal
woman. In other cases, and mainly in popular tales, the angel becomes
simultaneously a prophet and a people’s guardian. In Palamas’ poems, we detect
the guardian angel, protector of poets’ inspiration. On the contrary, the
psychopompe angel becomes the frequent image among Greek writers, such as in
Dionysios Solomos’ poem “Lampros,” Alexandros Papadiamantis’ novel One
Soul, Georgios Vizyinos novel, The Only Trip of my Life, and Georgios Tertsetis’
thematic The Fair Revenge (1847) and The King’s Dream (1854). For further
information about the angel in Greek literature, see Fragkish Ampatzopoulou, “The
poets’ angels,” Epta Imeres. Kathimerini (March 27, 2005). ĭȡĮȖțȓıțȘ
ǹȝʌĮĲȗȠʌȠȪȜȠȣ « ȅȚ ȐȖȖİȜȠȚ ĲȦȞ ʌȠȚȘĲȫȞ», EʌĲȐ ǾȝȑȡİȢ. ȀĮșȘȝİȡȚȞȒ, 27-03-
2005.
13
Gysis Nikolaos was born in 1842, in a small village on the island of Tinos,
which he left in 1850 in order to study at the Polytechnic School of Athens. Having
obtained a scholarship, he left for Munich in 1868 where he entered Karl von
Piloty’s studio. In 1875, he became a member of the group Allotria, an artistic
society, in which many artists had already participated, among them Franz von
Stuck. In 1888, Gysis was elected to Munich Academy, where he had been
teaching as a professor assistant since 1882. He died in 1901, in Munich, of a
serious disease.
14
At the announcement of his death, young Parthenis in the review ȆĮȞĮșȒȞĮȚĮ
(Panathinea) noted, “The majority of the people liked him as a painter but only
those who could understand him liked him as an artist. He fascinated me as an
artist and I always looked for the poetry of his works; however, I just liked him as
a painter,” ȆĮȞĮșȒȞĮȚĮ, A, 1901, 434.
15
Missirli, in her monograph about the painter repeats this assertion. Missirli Nelli,
Gysis (Athens: Adam, 1995). ȂȚıȚȡȜȒ ȃȑȜȜȘ, īȪȗȘȢ (ǹșȒȞĮ: ǹįȐȝ, 1995). The
same remark is made by Kotidis, Modernism and Tradition in the Greek Art during
the Mid War, 171 (ȀȦĲȓįȘȢ, 1993, 171) and Marina Lampraki-Plaka, “The Middle
Class and her Painters 1862-1900. Symbolism and allegory. Nikolaos Gysis,” In
National Gallery, 100 Years. Four centuries of Greek Painting, ed. Lampraki-
Plaka Marina (Athens: National Gallery, 1999), 293. ȂĮȡȓȞĮ ȁĮȝʌȡȐțȘ-ȆȜȐțĮ,
« Ǿ ǹıĲȚțȒ ĲȐȟȘ țĮȚ ȠȚ ȗȦȖȡȐĳȠȚ ĲȘȢ 1862-1900. ȈȣȝȕȠȜȚıȝȩȢ țĮȚ ĮȜȜȘȖȠȡȓĮ.
ȃȚțȩȜĮȠȢ īȪȗȘȢ », ǼșȞȚțȒ ȆȚȞĮțȠșȒțȘ 100 ȤȡȩȞȚĮ. ȉȑııİȡȚȢ ĮȚȫȞİȢ İȜȜȘȞȚțȒȢ
ȗȦȖȡĮĳȚțȒȢ, İʌȚıĲȘȝȠȞȚțȒ İʌȚȝȑȜİȚĮ ȂĮȡȓȞĮ ȁĮȝʌȡȐțȘ-ȆȜȐțĮ (ǹșȒȞĮ, ǼșȞȚțȒ

ȆȚȞĮțȠșȒțȘ, 1999), 293.
16
In one of his letters, he says this about religion: ‘‘I myself feel religion like love.
Love is its emblem.’’ Marinos Kalligas, Nikolas Gysis. His life and his work
(Athens: Cultural ǿinstitute of National Bank, 1981), 183. ȂĮȡȓȞȠȢ ȀĮȜȜȚȖȐȢ,
ȃȚțȩȜĮȢ īȪȗȘȢ. Ǿ ȗȦȒ țĮȚ ĲȠ ȑȡȖȠ ĲȠȣ (ǹșȒȞĮ, ȂȠȡĳȦĲȚțȩ ǿįȡȣȝĮ ǼșȞȚțȒȢ
ȉȡĮʌȑȗȘȢ, 1981), 183.
17
Even in the religious writings, Christ is identified in the light, appearing as the
only truth that will fight evil, incarnated in a figure of a snake. This quotation
proves the painter’s piety and the fact that he draws his topics from biblical
extracts.
18
Marilena Kassimati, ‘‘The artistic personality of Nikolas Gysis through his
journal, his letters and the others artists’ testimonies,’’ Nikolaos Gysis: The
National painter from Tinos Island, conference on the painter (Athens: Institute of
Studies about Tinos Island, 2002), 44-45). ȂĮȡȚȜȑȞĮ ȀĮııȚȝȐĲȘ,« Ǿ țĮȜȜȚĲİȤȞȚțȒ
ʌȡȠıȦʌȚțȩĲȘĲĮ ĲȠȣ ȃȚțȩȜĮ īȪȗȘ ȝȑıĮ Įʌȩ ĲȠ ȘȝİȡȠȜȩȖȚȠ, ĲȚȢ İʌȚıĲȠȜȑȢ ĲȠȣ țĮȚ
ĲȚȢ țĮĲĮȖȡĮĳȑȢ ȐȜȜȦȞ țĮȜȜȚĲİȤȞȫȞ : ȂȚĮ ȞȑĮ ĮȞȐȖȞȦıȘ ĲȘȢ İȜȜȘȞȚțȩĲȘĲĮȢ»,
ȃȚțȩȜĮȠȢ īȪȗȘȢ, ȅ ȉȒȞȚȠȢ ǼșȞȚțȩȢ ȗȦȖȡȐĳȠȢ. ȆȡĮțĲȚțȐ ȈȣȞİįȡȓȦȞ-6 (ǹșȒȞĮ:
ǼĲĮȚȡİȓĮ ȉȘȞȚĮțȫȞ ȂİȜİĲȫȞ, 2002), 44-45. Kassimati stated that the painter,
interested in mysticism, owned theosophical books, a piece of information that his
grandson, Ewald Petritschek, revealed during a conversation in Munich in 1979.
19
In a letter, written in September 1894, he writes to his student Anna May, “I
hope that I well inspired my confrere (Angel), Gabriel, at least it’s very evident in
one of my last sketches.” Kalligas (ȀĮȜȜȚȖȐȢ), 1981, 172.
20
It is very likely that both painters knew each other, since they had been teaching
in the School of Munich and they were members of the group Allotria. Kalligas
mentions that friendship bound the painters, Kalligas (ȀĮȜȜȚȖȐȢ), 1981, 34-35.
21
The young man outlined in 1882 in the work Glory Beats Death lends the
physical features to the Archangel of the Foundation of Faith as well as to the
young man of the study The Mourning Spirit, dated 1898 (Athens, Private
collection), Missirli (ȂȚıȚȡȜȒ), Gysis, 250 and 254.
22
Ibid., 288.
23
The closed eyes, which are found in a great number of Symbolist compositions,
form a motif that refers to themes of internal contemplation, used equally by Gysis
in order to point out spiritual vision, the Archangel’s absence in the earthly world,
which is presented with a face that exudes a silent perfection. For more studies of
closed eyes, see Petr Wittlich, “Les yeux clos, le symbolisme et les nouvelles
formules du pathos” in Paradis perdus: L’Europe symboliste., cat. exp. Musée des
Beaux-Arts de Montréal, June 8-October 15 1995, 235-241.
24
The angel’s costume in that representation is not only similar to the attire of the
warrior angels of western art, but also to the angels of Byzantine art, which Gysis
had studied. This fact is revealed in a letter that the painter wrote to his brother-in-
law, which testifies that Gysis consulted for his representations Dionysios de
Fourna’s book The Painters’ Interpretation, which examines Byzantine
iconography. Kassimati, ‘‘The artistic personality of Nikolas Gysis through his
journal, his letters and the others artists’ testimonies,’’ 51; Missirli Nelli, “The
Personality of Nikolaos Gysis and the Ideology of his Works,” Nikolaos Gysis: The
National Painter of Tinos Island, conference (Athens: Institute of Studies about
Tinos Island, 2002), 22. ȀĮııȚȝȐĲȘ, 2002, 51; ȂȚıȚȡȜȒ ȃȑȜȜȘ «Ǿ ʌȡȠıȦʌȚțȩĲȘĲĮ
ĲȠȣ ȃȚțȩȜĮȠȣ īȪȗȘ țĮȚ ĲȠ ȚįİȠȜȠȖȚțȩ ȣʌȩȕĮșȡȠ ĲȦȞ ȑȡȖȦȞ ĲȠȣ», ȃȚțȩȜĮȠȢ īȪȗȘȢ,
ȅ ȉȒȞȚȠȢ ǼșȞȚțȩȢ ȗȦȖȡȐĳȠȢ. ȆȡĮțĲȚțȐ ȈȣȞİįȡȓȦȞ-6, ǹșȒȞĮ, ǼĲĮȚȡİȓĮ ȉȘȞȚĮțȫȞ
ȂİȜİĲȫȞ, 2002, 22.
25
Peter Cooke, “Les Lyres mortes de Gustave Moreau: vie et mort de la
mythologie païenne,” Revue des musées de France : La Revue du Louvre 3, June
2008, 86-99.
26
In 1878, Gysis participated in the Universal Exhibition in Paris, in both the
Greek and German sections. Moreau, in the Universal Exhibition, had exhibited
among others the paintings Jacob and the Angel, Moise, and David. On the
occasion of the Universal exhibition, Gysis visited Paris. However, in his
correspondence, he made no mention of the French painter’s works.
27
Mpiskinis came from a family of church iconographers, a fact that shows that he
is knowledgeable about the iconographic tradition of religious Orthodox art.
During his stay in Paris (1919-1923), he attended courses in the Academy Julian
and in Grande Chaumière. In 1923, he returned permanently to Athens. Some years
later, in 1928, he was elected a professor of design in the National School of Fine
Arts, a position he retained until his death in 1947. Biographical notes written from
the artist himself are reprinted in The 100 years of D. Mpiskinis and the
Symbolism, 1891-1947, ed. Manos Stefanidis (City of Zografou: Cultural Center,
Cotopouli Museum, 1991). ȉĮ 100 ȤȡȩȞȚĮ ĲȠȣ ǻ. ȂʌȚıțȓȞȘ țĮȚ Ƞ ȈȣȝȕȠȜȚȢıȝȩȢ,
1891-1947 (ǻȒȝȠȢ ǽȦȖȡȐĳȠȣ, ȆȞİȣȝĮĲȚțȩ ȀȑȞĲȡȠ, ȂȠȣıİȓȠ ȀȠĲȠʌȠȪȜȘ, 1991).
28
“D. Mpiskinis, Man and Artist,” O Aion mas, 1947, in The 100 years of D.
Mpiskinis and the Symbolism, 1891-1947, 75. «ǻ. ȂʌȚıțȓȞȘȢ. ȅ ȐȞșȡȦʌȠȢ țĮȚ Ƞ
țĮȜȜȚĲȑȤȞȘȢ», ʌİȡ. ȅ ǹȚȫȞ ȝĮȢ, 1947, 75 ıĲȠ ȉĮ 100 ȤȡȩȞȚĮ ĲȠȣ ǻ. ȂʌȚıțȓȞȘ țĮȚ
Ƞ ȈȣȝȕȠȜȚȢıȝȩȢ, 1891-1947, 75.
29
Another title is also attributed to this series: Adam and Eve.
30
Dimitris Kallonas, “D.Mpiskinis: The Visionary painter,” Vradini 27, no 3, 1957
reprinted in The 100 years of D. Mpiskinis and the Symbolism, 1891-1947, 82.
ǻȘȝȒĲȡȘȢ ȀĮȜȜȠȞȐȢ, « ǻ. ȂʌȚıțȓȞȘȢ. ȅ ȗȦȖȡȐĳȠȢ ȠȡĮȝĮĲȚıĲȒȢ », ǺȡĮįȣȞȒ,
27.3.1957,ıĲȠ ȉĮ 100 ȤȡȩȞȚĮ ĲȠȣ ǻ. ȂʌȚıțȓȞȘ țĮȚ Ƞ ȈȣȝȕȠȜȚȢıȝȩȢ, 1891-1947, 82.
31
An idea highlighted by Péladan in his first exhibition of Rose+Croix, where he
stated, “Artist, you are a priest;” Jean Delville configures the same idea in his
works as well as in his books.
32
He signed all his works in French. This could be a revelation of his strong wish
to have his career in Paris and distinguish himself as an artist, but it could also be a
hint of his belief in the innovative character of his art.
33
Parthénis was born in 1875 or 1876 in Alexandria, Egypt. It seems that the
Italian painter Annibale Scognamiglio, who settled in Alexandria, was his first
teacher. In 1896, Parthénis met Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach and the next year
followed him to Vienna. Matthiopoulos says that the artist never registered in any
Academy in Vienna: The Greek participation in Venice Biennale 1934-1940, PhD.
University of Crete, 1996, 3:834. ǼȣȖȑȞȚȠȢ ȂĮĲșȚȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ, Ǿ ıȣȝȝİĲȠȤȒ ĲȘȢ

ǼȜȜȐįĮȢ ıĲȘ ȂʌȚİȞȐȜİ ĲȘȢ ǺİȞİĲȓĮȢ 1934-1940, įȚįĮțĲȠȡȚțȒ įȚĮĲȡȚȕȒ,
ȆĮȞİʌȚıĲȒȝȚȠ ȀȡȒĲȘȢ, 1996, 834. The most important fact was that Parthenis had
stayed in Vienna during the foundation and the acme of the Secession. Dimitris
Papastamos, “The Influence of Jugendstil and of Art Nouveau on the art of K.
Parthenis,” in Konstantinos Parthenis, 1878-1967 , exh. cat, October-November
1984, Vafopouleio Cultural Center, Thessaloniki, 1984, 11-17. ǻȘȝȒĲȡȘȢ
ȆĮʌĮıĲȐȝȠȢ, «Ǿ ıȘȝĮıȓĮ ĲȠȣ īȚȠȪȖțİȞĲ ȈĲȚȜ țĮȚ ĲȘȢ ǹȡ ȃȠȣȕȫ ıĲȘ ȗȦȖȡĮĳȚțȒ
ĲȠȣ Ȁ. ȆĮȡșȑȞȘ», țĮĲ, İțș, ȀȦȞıĲĮȞĲȓȞȠȢ ȆĮȡșȑȞȘȢ, 1878-1967, țĮĲ.İțș,
ȅțĲȫȕȡȚȠȢ-ȃȠİȝȕȡȚȠȢ 1984, ǺĮĳȠʌȠȪȜİȚȠ ȆȞİȣȝĮĲȚțȩ ȀȑȞĲȡȠ, ĬİııĮȜȠȞȓțȘ,
1984, 11-17.
34
His brother Aristides, who was both a writer and a critic, sojourned in Paris and,
at that period of time, published the review Isis (“A monthly review about
literature, critique and art”) with the contributions of Péladan, Emile Verhaeren,
Gustave Khan, Paul Adam, Jean Moréas and Charles Morice. The artist strongly
expected that the critics would support his art, something that never happened due,
perhaps, to the fact that he stayed in Paris for only two years (1909-1911). In Paris,
he participated, with three paintings, in the Salon d’Automne organized in Grand
Palais in 1910 and in April 1911 at the exhibition of Société des Artistes
Indépendants with five paintings. Eftichia Agathonikou, Les peintres grecs ayant
exposé à Paris à partir de l’Exposition Universelle de 1855 jusqu’en 1914,
mémoire de D.E.A. (Paris: Université Paris X-Nanterre, 1986), 69-70.
35
In 1917, he exposed his work Annunciation, taking part in the first exhibition of
“the group Techni: (ȅȝȐįĮ ȉȑȤȞȘ), and it was at this time the publication of the
information that this painting was awarded in Paris in 1911, information never
verified until now. Evgenios Matthiopoulos, C. Parthenis (Athens: K. Adam,
2008), 57. ǼȣȖȑȞȚȠȢ ȂĮĲșȚȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ, Ȁ. ȆĮȡșȑȞȘȢ (ǹșȒȞĮ: Ȁ. ǹįȐȝ, 2008), 57.
36
The musician angel or the angel who carries the lyre as a musical instrument is
not a rare motif in Symbolist art but, in Parthenis’ art, there is a parallel between
the angel and the figure of Orpheus, a figure which haunted the painter throughout
his career.
37
In his book, published for first time in 1889, Schuré popularized the theosophical
notions. According to these, Orpheus, like Hermes, Pythagoras, Plato, Moses and
Christ, was one of the hereditary incarnations of the unique and supreme spirit.
38
It is not a coincidence that Parthenis chose to offer a painting of that Annunciation
series in 1924 to his friend and politician in Venizelos’ party Alexandros
Papanastassiou, which had the dedication “To my dearest friend Al.
Papanastassiou in memory of the glorious day 25th March 1924. With love and
gratitude, C. Parthenis.” March 25, 1924 was the declaration day of the first Greek
Republic
39
Manos Stefanidis, “Parthenis, the painter of Venizelos’ ideal” in Parthenis-
Ghikas-Moralis, exh, cat, October-December 1992, National Gallery, Department
of Corfu, Athens, 1992, 49-50. ȂȐȞȠȢ ȈĲİĳĮȞȓįȘȢ «ȆĮȡșȑȞȘȢ, Ƞ ȗȦȖȡȐĳȠȢ ĲȘȢ
ȕİȞȚȗİȜȚțȒȢ ȚįȑĮȢ», ȆĮȡșȑȞȘȢ-īțȓțĮȢ-ȂȩȡĮȜȘȢ, țĮĲ.İțș, ȅțĲȦȕȡȚȠȢ-ǻİțȑȝȕȡȚȠȢ
1992, ǼșȞȚțȒ ȆȚȞĮțȠșȒțȘ, ȆĮȡȐȡĲȘȝĮ ȀİȡțȪȡĮȢ, ǹșȒȞĮ, 1992, 49-50.
40
We observe that, during this period, Parthenis looked back to Byzantine art and
El Grecos’ homonymous painting in order to draw sources of inspiration for his
paintings. His drawings coincided with a period in which, in the Greek artistic
environment, there was a rediscovery and a revaluation of Byzantine art and of
Dominikos Theotokopoulos’ work. Moreover, we should not neglect Parthenis’
stay in Paris, his two-year “education” and experiences. His particular interest
could be exhorted by Maurice Denis’ example, meaning the attention of a Nabis
painter to Byzantine art. An interesting point is the fact that, since 1908, there was
as strong admiration of El Grecos’ work in Paris, which reached its culmination in
1911 with the publication of Paul Lafond’s and Maurice Barrés’ book Le Greco, a
book that Parthenis must have read. Matthiopoulos mentions that about Athanasios
Diakos’ Apotheosis and mainly about his first and third version, Parthenis inspired
presentations by spherical rings, discovered in excavations having taken place in
Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans, which during that period were reproduced in Emile
Gilliéron’s (father and son) publications, Matthiopoulos (ȂĮĲșȚȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ), C.
Parthenis, 74.
41
Manos Stefanidis, “Parthenis, Ghikas, Moralis, Tsarouchis. Tracing of
Hellenism,” in Parthenis-Ghikas-Tsarouchis-Moralis: Four Masters of Greek
Modernism, exh, cat, Nicosia, Municipal Center of Arts, Athens, 1995, 23. ȂȐȞȠȢ
ȈĲİĳĮȞȓįȘȢ « ȆĮȡșȑȞȘȢ, īțȓțĮȢ, ȉıĮȡȠȪȤȘȢ, ȂȩȡĮȜȘȢ. ǹȞȓȤȞİȣıȘ ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȩĲȘĲĮȢ»,
ȆĮȡșȑȞȘȢ-īțȓțĮȢ-ȂȩȡĮȜȘȢ-ȉıĮȡȠȪȤȘȢ, țĮĲ.İțș, 13 ȠțĲȦȕȡȚȠȣ-15 ȞȠİȝȕȡȓȠȣ
1995, ȁİȣțȦıȓĮ, ǻȘȝȠĲȚțȩ ȀȑȞĲȡȠ ȉİȤȞȫȞ, ǹșȒȞĮ, 1995, 23.
42
Parthénis was an ardent supporter of the Liberal party, whose leadership held El.
Venizelos, creating bonds of friendship with politicians of that party, who later
were supporters of his art. It is a great paradox that the artist supported Ioannis
Metaxas, the dictator during the years 1936-1941. His political attitude and the
commissions of the portraits of the royal family and of Metaxas for the decoration
of the city hall of Athens demonstrate his identification with the role of the
national painter above all political circumstances.
43
Constantinos Chatzopoulos, The Poems, ed. Giorgos Veloudis (Athens:
Foundation of Kostas and Eleni Ourani, 1992), 24. ȀȦȞıĲĮȞĲȓȞȠȢ ȋĮĲȗȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ,
ȉĮ ȆȠȚȒȝĮĲĮ, İȚıĮȖȦȖȒ īȚȫȡȖȠȢ ǺİȜȠȣįȒȢ (ǹșȒȞĮ, ǿįȡȣȝĮ ȀȦıĲĮ țĮȚ ǼȜȑȞȘȢ
ȅȣȡȐȞȘȝ, 1992), 24.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE RADIANCE OF FRENCH SYMBOLISM
1
IN GREECE
CHRISTOS M. NIKOU
Symbolism, both as a literary and artistic movement, like all movements

preceding it, appeared as a reaction against movements and ideologies of
that time, including Realism, Parnassianism, Naturalism or even
Romanticism. This reaction is perfectly portrayed in Bertrand Marchal’s
quote:
One of the features of the Symbolist rhetoric consists in presenting a new

movement as a protest of the spirit or soul against contemporary
materialism whose literary incarnation is embedded in the Zola’s
Naturalism, and to a less extent in the parnassianist realism. Antimaterialism
and antinaturalism are two faces of the same reaction for the sake of the
ideal.2
Based on this ideal, on this ideal world—since the real world is conceived
of as only the reflection of a reality out of this world—the Symbolists
forged their doctrine, their own literary core.
Therefore, the present article, which is based on a comparative
reflection, aims to look at the impact that French Symbolism exercised on
Greek Symbolist poetry. After reviewing some basic principles of
Symbolism, seen as an inspiring movement, we will endeavour to
demonstrate the French influence on the Greek literature of that time
through some concrete examples.
***
Symbolism was officially initiated by the Symbolist Manifesto

published in the newspaper Le Figaro by Jean Moréas on September 18.
However, the ground had been already prepared. In April 1872, the first
Volume of the journal Renaissance artistique et littéraire appeared: its
410 Chapter Twenty-Three
title underlined the need on the part of the writers and poets of that time
for renewal, for new poetic ways and for a recombining of the literary
arena: Parnassians, even Rimbaud and other dissidents of Parnassianism
like Cros and Verlaine, joined this literary movement. In the 1870s, a
decade always under the shadow of Parnassus, a pessimistic literary
Bohemia was born, which was marked by the events of the Commune.
Literary Bohemia (la bohème littéraire) invented new literary places: the
club or the cabaret. The most famous among them was the Black Cat (Le
Chat noir).
According to Bertrand Marchal:
it is in this milieu of literary Bohemia that the first signs of the declining
spirit appear, this feeling of arriving so late in such an old world, this new
plague of the century where all pessimisms and obsessions of the end are
blended together.3
This declining sensitivity, inherited from Spleen and Paradis Artificiels by

Baudelaire, came to nourish Symbolism, which was by definition the
movement of the symbol, the imaginary and the unknown and mystical
feelings.
In this respect, Moréas proposed the word “symbolism” to name the
Renaissance, as the only term to be “able to reasonably indicate the current
trend of that creative spirit in art.”4 The origins of this movement are in the
Supernaturalism of Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, who, according
to the Manifesto, “is regarded as the real precursor of the current
movement.”5 The Symbolists believed that the objective of art was to
apprehend the Universe and to express the absolute truths through indirect
ways, of which the most obvious is the symbol and the symbolic use of the
words. Therefore, poets are supposed to compose their works by
employing metaphors, images, and objects in their symbolic meaning.
Metaphysical and mystic elements dominate their poetic creation. Death,
dream, mythological and dramatic figures constitute the set of symbolist
themes par excellence. Since the arising of a romanticism under a more
mystical veil, this Nervalian dream, this Baudelairian death and the
mythological figures being “resurrected,” attribute to poetry a great
originality and an apparent inaccessibility. In Baudelaire’s works these
elements could find their own poetical ideals:
Purification and the autonomy of poetry, the infallibility of the poet

dominating nature and the valorization of the sensitive dimension of
language. But for them, the logic of correspondences takes a new dimension:
it sets out the esthetics of suggestion.6
The Radiance of the French Symbolism in Greece 411
The figure below (Fig. 23-1)7 constitutes a compendium, a summary

of the spiritual conception of Symbolism, which aimed at promoting
idealism, this transcendental sensitivity, while suggesting these ideals
through symbols.
Fig. 23-1. Carlos Schwabe, The Death of the Gravedigger, 1900.
Charles Chadwick, a prominent critic of the 20th century, defines two

aspects of Symbolism:
Symbolism can … be defined as the art of expressing ideas and emotions

not by describing them directly, nor by defining them through overt
comparisons with concrete images, but by suggesting what these ideas and
emotions are, by re-creating them in the mind of the reader through the use
of unexplained symbols. This is only one aspect of Symbolism, what may
be called the personal aspect that remains in the human plane. There is a
second aspect, sometimes described as “transcendental Symbolism,” in
which concrete images are used as symbols, not of particular thoughts and
feelings within the poet, but of a vast and general ideal world of which the
real world is merely an imperfect representation.8
According to Baudelaire, the poet expresses the profound and hidden

meaning of the nature and the world by means of an “evocative witchcraft”
(sorcellerie évocatoire); in other words, it is a matter “of projecting the

spiritual world in the visible one … , to include “the infinite in the finite.”9
Moreover, with the Correspondences baudelairiennes, the poet was
supposed to be in search of this Supra-sensible World, in an attempt to
touch nature and the hereafter, by interpreting synesthesias. Baudelaire,
the precursor of Symbolism, had expounded a communication theory on
the human contact with the hereafter which was elaborated by Symbolists
later on.
This theory was adopted by the poets who then enlarged the field of
the poetic language. Rimbaud would communicate with the unknown
world only by disordering senses and language, by what Rimbaud called
the derangement of all senses and “verbal alchemy.” Mallarmé discovered
nothingness (le néant) “en creusant le vers” (by elaborating the verse) and
put forward the art and pleasure of suggestion, because for him:
To name an object is to cancel three-quarters of the enjoyment in a poem

that derives from the pleasure of deciphering little by little; to suggest, that
is the dream. This is the perfect use of mystery which constitutes the
symbol.10
Verlaine, with his manifesto-poem Art poétique advocates that, in

poetry, what matters is the music and the musicality of the verse (in
particular, odd verses, namely from 5 to 13 syllables), an idea that is
manifestly articulated by his expression “de la Musique avant toute
chose.” All these principles were employed and faithfully adopted by the
Greek Symbolists.
Richness of the Rumanian poetic production … is unfortunately

underestimated in France and Europe. The same happens to the Neo-
Hellenic lyric revival, about which we have little known before Seferis and
Cavafis. … If we have to acknowledge that Parnassus is affiliated to
Symbolism for Rumanians, Greeks, and Bulgarian, most of them are
purely lyric interrogating the mystery of nature both with emotion and
sensitivity, with more or less depth and subtlety.11
From Alain Mercier’s observation, we can conclude that Greek Symbolism

is characterized by a lyric revival. French poets used the symbol in its
rough state, and for this reason it became hermetic in some poetic works.
They are not as lyric as Greek poets, whose traces of romantic lyricism are
always present, in an obvious or subjacent way. Greek poets succumb to
their feelings, while French appear to be more neutral and always in search
of communicating with the hereafter. The Greeks are more interested in a
lyric love found either “here” or “elsewhere” than in symbols, intermediaries

between the Real and Supra-sensible World.
Constantin Chatzopoulos, the founder of Greek Symbolism, in his turn,
provides a review of Greek Symbolism in his article “The Psychology of
Symbolism,” published in 1909, namely in a period when Greek Symbolism
was flourishing while French Symbolism was declining:
The trends of each era have always been incarnated by and reflected on
Philosophy and Art, whose objective is to grasp the meaning of life and to
give an explanation, the former following a logical investigation, and the
latter through pictures. As for the philosopher, clarity of thought stands for
the force of his mind, for the poet also gleam and dynamism of the image
reflect the force of his creative spirit … When mystery and metaphysics
prevail in the social thought, mystical and symbolist tendencies in the
literary production show that the spirit has lost its coherence with reality
and searches, in a symbolist inaccuracy, to hide the weakened thought, the
relaxation of the vital feeling. And here one should investigate why the
fashion of Symbolism spread all over Europe a few decades ago. An
impromptu explanation of this phenomenon is that the new generation,
tired of the current forms of art, has sought new ways of expression of the
beauty, as every other generation used to do. However, the philological
styles and movements are neither formed nor born by the arbitrary will of
individuals, but depend on the social conscience of each era and are only
the expression of this conscience in beauty. Poetic or technical evolutions
of humanity have always walked along with social evolution.12
For Chatzopoulos, art and philosophy are inextricably interconnected.

They are the two faces of the same coin. Moreover, in his opinion, a
movement in order to be born should have a main social cause. This is
corroborated by his observation:
The term history means to us, as socialists “the history of social battles”.
Philosophy and art are also spiritual weapons and belong to an ideological
field where this social battle unfolds or at least is reflected. Poets and
philosophers’ works reflect this battle and each one of them, either
voluntarily or involuntarily, feels and expresses life under the prism of
feelings and ideals of the class to which they belong.13
According to Chatzopoulos, the psychology of Symbolism always lies

in the fact that social phenomena affect literary genres.
When the sense of reality gets lost, the feeling itself gets dry and turns
cloudy, while the thought, being unable to explain this direction, seeks a
way to escape from it, bewildered by its own weakness, turns to the
impromptu negation or to a hermetic or vague interpretation. Such an

interpretation in art is the symbol. The suggestion of Symbolism was
certainly unknown to our country, but a mature spiritual state was able to
receive it, along with its state of mind ready to catch hold of its net. The
first cases came after the war of 1897.14
After the war, the spirit of the Greek society gets into darkness and
mystery, and in its attempt to find an answer, it moves endlessly from “the
unexplainable to the unexplainable.”15 Furthermore, Greek poets find the
explanation for the unexplainable in a finely molded lyric poetry of
mysticism, allegories, and symbols. The first timorous steps on the part of
the Greek poets in this new movement, which for both Greece and France
was a reaction against Realism, Naturalism and Parnassianism, were made
in 1893. By that time, literary Greece had not produced any “Symbolist”
works. Symbolists’ traces were only found in discussions about this new
movement born in France. A critic named Aggelos Fouriotis informs us
that by the time Costis Palamas had written some articles about that topic,
Nikos Episcopoulos and others followed in his steps.16
According to the border line drawn by I. M. Panayotopoulos, the first
thirty years of the twentieth century are for the literary and even poetic
Greek reality the Neo-Hellenic era of Symbolism. Panayotopoulos, in an
article published in Nea Hestia (New Home), in asking himself about the
arising of Symbolism in Greece, provides the following answer:
Not so late after having been established in the rest of Europe, Symbolism
has existed nuclearly [sic]—this is the right answer to our question—in
several romantic poets, and in few Parnassians, but in a superficial and
unfounded way. There is in the '' mystical'' Blake, and later on in another
“mystical” Rilke. It can be found in Poe’s works, … And in Baudelaire’s
works as well.”17
Symbolism comes to replace the romantic fanfares, which have already

started tiring the reader. Symbolism constitutes a “miserly” art. It dislikes
pompous styles and is not interested in the theme, the idea; it focuses on
words. The choice of each word is very important to Symbolists. They are
in search of rare, mannered and embellished words to give, in a laconic
way, the exact meaning. Of course this leads unavoidably to hermetism,
since behind a certain word a whole poetic and, in particular, semiotic
world can be hidden. The partition for Symbolists is the poem itself, while
the internal techniques of the verse (internal alliterations, assonances,
rhymes, etc.) and the stanza (rhymes, page layout, punctuation, etc.)
constitute the musical effects.
1897 is an important date for the latent birth of this new movement in
Greece, but the following year, 1898, will be the official release of the
movement with the arising of a new literary journal, entitled Techni (Art)
under the direction of Constantin Chatzopoulos. The society of the
Symbolist poets forming this journal and the poets Chatzopoulos, Ioannis
Gryparis, Lambros Porfyras, Miltiadès Malakassis, G. Kambisis and a
constantinopolitain, Apostolos Melachrinos, gave a new dash to Greek
poetry. Though Techni lasted only twelve months, it allowed for the
diffusion of Symbolist ideas in Greece. Chatzopoulos had written in the
last volume of the journal: “It is a pity that the ‘real me’ of Techni could
not be confirmed, especially in its polemical field. That this ‘me’ shall sow
its seeds in a sterile ground is the hope that deludes this journal.”18
The study conducted by Panayotopoulos on Greek Symbolist poetry
demonstrates that the first initiation of Greek poets to Symbolism took
place thanks to translations, done by the aforesaid poets themselves, of
critical studies on the French movement and meetings with French
Symbolist poets (in particular, with Jean Moréas) or German poets (with
Heine, for instance). As for the critical studies of the journal,
Panayotopoulos19 provides revealing examples of the French presence in
the Greek territory: the article by Kambisis on Stefan George’s poetry, an
anonymous article on Mallarmé on the occasion of his death, and even an
anonymous article on “Maeterlinck and Drama.”
After the journal disappeared, Chatzopoulos was the only one to
diffuse Symbolist ideas, always adapted to the Greek poetic experiences.
Symbolism is the art of a closed space, whereas the Greek universe is
open. The Mediterranean sun has nothing to do with the French
nebulosity. Symbolists live in the half-light to be able to walk through this
here and there, this now and then, between reality and unreality, to travel
between space and time, memory and oblivion, water and fire. In other
words, between elements of contradictory nature suggesting things and
ideas able to give a probable reality, which exists and nourishes the
energetic forces of the world. Greeks are plunged into darkness to release
the light, to illuminate their poetic creation. Nothing should remain in the
darkness. Poetry is there to enlighten, even behind its suggestiveness.
Panayotopoulos presents this phenomenon as follows:
Symbolism looks at the nature behind a dazzled window pane, the strong
and lenient Greek countryside. And this window pane destroys it.
Symbolism is incomprehensible without the arboretums of the large city,
preferably those of Paris, without those pensive channels, old portraits,
young melancholic persons, the eternal desire to escape, the sense of
nuances and the suggestion of musicality. Greece is plastic, not musical.
Greece lives in the abundant and vertical light, in harmony of old marbles.
We needed to discover the peppers of Amalias’ avenue, the autumnal rain
and the everlasting nostalgia of youth, to be able to experience, in our turn,
the movement of Symbolism.
And its introduction to our tradition has been a beneficial act. Firstly,
because Symbolism has enabled us to get rid of this glaring romanticism of
the end of the previous century. Secondly, because it has put us directly
through to the wider intellectual world of European. Thirdly, because it has
taught us, with such rigour and subtlety, the authentic law of poetry, taught
us to pay attention to every single detail, to detect the major secrecies of
life and art, to honour the word, the basic elements of discourse.20
Greek poets follow Symbolist theories faithfully, except some times the
principle of the idealism, which they abandon in the profit of a profound
lyricism. The poets draw their themes from Greek folklore, which is rich
in “elements,” natural phenomena and dead or missing people. The latter
topic is the best example to illustrate why the Greek Symbolist poetry did
not meet the French idealism and why it remained faithful to lyric poetry
and to the exaltation of feelings and the state of mind. Smaller was the
attempt made by Rimbaud and Mallarmé in the field of folklore. However,
we should not ignore Igitur by Mallarmé, created in such a way that it
seems to have been immersed in an intensively folkloric universe
(midnight, clock, black, shadows).
In Chatzopoulos’ poetry, the suggestion, following the principles of
Symbolism, can be encountered through fuzzy and vague images and the
musical fascination of the verse. “Musical fascination” is meant to refer to
all these musical effects that poets can employ in order to attribute music
to their poetry. Rhymes at the end of the verses, internal rhymes,
repetitions, assonances, and all elements that can be called musical effects
prevail in his poetry. “The style which dominates in Chatzopoulos’ works
is elegiac, a vague poetic daydream, the lack of the concrete.”21
Lambros Porfyras, among the first followers of the society Techni, has
a unique poetic voice. He retreated into solitude to create poetry to such an
extent that he believed that the universe was gradually disappearing to
leave its place to poetry. Instructed by Jean Moréas himself, Miltiades
Malakassis22 was “the poet of the internal music in which a richness of
words and rhythms prevailed (Hours, 1903, Destiny, 1909, Asphodels,
1918).”23 His verse flows freely, without cogitation, while having a
pessimistic and confessional style.
Lastly, Apostolos Melachrinos was influenced by Gryparis (who was
his collaborator in the publication of the journal) and by Mallarmé. The
folklore, the fairy-like element and preciousness of words are the main
ingredients of his poetry. The presence of folklore and fairy-like elements
… on the one hand, corresponds to the idea that, in order to renew the
poetic discourse, it is necessary to enrich it with elements from previous
traditional literatures, an idea to which the need for Symbolism has stuck
from the very beginning, in Greece. On the other hand, it serves or seems
to serve its personal objective: which consists in eliminating the
comprehensible, the semantic contents of the words and their transmissible
emotional charge.24
“He has persistently cultivated the symbolic style, and searched the
musical enchantment of the verse.”25 To this observation, André Mirambel’s
words should also be added: “[Melachrinos] is one of the most authentic
representatives of Symbolism, and one of the poets who could at best
benefit from the musical resources of the language.”26 His great poem in
conversation, Apollonios (1938), brings into play an amazingly connotative
universe after the fall, while trying to link it with paradise, the garden of
Eden of the “Revelation-restoration,” by connecting the Sun with the
Moon.
After presenting the visions of the world in both Symbolisms, let’s
look at some examples, which can perfectly illustrate this thematic
convergence of ideas. The study will be limited to three recurring themes.
In this respect, we will not examine the great literary myths related to both
Symbolisms such as Orpheus, Narcissus, Cain, etc. In this study we are
mostly interested in the themes related to the state of mind: autumn, the
shadow, the night and the notion of nostos (return).
Autumn is the most frequently used season in poetry, from the Middle
Age to the twentieth century. Autumn is a transitional stage between the
summer and the winter, and by extension, in poetic terms between
alertness and hibernation, blooming and decay, alive and dead leaves,
warmth and coldness—in other words, between the life and death of the
universe and the heart. This results in a profound melancholy, nostalgia for
an “elsewhere,” for a sunny place or for an elsewhere still darker, where
the poet can feel indeed alive. This macrocosmic aspect is always
subjective and varies from one poet to the other. Rimbaud feels alive in his
Illuminations, his Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), in his “hereafter.”
The Greeks poets can find in autumn the ideal metaphor to express their
state of mind.
Autumn is portrayed in an explicit or implicit way through images
such as clouds, the first rains, or the fog, all these natural phenomena
preceding the cold and the desert landscapes of the winter.
Porfyras has recourse to “The Autumn” (Musical Voices, III, Voices of
the Field) to describe his state of mind. The poet recalls all those days full
of happiness. It should be pointed out that, except for the title, the word
“autumn” does not occur anywhere else, yet it recurs as a theme that is
interwoven throughout the poem thanks to its suggestive images (clouds,
sheets, silence, shadows):
From the Summits, this evening, little by little

The clouds have heavily rolled
Casting over their shadow once again
In the croups, over there in the villages
................................
Tell me stories, tell me happy stories,
Full of light, innocent, simple stories
About familiar and beloved lives to us,
About ephemeral happy lives
................................
Oh! I just want to forget all the other stories
The old ones
Which told me about great lives
Eternal ones. No. Don’t tell me about these lives!
I just want them to come from my memory

Full of bitterness,
Afflicting my heart
Like this blurred nebulosity.
................................
Let them disappear
Get rid of them
Let’s keep only that pleasant voice of the grillo … 27
One can encounter the same position in Baudelaire’s works,

particularly in his “Chant d’automne” (Song of Autumn):
Soon we will be sunk in cold uncertainty [darkness]

Farewell to summer splendour, lost and gone!
................................
Of seasoned firewood striking cobblestone
................................
I’ll hibernate and fill myself with bile,
With hatred, dread, forced labour, sacrifice.
................................
A coffin hastily nailed shut. But whose?
Bemused by hammer-stroke, and funerals,
By these strange blows that ring out like goodbyes!
Summer was yesterday. Bring on the fall.28
The poem by Porfyras is very close to that by Verlaine (“Chanson

d’automne”/ Song of Autumn), where one can observe more similarities.
The autumns throbbing

Strings moan, sobbing,
Drone their dole;
Long-drawn and low,
Each tremolo
Sears my soul
When tolls the hour

I think of our
Days gone by;
Pallid as death
I gasp for breath,
And I cry.
And like a dead

Leaf, buffeted,
Tempest-tossed,
I ride the air-
Now here, now there –
Aimless, lost . . . 29
Yves-Alain Favre argues that “Verlainian melancholy consists in a passive

resignation and subjection to the destiny.”30 Porfyras resists this destiny;
he is lyric and wants to hope. He wants to keep only the good moments of
life. He is not in search of any loophole such as “the wind” in order to
avoid his destiny and what destiny reserves for him. Verlaine created
another poem, “Nevermore,” in which he showed the love between two
people by calling upon the autumn:
Memory, Memory, what do you want of me?

Autumn drives the thrush down the languid air,
And the sun darts his rays monotonously
On the yellowing woods on the north wind rumbles there.
We were walking in a dream, and we were alone,

She and I, our thoughts like our hair wind-blown.
In her voice of living gold, with that troubling gaze
She suddenly asked, “Which were you happiest days?”
................................
—Ah, how the first flowers have the finest scent!31
As for the topics of shade and night, and by extension the moon, one
can say that they stand either for the beloved dead or for a mystical
moment where strange things occur, or where memories and dreams arise.
In his last collection, Legends, Chatzopoulos indulges himself in
playing with the Greek folkloric elements, a pleasure that makes him
immerse all his poems in such an atmosphere:
IN THIS WAY I WAS TALKING TO SHADOWS

In this way I was talking to shadows
somewhere one day
in a remote forest:
Shadows coming from the clouds, high above

and shadows under the trees
untraceable, mystical shadows,
what binds my sick heart with you,
imperceptible or dead shadows?
Shadows that the autumn

sowed here for you,
while passing by.
You are crawling heavily inside me,
shadows in the plains
Sad nights,
Long, heavy shadows
You are unfolding inside me
Shadows of the cypress
In an old remote chapel32
Verlaine’s verses, drawing on the theme of shadow, also suggest an

alarming and horrifying “Saturnian” landscape:
Some, —the innocent or the lymphatic—

Find in the woods charms languorous or gay;
................................
I tremble in the forests like a fool
Who fears an ambush or may fear the dead.
These branches thick, like billows without band,

Where falls black silence and where falls a shade
Still blacker—all this mournfulness displayed,
Fills me with horror, foolish, yet profound.
(“In the Woods,” Poems Saturnine) 33
Or as Mallarmé writes:
Victoriously from beautiful suicide having fled

Ember of glory, blood through foam, gold, storm!
Oh laughing if out yonder a scarlet spreads
To drape regal only me absent tomb.
But look! Of all that luster not even a shred

Lingers, midnight now, where the dark invites
Save that a presumptuous treasure of the head
Pours its caressed indolence without torch-light34
Or in Malakassis’ pen:
With its heavy shadow

The large cypress
A girl’s tomb is protecting,
Crying at a silent night,
The crime, the great crime,
The large cypress
Protecting a girl’s tomb.35
(Ruins)
Chatzopoulos is in the same line of thought as Verlaine. The “Saturnian”

Verlaine seems to be immersing himself in a forest, a place particularly
mystical, where he is overwhelmed with feelings of terror while being
afraid of “seeing the dead.” The reading pathway of Verlaine’s Worlds
seems to be more opaque.
To finish off this contrastive study revolving around the topics of
French Symbolism, borrowed by the Greek poets, we should refer to the
idea of nostos and the trip by comparing two poems: Le Bateau ivre (The
Drunken Boat) by Rimbaud and Petty Sorrows by Malakassis:
You, haunted boat and always forgotten,

Let it become your slave forever,
In the everlasting storm, hit by the waves,
I want only to forget and be forgotten36
Or for Rimbaud:
As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers

................................
I cared nothing for all my crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with

The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased
................................
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;37
The two poems reflect a great personal and poetic escape, an inevitable
destiny for the former and an ultimate exercise of style for the latter. “Le
Bateau ivre” meets in fact the need for putting oneself, for the last time, to
the test by the miraculous virtues of the language. This is an escape “in the
language and not by the language.”38 Rimbaud assumes the risk to conceal
disorder and turmoil in an imbroglio of words and images.
***
In this study we have attempted to prove the impact of French

Symbolism on Greek poetry at the end of the century, in particular on an
ideological level, by having recourse to some very revealing examples.
Thus, we wish to point out that there cannot be any tight compartments
between “poetries” or between the dates of the reception of a certain
literary movement within a linguistic and literary area.
The last years of the century … devote initially with an inevitable lapse in
comparison to the apogee of the movement in France and Belgium, the
international radiation of Symbolism: in England, Germany, Austria, Italy
and Russia, Symbolism becomes the name of poetic modernity; and
Symbolism will enjoy at best its posterity abroad and mainly thanks to
George, Rilke, Yeats and Eliot.39
Anna Balakian, in her great study on European Symbolism, The

Symbolist movement in the Literature of European Languages, explains
the reasons why the Symbolist movement had a such great impact on
European literature. Except for the mutual loans from country to country,
the Symbolist movement laid the foundations for a universal poetic/ poetry
both free from any kind of imitation and released from time and space.
Greek and foreign Symbolism remains a unique incentive for a better

future. The proof is that, nowadays, the symbol represents, for every
people, a light towards a better world. This light directs poetry and prose,
the theatre and music and pictorial arts.40
Fig. 23-1. Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926), The Death of the Gravedigger,
1900, watercolour, gouache, black lead. Paris, Orsay Museum. Conserved
at the Department of Graphic Arts (D.A.G) of the Louvre Museum,
Michonis’ legacy (RF 40162 bis).
Notes
1
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Rosina Neginsky who
was so kind to include my article in the proceeding of the conference, which
unfortunately I was not able to attend.
2
Bertrand Marchal, Lire le Symbolisme (Paris: Dunod, 1993), 7. All translations of
this text are my own and Dr. Maria Constantinou’s. My special thanks to Dr Maria
Constantinou for being so kind to proofread and help me translate this article into
English.
3
Marchal, Lire le Symbolisme, 43.
4
Jean Moréas, “Le Manifeste du symbolisme,” published in the Parisian
newspaper Le Figaro, on September 18, 1886, reproduced in Marchal, Lire le
Symbolisme, 136.
5
Ibid.
6
Our translation. Laurence Campa, 51.
7
The Angel of the Death who, like in a Nervalian dream, comes to take the
gravedigger.
8
Charles Chadwick, Symbolism (The critical idiom) (London: Methuen & Co Ltd,
1971), 3-4.
9
Guy Michaud, Le Symbolisme tel qu’en lui-même, with the collaboration of
Bertrand Marchal and Alain Mercier (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1995), 35.
10
Our translation. Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire, 1891, reproduced in Bertrand
11
Guy Michaud, Le Symbolisme tel qu’en lui-même, 378.
12
Our translation. Constantin Chatzopoulos, “The Psychology of Symbolism,” in
Noumas, 2 vols., 336 and 337 (March 22, 1909 and March 29, 1909). His critical
texts were collected and published under the title Kritika Keimena (Critical Texts)
by Constantin Chatzopoulos, by Kristi Anemoudi-Arzoglou in the Editions of
Costas and Helene Ourani’s Foundation (1996), 125, 126-127.
13
Ibid., 127.
14
Ibid., 130-131.
15
Ibid., 131.
16
Aggelos Fouriotis, “Istoriki anadromi” (Historic journey), Nea Hestia (New
Home), Special Volume on Symbolism (December 1953): 187.
17
Our translation. I. M. Panayotopoulos, “Symbolism and Neo-Hellenic Lyrics,”
in Nea Hestia, Ibid., 108.
18
Chatzopoulos, Critical Texts, 518.
19
Panayotopoulos, “Symbolism and Neo-Hellenic Lyrics,” 110.
20
Ibid., 111. Our translation.
21
Linos Politis, History of the Neo-Hellenic Literature (Athens: MIET, 1978), 224.
(In Greek)
22
He had married Jean Moréas’ cousin, Elise, and translated Moréas’s Stances into
Greek, followed by an introduction to his translation, where he mentioned that Jean
Moréas is “his Master.”
23
André Mirambel, La littérature grecque moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, coll. « Que sais-je », 1953), No.: 560, 73.
24
Our translation. Agori Gkrekou, Pure Poetry in Greece: from Solomos to
Seferis, 1833-1933 (Athens: Alexandria, 2000),151.
25
Linos Politis, History of the Neo-Hellenic Literature, 246.
26
André Mirambel, La littérature grecque moderne, 99.
27
Our translation. Lambros Porfyras, Complete Poetic Works, 1894-1932,
coordinated by Helen Politou-Marmarinou, eds. Fondation Kostas and Helen Urani
(Athens: Serie Neoelliniki Vivliothiki, 1993), 241-242. (In Greek),
28
Charles Baudelaire, Complete Poems, ed. and trans. by Walter Martin (New
York: Routledge, 2002), 151. The poem in French : “Bientôt nous plongerons dans
les froides ténèbres;/Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés courts !/ . . . / Le bois
retentissant sur le pavé des cours/. . . /Tout l’hiver va tomber dans mon être :
colère,/Haine, frissons, horreur, labeur dur et forcé,/ . . . /Il me semble, bercé par ce
choc monotone,/Qu’on cloue en grande hâte un cercueil quelque part./Pour qui ?
C’était hier l’été ; voici l’automne !/Ce bruit mystérieux sonne un départ.” French
edition: Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, introduction by Claude Pichois
(Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 1972), 93-94.
29
One hundred and one poems by Paul Verlaine, bilingual edition, trans. by
Norman R. Shapiro (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 17. The
poem in French : “Les sanglots longs/Des violons/De l’automne/Blessent mon
cœur/D’une langueur/Monotone./ Tout suffocant/ et blême, quand/sonne l’heure/Je
me souviens/ Des jours anciens/Et je pleure;/ Et je m’en vais/Au vent mauvais/Qui
m’importe/Deçà, delà, /Pareil à la/Feuille morte.” French edition: Paul Verlaine,
Œuvres poétiques complètes, presented by Yves-Alain Favre (Paris: Robert
Laffont, 1992), 22-23.
30
Ibid., 749.
31
Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, trans. by C. F. Macintyre (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1976), 5. The poem in French: “Souvenir, souvenir,
que me veux-tu ? L’automne/Faisait voler la grive à travers l’air atone, /Et le soleil
dardait un rayon monotone/Sur le bois jaunissant où la bise détonne./Nous étions
seul à seule et marchions en rêvant,/Elle et moi, les cheveux et la pensée au
vent./Soudain, tournant vers moi son regard émouvant :« Quel fut ton plus beau
jour ? » fit sa voix d’or vivant,/. . . /Ah ! les premières fleurs, qu’elles sont
parfumées.” French edition: Œuvres poétiques complètes, 12
32
Our translation. Constantin Chatzopoulos, Complete Poetic Works, text
presented by G. Veloudis, eds. Foundation Kostas and Helene Urani (Athens:
Series Neo-Elliniki Vivliothiki [Greek Library], 1982), 268. (In Greek)
33
Paul Verlaine: His absinthe-tinted Song, ed. and transl. Bergen Applegate,
(Chicago: R.F.Seymour/The Alderbrink Press, 1916), 66. Œuvres poétiques
complètes, 29. “D’autres, —des innocents ou bien des lymphatiques,/ Ne trouvent
dans les bois que charmes langoureux,/ . . . / Par les forêts je tremble à la façon
d’un lâche/ Qui craindrait une embûche ou qui verrait des morts./ Ces grands
jamais apaisés, comme l’onde, / D’où tombe un noir silence avec une ombre
encor/Plus noire, tout ce morne et sinistre décor/Me remplit d’une horreur triviale
et profonde.”
34
Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. by Mary Ann
Caws (New York: New Direction Book, 1982), 47. French edition: Stéphane
Mallarmé, Poésies, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 1992), 58.
“Victorieusement fui le suicide beau/Tison de gloire, sang par écume, or, tempête
!/ Ô rire si là-bas une pourpre s’apprête/ A ne tendre royal que mon absent
tombeau./ Quoi ! de tout cet éclat pas même le lambeau/S’attarde, il est minuit, à
l’ombre qui nous fête/ Excepté qu’un trésor présomptueux de tête/Verse son
caressé nonchaloir sans flambeau.”
35
Our translation. Miltiades Malakassis, Complete Poetic Works, presented by
Giannis Papakostas (Athens: Patakis, Athens, 2005), 105. (In Greek)
36
Ibid., 284.
37
Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems, ed. and trans. by Olivier Bernard (New
York: Penguin Books, 1997), 165-166. French edition: Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres
complètes, ed. Pierre Brunel, eds. La Pochothèque, 1999), 294-295. “Comme je
descendais des Fleuves impassibles, . . . /J’étais insoucieux de tous les
équipages,/Porteur de blés flamands ou de cotons anglais./Quand avec mes haleurs
ont fini ces tapages/ Les Fleuves m’ont laissé descendre où je voulais. . . /Et dès
lors, je me suis baigné dans le Poème/De la mer, infusé d’astres, et lactescent,/
Dévorant les azurs verts; où, flottaison blême/ Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois
descend.”
38
Dominique Rincé, Rimbaud: Poèmes et proses, eds. Intertextes/ Nathan, p. 53.
39
40
Our translation. Aggelos Fouriotis, “Istoriki anadromi” (Historic journey), 188.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
GIOVANNI SEGANTINI'S THE ANGEL OF LIFE
AND THE NIRVANA CYCLES
LIANA DE GIROLAMI CHENEY
In memory of Pina Quarta De Girolami, magnifcat anima mea matrem!
“Art should find the secrets of nature and

translate them through nature into pictures.”
—Giovanni Segantini
The Italian Divisionist and Symbolist painter, Giovanni Segantini

(1858-1899), was born in Arco, near Lake Garda, in the Trentino, Alpine
region. In the early stages of his work, Segantini paints nature pure and
simple. He paints what he sees. Gradually, however, his natural imagery
begins to allude to such concealed symbolic abstractions as motherhood,
devotion, or forgiveness. As Segantini’s symbolism evolves, his depiction
of nature becomes bizarre. Ingeniously, these bizarre forms become
concealed symbols of life. The human figure, for example, loses importance
in the natural setting, while the natural setting or landscape achieves
immensity and magnitude. At the end of development of his artistic quest,
Segantini’s composition illustrates a mysterious and exotic Alpine
landscape, with human figures portrayed as fantastic creatures signifying
metaphysical abstractions such as love and beauty.
Segantini is an Italian Divisionist painter in the manner in which he
applies the paint on his canvasses, similar to Gaetano Previati’s La
Maternità (Maternity, 1890, at the Banca Popolare of Novara), as well as
an Italian Symbolist artist, similar to Emilio Longoni’s Sola (Alone, 1900,
at the Casa di Lavoro per i Ciechi in Milan), in the selection of his painted
themes, such as the cycles of the Angel of Life and the Nirvana versions.1
These two cycles are the focus of this essay (Figs. 24-1, 24-2, 24-6, 24-8.
24-9, and 24-10).
Giovanni Segantini’s The Angel of Life and the Nirvana Cycles 427
Applying the Divisionist technique, Segantini depicts the cycle of the

Angel of Life, which includes several versions of drawings and paintings
from 1894-1897 on The Angel of Life and The Fruit of Life (Fig. 24-1 and
24-2). This group of Symbolist paintings consists of the portrayal of a
seasonal spring. In a blooming tree rests a beautiful woman holding her
child or fruit of her love.2 Employing the Divisionist technique, Segantini
also paints the second cycle, the Nirvana versions. This second group of
Symbolist paintings, consisting of wintry scenes of icy Alpine landscapes
with barren trees and mysterious flying women, comprise The Punishing of
Lust3 and The Bad or Evil Mothers (Figs. 24-6 to 24-10).4
During his career, Segantini encounters an advocate for his art, Vittorio
Grubicy de Dragon, an art critic and art dealer who not only loves his art,
but also sponsors it and writes about it.5 In his writings, Grubicy strongly
supports the merits of the Italian Divisionist and Symbolist artists. He
eloquently explains and praises the Symbolist’s artistic technique,
demonstrating how their creativity prompts a new direction for art called
Divisionism.
The term Divisionism refers to the painting technique of separating
colors into their components and applying them with a brush on a surface,
creating dots and shapes for the eye to organize into a form. At this time,
the public viewed Divisionist artists with incredulity because their
technique drastically contrasted with the conventional representation of
nature. Viewers and critics ridiculed and felt sorry for these artists because
they believed they suffer from two types of maladies: one is physically
caused by a visual disease, a malformation of the retina; the other is
psychological in nature, as reflected in a mental state of suffering or
hysteria.6
As a Divisionist painter, Segantini employs color gradations and
varying colors, meticulously applying them on the canvas in parallel thin
lines. As a Symbolist painter, Segantini fantasizes about the depiction of
nature. Thus, the Divisionist technique assists him in the pursuit of his
magical imagery.7 Segantini depicts natural representations of springtime,
iridescent atmospheric light, gentle breeze and blossoming trees in the
Angel of Life cycle. Whereas icy Alps, frosty leafless trees and frozen
lakes, portraying glacial weather, snowstorms, and hurricane winds, appear
in the Nirvana cycle. However, in both cycles, ethereal creatures express
complex sentiments of love and death, and nature and art. Although the
Alpine scene is topographically correct, in the both cycles, visionary and
mysterious forms are depicted among its corpulent or slim trees in open
succulent fields or rocky and snowy mountains.
428 Chapter Twenty-Four
Fig. 24-1. Giovanni Segantini, The Angel of Life, 1894, The Galleria d’Arte
Moderna, Milan.
Fig. 24-2. Giovanni Segantini, The Fruit of Life, 1889, Museum der bildenden
Künste, Leipzig.
Fig. 24-3. Cavalier Cesare d’Arpino, Madonna of the Tree, 1590, The Galleria
degli Uffizi, Florence.
In both cycles, these apparitions depict eerie female figures posing in

corpulent trees or flying in icy landscapes, becoming entangled in bare
frosty trees. In the Angel of Life cycles, depicting springtime, tree branches
expand from the tree trunk to form a simulated crown above the mother
and child resting on the center of the tree trunk. These branches also create
a circular shape around the familial setting, thus cuddling mother and child
and engulfing the human forms into the natural realm. The earthy branches
parallel, in substance and appearance, the long and abundant tresses of the
female images resting on a tree. The golden tresses evoke the rays of
sunlight in springtime. These angelic images allude to the beauty of life,
love and nature as a disguised personification of maternity.8
In other instances, as in the Nirvana cycles, the branchless trees with
few branches punctuate the icy landscape. These string-like branches twist
and turn, creating a thorny path. These types of branches are similar to the
long strands of the flying, ghostly females. In part, these tresses cover the
female’s sensual bodies, but mostly their hair entangles with the branches’
thorny path, thus entrapping the unearthly and floating forms. The human
form is bound to the proclivity of the natural realm. These eerie images
represent abstract conceits of evil, lust and punishment. These images
further conceal personification of unnatural love or vanity (vanitas). In
both cycles, the Angel of Life and the Nirvana versions, the natural realm
alludes to mysteries and vicissitudes of the metaphysical realm.
As an Italian Divisionist painter, Segantini unifies three stylistic
components in his two cycles, reflecting his observations of nature with a
loose painterly technique. In the Angel of Life cycle, there are implied
circular compositions, springtime landscapes with blooming trees and
branches, and angelic female figures. The Nirvana cycle reveals rectangular
compositions with glacial landscapes with bare frosty trees and ghostly
female creatures. However, as an Italian Symbolist artist, Segantini reveals
the beauty of nature in painting, associating this artistic creation to an
aesthetic principle of goodness as well as to the ethical principle of
forgiveness.9
Segantini’s Symbolism consists of the harmony of topographical
landscapes and archetypal figures, which together suggest the abstract idea
of nature and fertility, thus connecting love with life and motherhood. He
dramatizes these aesthetic quests in depicting symbolic landscape, where
natural love is contrasted with unnatural love, fertility with infertility,
fruitful with fruitless. The visualization of these conceits are at two levels:
one is through natural conceits are portrayed through the depiction of
natural forms as a spring season with blooming tree and a pregnant woman
are symbols of fertility, contrasting with winter season with a bare tree and
a childless woman, which are symbols of infertility. The second level is
through metaphysical conceits as portrayal of good and bad (mothers) or
life and death (children), or as depiction of personifications of modesty and
vanity (female form).
The theme of motherhood haunts Segantini at many levels, thus
pushing him to create two painted cycles and visualizing the theme in
numerous paintings (the Angel of Life and the Nirvana versions). Personal
life experiences cause Segantini to investigate the meaning and
manifestations of motherhood.10 When he is seven years old, his mother,
Margherita De Girardi, after a long illness, dies from complications of
delivery of her first child.11 A year later, 1866, Segantini’s father, Agostino
Segantini, also dies. After the death of both of his parents, records indicate
that Segantini resides in Milan under the tutelage of his stepsister,
Domenica Maria Aloisa, nicknamed Irene.12 Remembrance of the maternal
love is constantly reflected in his art, e.g., the love of animals, a cow for its
calf as in Le due madri (The Two Mothers, Fig. 24-4-, signed and dated G.
Segantini 1889 at Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan); the love of humans,
mother for her child as in L’angelo della vita (The Angel of Life, Fig. 24-
1, signed and dated G. Segantini 1894, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in
Milan); and the love of humans for animals, the pastor for the sheep as in
Ave Marie a trasbordo (Ave Maria at the Crossing, 1886, Fig. 24-5, signed
G. Segantini at San Gallen). Perhaps the loveliness, suffering, and sadness
of Segantini’s early years cause him to carefully study and learn about
nature, where he finds love and solitude, feelings that he understands, thus
enabling him to identify with nature through the concept of life and death
as well as the mystery of maternity for a man.13
Fig. 24-4. Giovanni Segantini, The Two Mothers, 1889.

Fig. 24-5. Giovanni Segantini, Ave Maria at the Crossing, 1886.

In addition to his artistic affiliations, another major source of inspiration

for Segantini in the depiction of the cycles is his interaction with the
literary circles of the time, where literary and philosophical essays probed
with fascination into the subject of motherhood.14 Influenced as well by the
writings of novelist Émile Zola, the poetry of Guido Gozzano and
Giovanni Pascoli, the essays of criminologist Cesare Lombroso, and
philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Fredrick Nietzsche, Segantini
views art as a by-product of lyricism, sensitivity, and imitation of nature.15
In the cycles of the Angel of Life and the Nirvana versions, for example,
Segantini depicts motherhood as an element of nature or as a natural
phenomenon. His philosophy of art is based on naturalism, a general
doctrine that claims that the proper study of art is through the observation
of nature as expounded by Hippolyte Taine’s The Philosophy of Art of
1865.16 For Segantini, art has the potential to, at once, reveal and conceal
the laws of nature with artistic symbols, thus alluding to the ethical
sentiments of the individual, e.g., goodness and modesty, contrasting with
selfishness and vanity. In his theory of art, Segantini fuses naturalism with
spiritualism.17 In combining these two philosophies, although contradictory
in principle, he does not deviate from the path of reality and of artistic
development. Segantini paints the harmony between colors and forms to
understand the metaphysical complexity of life and nature as well as the
body and the soul. He depicts paradoxical symbols, adding a note of
unreality to the absolute reality of life as well as alluding to the mystery of
nature in his art.
At the time, some consider Segantini to be a leader of the Spiritual Art
movement, a pantheistic encapsulation of divinity in nature, which later
will be embraced by and associated with the Russian painter, Wassily
Kandinsky.18 In 1911, Kandinsky expounds this theory in Concerning the
Spiritual in Art, stating: "The relationships in art are not necessarily ones
of outward form, but are founded on inner sympathy of meaning."19 In the
Divisionist intellectual circles, the religious views of the supremacy of the
spirit over science are expounded by Antonio Fogazzaro in Human Ascents
(Ascensione Humane) of 1898 and later captured in the writings of
Domenico Tumiati in the literary journal Il Marzocco.20 These authors aim
to reconcile the dispute between science and religion, reason and faith,
scientific observations and mystical experience.
The Angel of Life cycle reveals Segantini’s sentiments about the
complexity between the depiction of an image and its signification, e.g.,
The Angel of Life and maternity. Quinsac’s long documentation and
explanation about this painting allude to the intrinsic Italian symbolism of
traditional Christian imagery and artistic self-revelation. She elaborates on

the fusion of naturalism with mannerism, conveying a vision.21 The
original title for the work was Maternità (Maternity). In 1891, in Cronica
di Brera, Segantini explains the symbolism of the painting: “la prima
madre seduta nel giardino dell’Eden davanti all’albero della vita, addorata
dagli Angeli mentre allatta is suo primo figlio” (the first mother, in the
Garden of Eden, seated in front of the tree of life, adored by Angels while
she is nursing her first child). The numerous drawings executed for this
painting portray members of Segantini’s family, his idealized wife, Baba,
and his recently born son, Gottardo.22
In The Angel of Life (Fig. 24-1), Segantini depicts a loving mother
embracing her child sitting in a blooming birch tree. In the background,
early signs of spring are seen as the snow in the mountain melts.
Metaphorically, The Angel of Life relates to the Christian tradition of
rebirth (spring), forgiveness and salvation. The tree as a symbol of nature
alludes to the natural transformation and gestation in the seasons.23 In the
spring, the tree blossom and is fruitful, but in the winter, it becomes bare
and fruitless. The blossoming trees, like the child, are manifestations of
gestation and life.
Segantini acknowledges the artistic tradition in the depiction of mother
and child resting on a tree. In 1894, for example, he composes several
paintings and drawings incorporating a tree with mother and child. These
images combine the theme of motherhood and nature, as in The Angel of
Life (Angelo della Vita of 1894, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan
and the 1896 version at the Segantini’s Museum in St. Moritz). Segantini
inscribes his signature in the birch tree trunk as “G. Segantini 1894,” which
alludes not only to the obvious artistic acknowledgement and family name,
but also to the symbolic connection of fruition between the earth and the
tree, a mother and her child, and an artist and a work of art. He also
connects the tree with his family name, Segantini, which derives from his
father’s occupation as a lumberjack. The Italian word, seghe, means
lumber, from the verb, segare, as in to saw lumber. Not by accident,
Segantini inserts his signature in the tree trunk in The Angel of Life,
connecting his family name with the portrayed imagery, thus linking his
lineage with his newborn son. Because trees “span ten or more generations
of the [individual], so they become a symbol of the family tree branching
outwards, generation to generation.”24 His imagery further implies his
personal symbolism of the tree with the imagery of maternity.25 For
Segantini, the birch tree has a specific significance, “between man and tree
there is only one difference, man moves on earth, while the tree has roots
in the mother earth and remains immobile waiting of its life and end . . .
and yet even so does man and nothing different.”26 The tree is traditionally
an intermediary symbol between the natural world, matter or the earth, and
the metaphysical world, the spirit or the conscious mind.27 Segantini
parallels his artistic creation with the fruition of life, thus the natural realm
binds his aesthetic metaphysical realm. Fascinated with these themes, he
composes many drawings of this subject between 1894 and 1896 in oil on
paper at The Szépmüvézeti Múzeum in Budapest, in charcoal with red
gesso at the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen, and in pencil with gold touches at
The Segantini Museum in St. Moritz.28
The meanings of the association of the tree with the woman are
embedded in the past symbolic conventions. This connection of the tree
with a human form, in particular the female form, originates from ancient
religions, where the tree is associated with the earth goddess, Hathor,
Tammuz or Demeter, and with fertility rites to generate cultivation.29 The
natural mutations of the tree, such as blooming and withering, reveal the
seasonal changes on earth.
The symbolism of the tree as axis mundi alludes to a tree rooted in the
earth, but with branches reaching the heaven. Traditionally, the tree, a
symbol of human’s spiritus vegetativus (“vegetal soul”),30 contrasting with
the human’s psyche, a spiritual soul, is depicted in religious paintings. In
these paintings, in particular, those portraying scenes of Christ, the tree
signifying the “Tree of Life” or the ascending connection of human nature
with divine nature, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi of
1482, at the Uffizi. In Leonardo’s painting, a blooming tree is placed in the
middle ground, alluding to the Tree of Jesse, Christ’s roots and origin. The
symbolism of the tree connects with the events of the Nativity and the
Adoration of the Magi in the foreground.31
In Christianity, the tree continues to be connected with the cycle of life
and death, but with the inclusion of a moral overtone. A barren or dead
tree, for example, is associated with sinners, whereas a tree with branches
and leaves is associated with the “Tree of Life” or the Virgin Mary giving
the fruit of life, Christ.32 The association of tree as a symbol of Christ is
noted in 600 CCE in Eulogius of Alexandria’s writings, stating, “Behold in
the Father the root, in the Son the branch, and in the Sprit the fruit: for the
subject as in the tree in one.”33 Thus, a tree becomes not only a male
symbol of incarnation of body and spirit, but also a female symbol of
maternity or motherhood, as portrayed in the Mannerist drawing of
Cavalier Cesare d’Arpino’s Madonna of the Tree of 1590, at the Galleria
degli Uffizi in Florence (Fig. 24-3).34 In this drawing, d’Arpino elevates
the Madonna and Child from the surrounding faithful by placing her above
the trunk of a tree and creating a throne of branch leaves for her and her
child to address the faithful. The blooming branches of the tree engulf the
holy figures, forming a crown or a nimbus around them, alluding to their
heavenly royalty and divinity. The Christian symbolism of motherhood
love and caritas (“charity”) is unified as life and sanctity. Segantini
subconscious awareness of this tradition is manifested in his painting on
the theme of motherhood as the Angel of Life cycle.
The other associated theme on motherhood and nature is the Fruit of
Life of 1889, at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig (Fig. 24-2).
Many drawings also accompany this painted version.35 Segantini uses the
title of Il Fridello or Fridellino, a Trentin word, for The Brother or The
Little Brother. Evidence of this is the image of the child, who is not
idealized, but represents a specific child, perhaps one of Segantini’s
children; the woman is similar to his wife, Baba. For Quinsac, the frame
composed for this painting is designed to create a religious icon of the
imagery.36 Furthermore, these images signify the sanctity of motherhood
and the beauty of maternity, also alluding to the recent birth of one of his
four children. These compositions of a woman and a child on a tree reveal
Segantini’s visual assimilation of earlier religious compositions on the
theme of Madonna and Child, e.g., d’Arpino’s Madonna of the Tree.
However, when comparing The Fruit of Life with The Angel of Life, a
discrepancy is noted. Although both mother and child are seated on the
tree, the tree is different in both its construction and composition. In The
Angel of Life, the blooming tree is corpulent, sustaining the pair, and
designed with an implied movement from the foreground to the
background of the painting. Whereas in The Fruit of Life, the tree trunk is
slim with a few branches. Mother and child are placed in front of tree, their
seated stance is precarious, and the directional movement of the tree is
diagonal, paralleling the placement of the child in the mother’s lap. In The
Angel of Life, there is a depiction of the mater lacta (“nursing mother”).
Segantini depicts the traditional imagery of nursing Madonna, e.g., Andrea
Solario’s Maria lactans of 1507, at the Musée du Louvre in Paris,37 as well
as the bond between mother and child, as the child is asleep while gently
touching the revealed breast of his mother. By contrast, in The Fruit of
Life, Segantini alludes to the Christian lamentation scene, e.g.,
Michelangelo’s Pieta of 1489, at the Vatican. In the painting, the mother
tenderly observes the joyous child resting on her lap. The reclining
position of the child and his association with the diagonal inclination of the
tree allude to death of the child and his crucifixion. Thus, The Angel of Life
depicts the bliss of motherhood, whereas The Fruit of Love portrays the
anticipated suffering of motherhood. Although not a practicing Catholic,
Segantini is nevertheless a spiritual and mystical man who believes in
metaphysical power and in the manifestation of good, beauty and nature.
Metaphysically, he honors maternity, but during his life he never marries
the mother of his four children.
In the cycle of the Angel of Life, the imagery alludes to the modesty of
the woman or mother as well as to her natural ability to nurse, love and
protect her child. Furthermore, these images signify the sanctity of
motherhood and the beauty of maternity, also alluding to the recent birth of
one of his four children. Segantini eulogizes maternity in the same manner
as contemporary poets, such as Giovanni Pascoli, who honors the
remembrance of his mother in a poem “Mia Madre” (“My Mother”).38
But as a byproduct of his culture and society, Segantini views woman
as femme fatale or mala femmina (prostitute) as well as virginal or
maternal.39 While in the Angel of Life cycle, Segantini portrays a bella,
buona and santa femmina (beautiful, good and holy woman), in the
Nirvana cycle, he depicts the opposite, a mala femmina (bad or evil
woman). This contrasting depiction of women or motherhood may allude
to Segantini’s psychological conflict in his persona for the love of his
mother as well as for his resentment of her for dying and abandoning him
when he was a child. Thus, the Nirvana cycle depicts a different view of
maternity.
Quinsac clearly demonstrates, using the correspondence exchanged
between Segantini and Grubicy, how Segantini composes both cycles
stylistically and thematically, and how these cycles reveal Segantini’s
dilemma in portraying an image of woman/mother. His quandary is a
cultural reflection of the male’s perception of women in late nineteen-
century in Europe. This type of female dualism haunts the male of this
epoch, fin-de-siècle, because women are identified as femme fatale, a
combination of a buona and mala femmina.40
Under the inspiration of a twelfth-century Indian poem by Luigi
Panghiavahli, Segantini paints the Nirvana cycle, incorporating the
symbolism of punishment, sterility and desolation but with sentiments of
forgiveness, hope and redemption. His friend, librettist and poet Luigi
Illica (1857-1911), translates Panghiavhali of Maironpada’s Indian poem
into Italian, as published in 1889. The poem immortalizes good and bad
motherhood.41 Quinsac doubts Illica’s translated the poem, since he is
unfamiliar with Indian language, suggesting that Illica is interpreting a
Cinquecento translation of the poem from a Dante scholar with familiarity
of the Indian philosophy and religion.42 Segantini is aware of Illica’s

assumed translation as recorded in a letter to Alberto Grubicy.43
Illica’s poem, Nirvana, contains the phrase “mala madre” or bad (evil)
mother. The entire poem reads:
Over there, in infinite blue space—Nirvana irradiates!—

Over there, behind the icy mountain and gray skyline—shines Nirvana!
Over there, everything is blue, is eternal, is laughter, is musical—is like
Nirvana!
Over there, the great hope that humans adhere, —is where is Nirvana!
And who suffered and sinned has peace and oblivion—such is Nirvana,
Oh, human is this Faith that forgets—and that forgives!—
Even the one that has sinned, partakes of the sweetness—ray of Light,
Of Nature must suffer the torments—and with Her laments.
The things similar to human are tears—and are at fault.
So is the Bad Mother in a purple downstream—in eternal icebergs
Where not even a green branch or blooming flower—turns driven.
There was no laughter, not a single kiss for your son—oh vain mother?
None of your kisses from your soul germinate, oh vain mother?
In this manner the silence torments you—beats and pushes
Frozen grub with the eyes’ tears—created by icebergs!
See Her! Exhaustedly wondering—like a leaf! …
And around her pain all is silent; —things are silenced.
Or there outside of the livid valley—trees appear!—
There each branch recalls a strong soul—what a pity and love;
And the silence is conquered and humane—a voice says:—
Come! Come to me , oh Mother! Come and offer me—the breast, life.
Come, Mother . . . I forgive you! . . . The ghostly image—at the sweet cry
She flies disinterested and gives at the shaky branch—the breast and soul.
—
Oh, marvel!—Observe! The branch trembles!—the branch has life!
Here! Is the face of a child, who sucks the breast—with eagerness and
kisses it!—
Then son and mother leave the grayish tree—falling in an enthralling …
Up there Nirvana radiates! Up there the son—with human delight
Forgives his Mother … The mountains encroach—the two ghostly images!
…
Encroach is the anxiety in the clouds and fly—where is Nirvana.—
Oh, human is this Faith that forgets—and that forgives.44
The Nirvana cycle consists of two types of themes, The Punishment of Lust
(Le lussiorose, Figs. 24-6 to 24-8) and the Evil (Bad) Mothers (Le cattive
madri, Figs. 24-9 – 24-10).45 In the Nirvana cycle, Segantini is also
inspired by the philosophical writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-
1860) on Indian religion and culture, as well as Friedrick Nietzsche, in

particular the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra of 1883, where the
German philosopher analyzes the three evils in nature: sex, lust and
selfishness.46 Another major source of influence for Segantini’s cycle is the
social condition on maternity and orphanages in Milan at the time. Judith
Meighan, in “In Praise of Motherhood: The Promise and Failure of
Painting for Social Reform in Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy,” explains
how “legal, social, and cultural constraints on motherhood in Italy
[particularly in Milan], produced a crisis of infant abandonment in the
middle years of the nineteenth century.”47 Her study is based on sociologist
David I. Kertzer’s Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and
the Politics of Reproductive Control, where he reports, “In Milan in 1875,
16 percent of all births were considered illegitimate and 91 percent of these
children went to the foundling home.”48
Familiar with the socio-eco-political climate of his time, Segantini
expresses his perception about motherhood as well providing a moral
resolution to the social condition in the painted cycles of the Angel of Life
and the Nirvana versions. As a Divisionist painter, Segantini unifies three
stylistic components in the Nirvana cycle: glacial landscapes, ghostly
female creatures, and bare frosty trees. While as an Italian Symbolist artist,
he depicts the beauty of nature in art, associating the aesthetic principle of
beauty with the ethical principle of forgiveness. Segantini’s symbolism
consists of the harmony of topographical landscapes and archetypal
figures, which together suggest the abstract idea of nature and fertility, thus
connecting love with life and motherhood. He dramatizes these aesthetic
quests in depicting symbolic landscape, where natural love is contrasted
with unnatural love, fertility with infertility, fruitful with fruitless. Thus, the
visualization of these conceits are at two levels: natural as portrayed in the
seasonal scenes of spring and winter, and metaphysical as implied in the
allusion of good versus evil or life versus death.
In contrast, in his Nirvana cycle, Segantini depicts the spiritual
significance and necessity for individuals to love nature along with their
transgressions in nature. Employing natural forms such as landscapes, trees
and human shapes, he unveils his symbolic paradox about women, which
conforms with nineteenth-century culture where women can be good or
evil. This notion recalls the paradox of Eva-Ave, a Biblical manifestation
of the relation between Eve and the Virgin Mary, or the nineteen-century
absurd image of femme fatale and Virgin Mary.49 In Idols of Perversity, for
example, Bram Dijkstra examines the symbolism of a tree in connection to
good and evil as well as its association to a human form, a man or a
woman. During the nineteen century, then, the symbolism of the tree is
simultaneously a phallus and a womb in connection to man and woman.
The tree symbolizes “static, immobile and cannot evolve but only grow in
size” representing manhood in its primeval state, while the bound-earth
quality of tree, alludes to passivity and static mental energy in
womanhood.50 Dijkstra notes “women’s relation to nature is as the tree’s
relationship to the soil in which it grows.”51 This notion is based on the
writings of Émile Zola’s The Sin of Father Mouret (1874), where Albine is
associated with nature, in particular with a bouquet of flowers, a colossal
tree and vegetation.52 In Zola’s novel, the colossal tree symbolizes fertility
and primal sexual excitement; it is associated with the tree of sensual
knowledge, an archetypal form for the tree of Paradise. For Zola, a
woman’s desire (Albine) to be part of a tree reveals her wish to be
impregnated or fertilized, her urge for physical pleasure.53
Paradoxically, in classical mythology, the virginal Daphne wishes to be
transformed into a laurel tree to avoid Apollo’s sexual advances (Ovid’s
Metamorphoses 1:452-54), thus symbolizing the triumph of chastity over
lust. But the opposite is recounted in Myrrha’s saga, where she hides in a
tree during her gestation, wanting to conceive the incestuous result with her
father, Cinyras. Hence, the myrrh tree is associated with the birth of
Adonis (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10:503-14), thus symbolizing the victory of
lust over chastity. Nineteenth-century Symbolist painters vacillate between
these types of associations of a woman and a tree: on the one hand, the
connection is spiritual; on the other hand, it is corporeal, as seen in the
paintings of John William Waterhouse’s Apollo and Daphne of 1908, in a
private collection in London, and Edward Burne-Jones’ The Tree of
Forgiveness of 1882, at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool.
In contrast, Segantini fuses symbolism with spiritualism in the Nirvana
cycle. The Punishment of Lust is part of a group of paintings depicted
between 1891 and 1896 on the theme of bad mothers (cattive madri). This
negative theme contrasts with the positive theme of good mother, portrayed
in the paintings of The Angel of Life and The Fruit of Life. Moreover, in
the Nirvana cycle, Segantini is inspired by a Buddhist poem, “Nirvana.”
Buddhism becomes a fashionable philosophy in Germany and Italy in the
late nineteenth century through the philosophical writings of
Schopenhauer. This philosopher supposes that emotional, physical and
sexual desires are never fulfilled, and so he opts to negate these human
desires, thus paralleling the philosophy of Buddhism, where in the state of
Nirvana, the individual does not need fulfillment.
The poem “Nirvana” contains the phrase “mala madre” or bad mother.
In part, it reads:
So is the Bad Mother in a purple downstream—in eternal icebergs

Where not even a green branch or blooming flower—turns driven.
There was no laughter, not a single kiss for your son—oh vain mother?
None of your kisses from your soul germinate, oh vain mother?
This type of mother is one who rejects motherhood, either out of lust or
selfishness, and is forced after her death to wonder in arid, wintry
landscapes. This type of woman is tortured by remorse of childlessness and
seeks forgiveness through a mythical unborn child or children, and once
reunited with them, she achieves the state of Nirvana. The poem
“Nirvana” also alludes to a moral renewal: the bad mother eventually will
acquire her natural instinct and life in her will blossom again. Segantini
visualizes this passage as a child nurses from a mother’s exposed breast.
Because her long tresses are entangled with the dry branches of a tree, the
mother, unable to escape, transforms, accepting and enjoying the bliss of
nurturing her child.54 The mother’s hair and veil are intertwined and
twisted around a tree’s bare branches and dry trunk. In some imagery,
Segantini depicts floating women in windy and icy fields, where their hair
is caught in decayed tree branches. He parallels the fate of a bad mother
with a lifeless, bare tree. But according to the cycle of the seasons or
nature, the tree will bloom in springtime, and the floating mother will
repent and will miraculously become fruitful again. Segantini moralizes
and provides hope and redemption for motherless or bad mothers. They are
guilty in the eyes of natural law or natural justice, but forgiven in the state
of Nirvana as the Buddhist poem proclaims and as Segantini portrays them.
Segantini becomes enamored with the romantic translation of
“Nirvana.” He depicts the spirits of the women floating in vast spaces of
snowy and icy landscapes in the Maloja mountains in the Alpine region.
For Segantini, the beauty of the Alpine landscape reveals how physically
and metaphysically the individual may apprehend nature with all its
capriciousness, magnitude and vicissitude. The vastness of the space, the
atmospheric quality of the sky, and the luminous reflection of the wintry
light all combine to produce a spiritual heaven for Segantini, as to say
before he dies, “I want to see my mountains.”
In both Punishment of Lust I and II and the Evil Mothers I and II (Figs.
24-6 to 24-10). the Alpine setting with the visual simplicity unites the
various stages of the expiation experience by the women. The spirits of
women who commit the sin of abortion willfully or unintentionally, those
who are barren or who neglect their children, and those who are bad, mean
or selfish mothers, float in mid-air in snowy waste. Their bodies allude to a

physical reality, like the icy mountains, but their self-propelled suspension
attest to their insubstantial reality or spiritual vacuum.
Fig. 24-6. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust I, 1891.
Fig. 24-7. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust I, 1891, drawing.

In a September 26, 1893 response to a cablegram from the Walter Art

Gallery in Liverpool, Segantini writes about the nature of the subject of the
painting, The Punishment of Lust (Luxury, signed and dated on the lower
right as “G. Segantini 1891” [Fig. 24-6]).55
Your offer accepted wishing that my picture “Punishment of Luxury”

could be part of that Distinguished Gallery. I suppose that the copyright
shall have to have the purpose of a speculation, and in consideration to this
I accepted the offer. The subject is not taken from any book, not is any of
my works, but has been created to symbolize part of a Buddhist conception
from Nirvana, and the truth of this is that at first I gave to my picture the
title of “Nirvana.”
Awaiting to hear from you, I remain yours, most faithful, G. Segantini.56
A drawing accompanies this painting (now at the Neue Gallery

Stallsberg, Fig. 24-7). In both painting and drawing, the somnambulist
women drift toward the center of the icy landscape. This depiction alludes
to their semiconscious state or dream like status where detachment from
reality provides comfort. From the mountains, other floating women are
approaching the center of the picture. Unfruitful trees with dead branches
balance the composition of the two central figures. Their long stringy hair
parallels the thin and brittle branches of the dead trees, while the reclined
and curved shape of their body recalls the formation of the Alpine
mountains. Partially clothed and revealing their breast, these figures glide
without any specific direction. Segantini pairs and juxtaposes these floating
women evoking a rotary movement with their stances as well as devising a
vortex. The vacuum of the whirlpool motion produces a state of
unconsciousness and a relief from remorse and accusations of vanity.
In 1897, Segantini repeats the composition, changing the time of day,
focusing on the early evening, where the colors of muted purples and blues
convey the austerity of the wintry season. In this later composition,
Segantini balances the design by grouping the wondering women on the
left, leaving an open desolate space in the center, and grouping sterile trees
and branches on the right. Quinsac claims that the depiction of the
landscape is imaginary, accompanying the choral grouping of floating
women, on the left, while clusters of branchless trees reflect similar ghostly
shadows in the icy field, on the right.57 This phantasmagoria version of The
Punishment of Lust II is at the Kunsthaus in Zurich (Fig. 24-8).
Fig. 24-8. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust II, 1896-1897.
The second group of images connected with the Nirvana cycle is the
Evil (Bad or Wicked) Mothers I and II (Fig. 24-9 – 24-10).58 The first
version dates to 1894 at the Osterrrisches Galerie in Vienna (Fig. 24-9),
and the second is painted in 1897, now located at the Kunsthaus in Zurich
(Fig. 24-10). As in the Punishment series, the major difference in the Evil
Mothers’ versions is the coloration. The later version of the Evil Mothers
focuses on an evening wintry scene, with bluish and purplish tones tinting
the entire composition. In the later version of 1897 (Fig. 24-10), a group of
evil mothers cluster around a barren tree. They are desirous of being
nursed by the forgotten child, as the bad mother tied up at the unfruitful
tree reveals. In the earlier version of the Evil Mothers (Fig. 24-9),
Segantini reflects on the floating women imagery, as a group of bad
mothers emerge from the icy Alpine mountains. However, on the right side
of the composition, a bad mother’s body and hair are twisted around a
barren tree. Her floating hair and transparent clothing parallel the
substance and composition of the tree’s branches. A young child adheres to
her breast in need of nursing and nurturing. The mother’s expression
demotes a paradoxical state of pleasure and disdain. The coloration of this
composition is a luminous white as a result of the reflection of an early
morning light. By contrast, the coloration of reddish and brownish
tonalities in the woman’s hair and garment as well as on the tree trunk
punctuates the vast icy panoramic landscape.
Fig. 24-9. Giovanni Segantini, Evil Mothers I, 1894.
Fig. 24-10. Giovanni Segantini, Evil Mothers II, 1896-1987.
In the Evil Mothers I (Fig. 24-9), Segantini confronts the dilemma of

love and life for both mother and child, e.g., the sudden appearance of the
child, desirous of nutrients in the icy wasteland, and the entrapment of the
mother by the winter wind, intertwining her hair and veil with the tree’s
thorny branches and trunk, restores love and life to both human beings. For
the mother, the child’s behavior is an indication of forgiveness and for the
child, the mother’s conduct is a physical and a psychological fulfillment.
Evoking the Buddhist poem, as well as his own child dilemma, Segantini
obtains redemption for the mother, elevating her to Nirvana, and for the
child or himself an understanding of the cycle of nature.
Segantini depicts the apprehensive state of the Evil Mothers,
contrasting it with the loving and serene condition of the Angel of Life
(Figs. 24-1 and 24-9). With the Nirvana and Angel of Life cycles, he
continues to emphasize the fin-de-siècle.59 Symbolist’s dichotomy between
a holy mother and a fallen woman as well as his personal wonderment of
motherhood and its sanctity, perhaps, at once, understanding, accepting
and forgiving the death of his mother at his tender age. In the Angel of Life
cycles and the Nirvana versions, Segantini spiritually and visually
manifests his quest for maternal love as he attempts to comprehend through
art the love for nature and beauty. In his words:
I lived a long time with the lilies, animals, in order, to understand their
passions, pains and happiness; I studied man and the human soul; I
observed the rocks, snows, glaciers, chains of mountains, threads of grass
and rivers; and I searched in my soul for an answer: “what was the thought
behind all these things?” I asked a flower, “what is universal beauty?” And
the flower answered me, while perfuming my soul, “Love.”60
Fig. 24-1. Giovanni Segantini, The Angel of Life, 1894, The Galleria
d’Arte Moderna, Milan.
Fig. 24-2. Giovanni Segantini, The Fruit of Life, 1889, Museum der
bildenden Künste, Leipzig.
Fig. 24-3. Cavalier Cesare d’Arpino, Madonna of the Tree, 1590, The
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
Fig. 24-4. Giovanni Segantini, The Two Mothers, 1889, Galleria d’Arte
Moderna, Milan.
Fig. 24-5. Giovanni Segantini, Ave Maria at the Crossing, 1886.

Fischbacher Foundation, San Gallen.
Fig. 24-6. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust I, 1891. Walker

Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Fig. 24-7. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust I, 1891, drawing.

Private Collection, Washington, DC.
Fig. 24-8. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust II, 1896-1897.

Kunsthaus, Zurich.
Fig. 24-9. Giovanni Segantini, Evil Mothers I, 1894, Kunsthistorisches

Museum, Vienna.
Fig. 24-10. Giovanni Segantini, Evil Mothers II, 1896-1987, Kunsthaus,

Zurich.
Notes
1
A version of this essay was presented at the International Conference on
Symbolism: Its Origins and Its Consequences, April 22-25, 2009, University of
Illinois at Allerton Park, Monticello, Illinois. I offer my gratitude to the organizers
of the conference, Prof. Rosina Neginsky, University Scholar, Department of
Interdisciplinary Studies and Literature, University of Illinois, and Prof. Deborah
Cibelli, Art Historian, Department of Art, Nicholls State University.
See Liana Cheney, “Giovanni Segantini’s Fantasy of Love,” in The Journal of
the Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 5 (November 1984): 49-55; Vivien Greene’s
“Divisionism’s Symbolist Accent,” in Radical Light: Italia’s Divisionist Painters,
1891-1910, ed. Simoneta Fanquelli, et al. (London: Yale University Press, 2008),
47-59; and Michelle Facos, Symbolists in Context (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2009), 115-27.
2
The Angel of Life of 1894, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, is part of the
first section of this cycle along with a group of drawings. Composed between 1894
and 1897, the drawings are executed in different media: 1) oil on paper, signed at
lower left as “G. Segantini,” no date, at the Szepmüvézeti Múseum in Budapest.
Segantini presents the drawing with an elaborate frame for his patron Leopoldo
Albini; 2) a charcoal, with red gesso and colored pencil on cardboard, signed on
lower right as “G. Segantini,” no date, but with a dedicatory to “All’amico William
Ritter/ Il suo Segantini Spirituale” (To William Ritter/His Spiritual Friend
Segantini) at the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen; 3) a precious pencil on paper
drawing with highlights in gold leaf of 1896 at the Museo Segantini in St. Moritz;
and 4) an unfinished sketch is signed as “G. Segantini,” while dated “VIII, 1898,”
with illegible notations such as “patito,” “benedendo,” and “le marchie del riposo”
(“suffering,” blessings,” and “the mark of rest”). See Annie-Paule Quinsac,
Segantini (Milan: Electa, 1982), 2:466, 474-475. It is important to note that most
of these drawings are also entitled Dea madre (Divine Mother), Dea cristiana
(Christian Divinity), Maternità (Maternity) or Madonna col Bambino (Virgin with
Child).
The second section of this cycle also consists of drawings and a painting, The
Fruit of Life, signed and dated in the lower right of the canvas as “G. Segantini,
1889,” located at Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig. An elaborated
arboreal framed encases the painting. Segantini provides a new title as well,
Fridello or Fridellino, an Italian version of Fratello (Brother) or Fratelllino (Little
Brother). Segantini composes several pencil drawings: 1) on brown paper, at the
National Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide (1899); 2) on reddish paper,
signed and dated “G. Segantini 1892,” originally in Grubicy’s Gallery; and 3) a
pastel drawing in a private collection. Segantini also suggests for these imagery
alternative titles, such as Da un fiore dell Alpi (A flower from the Alps), Fiore
dell’Alpe (Flower of the Alp) and Bonheur maternel (Maternal Bliss). See
Quinsac, Segantini, 2:463-65
3
The Nirvana cycle includes The Punishment of Lust I, an oil on canvas, signed
and dated on the lower right as “G. Segantini 1891,” at the Walker Art Gallery in
Liverpool, with a corresponding pencil drawing of 1895, signed in the lower right
as “G. Segantini,” no date, located in a private collection in Washington, DC. In
1896, this drawing is exhibited with the title of Fantasia notturna (Nocturne
Fantasy) at the Festa dell’ Arte e dei Fiori in Florence. See Quinsac, Segantini,
2:477-78. The other pendant is The Punishing of Lust II of 1896-1897, an oil on
blue cardboard, signed in the lower right as “G. Segantini,” no date, at the
Kunsthaus in Zurich. It is important to note that Segantini’s Italian titles for these
imagery ranges from Il castigo delle lussuriose (The Punishment of Lustfulness),
Le lussoriose (Lustfulness), Prima del Nirvana (Before Nirvana) to Nirvana
(Nirvana).
The second group of the Nirvana cycle portrays an imagery of evil motherhood.
Also for these paintings, Segantini provides several titles, including Le cattive
madri (The Evil Mothers or Wicked Mothers or Bad Mothers) or Les mères
denaturéers (Perverted or Unnatural Mothers). Segantini’s Evil Mothers I is a
painting in oils and canvas, signed and dated “G. Segantini 1894,” now at the
Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. A pencil drawing of 1895 is also exhibited
as a Fantasia notturna (Nocture Fantasy) at the Festa dell’ Arte e dei Fiori in
Florence in 1986. The location of this drawing is at present unknown. See Quinsac,
Segantini, 2:485. The second version, The Evil Mothers II of 1896-1987, is a
cardboard drawing in oil, signed in the lower right “G. Segantini,” no date, at the
Kunsthaus in Zurich.
4
Other paintings from the Nirvana cycle are The Agony of Comala, a charcoal
drawing on paper, signed and dated in the lower right as “G. Segantini 1895” is in
collection of Elio Dragoni in Milan. See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:511. The other
work is Vanity: The Source of Evil, signed and dated in the center of the painting,
“G. S. Maloja 1897, in a private collection in Milan. Several titles refer to this
painting, including La fonte del male (The Fountain of Evil), Venere allo specchio
(Venus at the Mirror) and erroneously labeled Vanità e invidia (Vanity and Envy),
See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:500. A drawing of 1898 on gray paper with white gesso
is signed three times as “G. Segantini” on the left of drawing, “GS” on the lower
right, and “G. Segantini” in the center of the drawing. Quinsac suggests that this
drawing might have been composed after the completion of the painting. See
Quinsac, Segantini, 2:502.
5
The correspondence between Segantini and Grubicy is extensive. See Annie-
Paule Quinsac, La peinture divisioniste italienne: origins et premiers
developpements (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972); Annie-Paule Quinsac, Segantini:
Trent’anni di vita artistica europea nei carteggi inediti dell’artista e dei suo
mecenati (Lecco: Cattaneo Editore, 1985); Annie-Paule Quinsac, Segantini: la
vita, la natura, la more. Disegni e dipinti (Milan: Skira, 1999); Primo Levi, “Il
primo e il secondo Segantini,” in Rivista d’Italia (Rome, 1899), nn. 11 and 12,
reprinted in Società Editrice Dante Alighieri (Rome, 1900); Franz Servaes,
Giovanni Segantini (Vienna: Gerlach, 1902); for an extensive publication of the
correspondence between Grubicy and Segantini; and Anna Maria Damigello, “Il
simbolismo italiano: cultura euroepa e identittà nazionale,” in Geneviève
Lacambre, ed., Il symbolism: da Moreau a Gaugin a Klimt (Ferrara: Ferrara Arte,
2007), 53, for an analysis of Grubicy’s concept of luminosity in Divisionism.
6
See Simonetta Fraquelli, “Italian Divisionism and Its Legacy,” in Radical Light
(London: Yale University Press, 2008), 11-20.
7
See S. Asciamprener, ed. Gaetano Previati: Lettere al fratello (Milan: Hoepli,
1946), 94-95, where he praises Segantini’s artistic power of evocation in stating,
“how he elicit in us impressions experienced through the light.”
8
I use the term personification (figurazione) here as described in Cesare Ripa,
Iconologia (Rome: Giovanni Gigliotti, 1593), preface (proemio). Reprinted in
Zurich by George Olms Verlag in 1984.
9
See Maria Teresa Benedetti, Simbolismo (Milan: Giunti, 1997), 45-47, and
Damigello, “Il simbolismo italiano: cultura euroepa e identittà nazionale,” 51-62.
10
See C. G. Jung, Aspects of the Masculine, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989), 9-23.
11
See Gabriella Belli e Annie-Paule Quinsac, Segantini: La vita, la natura, la
morte (Milan: Skira, 1999), 17. Segantini’s delivery is also problematic for his
mother as the medical register indicates with the Latin notation, “ob periculum
vitae” (“ob=obstetrics, dangerous childbirth”).
12
See Belli and Quinsac, Segantini, 17 and 27.
13
See Jung, Aspects of the Masculine, 25-36.
14
See Greene, “Divisionism’s Symbolist Ascent,” 47-48, and Judith Meighan, “In
Praise of Motherhood: The Promise and Failure of Painting for Social Reform in
Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy,” in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Journal of
Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Spring 2002), passim.
15
See Facos, Symbolist Art In Context, 39-62, for a discussion on the artistic and
literary precursors of the Symbolist movement.
16
See Hippolyte Taine, Philosophy of Art, trans. John Durand (New York: Henry
Holt, 1971-1888), Chapter on Imitation.
17
In Segantini’s words: “per far sentire tutta la dolcezza dell’amore materno e
l’idealismo della materinita dipinse Il Frutto dell’ Amore e L’Angelo della Vita”
(for people to feel all the sweetness of mother’s love and the idealism of
motherhood, I painted Il Frutto dell’ Amore and L’Angelo della Vita), see Luciano
Budigna, Giovanni Segantini (Milan: Bramante Editrice, 1962), 87.
18
See Greene, “Divisionism’s Symbolist Ascent,” 49.
19
See Michael T. H. Sadler, trans. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual
Art (New York: MFA Publications, 2001), Introduction.
20
See Greene, “Divisionism’s Symbolist Ascent,” 49. Tumiati is the founder of the
journal Il Marzocco. Like the Cronica d’Arte, these journals expounded the
theoretical views of the Divisionism and Italian Symbolist artists and literati.
21
See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:466.
22
It is interesting that Segantini reminiscences about the birth of his child since at
the time of the completion of the painting Gottardo was twelve years of age.
23
See Tom Chetwynd, Dictionary of Symbols (London: Aquarian Press, 1982),
404-406, for the symbolism of the tree, and H. Zimmer, Myths and Symbolism in
Indian Art and Civilization (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962), 67-70,
for concept on tree and earth symbolism.
24
See Chetwynd, Dictionary of Symbols, 404.
25
For Jung, the tree is often a symbol of personality, “a prototype of the self, a
symbol of the goal of the individuation process.” See Jung, Aspects of the
Masculine, 150.
26
See undated letter to Soisson, cited in Budigna, Segantini, 100.
27
See Chetwynd, Dictionary of Symbols, 404.
28
See note 2 for all the versions.
29
See Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the
Meanings Behind Them (New York: Meridian Books, 1994), 351.
30
See Jung, Aspects of the Masculine, 151.
31
See Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism), 350-51; James Hall, Dictionary of
Subjects and Symbols (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974), 307. The
representation of the Tree of Jesse is based upon the prophecy of Isaiah 11:1-2:
And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch
shall grow out of his roots: and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him:
the sprit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and fortitude,
the spirit of knowledge, and of the fear of the Lord.
32
See Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrandt, A Dictionary of Symbols (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994), 1026-33.
33
See Jung, Aspects of Masculinity, 152, citing Eulogius of Alexandria Theatrum
chemicum, IV (1659), 500 and 478: “Christ who is the tree of life both spiritual
and bodily.”
34
See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:466, for other images traditionally associated with
Mary on a tree, e.g., Petrus Christus, Our Lad of the Dry Tree of 1450 at the
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
35
See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:462-65. She provides an extensive discussion on the
correspondence between Segantini and Grubicy regarding this painting. See also
note 2 for the several drawings connected with this painting.
36
See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:462. She argues for an explanation of the awkward
size relation between mother and child, suggesting for the influence of the
composition Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck of 1535 at the Galleria
degli Uffizi. The Mannerist painting does not seem a direct influence for
Segantini’s imagery; instead, in viewing the pyramidal composition and the
landscape setting a closer connection are found in the Venetian images of
Madonna and Child depicted by Giovanni Bellini, e.g., Madonna of the Meadow
of 1505, at the National Gallery of Art in London, or the traditional lamentation
scene of Madonna and Child, e.g., Michelangelo’s Pieta of 1489, at the Vatican.
37
The Milanese painter, a follower of Leonardo da Vinci, depicts a loving
Madonna nursing Christ, who rests on a green pillow on a window’s beam. Behind
the holy pair, an open window shows an extended meadow, containing a large
blooming tree. The cypress tree seals the scene and functions as an honorific
symbol of a cloth of honor as well as a religious symbol of eternal life. The
painting is signed on the lower right as “Andrea de Solario, fa.” See Chetwynd,
Dictionary of Symbols, 404-406, for the symbolism of the tree.
38
See Giovanni Pascoli: Poesie, ed. Luigi Baldacci (Milan: Gazanti, 1974), 560-
61.
39
See Liana De Girolami Cheney, “The Fair Lady and the Virgin in Pre-Raphaelite
Art: The Evolution of a Societal Myth,” in Liana De Girolami Cheney, ed., Pre-
Raphaelitism and Medievalism in the Arts (New York/London: The Edwin Mellen
Press, 1992), 242-80; Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 995-96; Greene, “Divisionism’s Symbolist Ascent,” 14;
and Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art In Context (Berkeley, CA: The University of
California Press, 2009), 115-44.
40
See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:476-95; Simon Houfe, Fin de Siècle: The Illustrations
of the Nineties (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1992), 83-112; and Shearer West, Fin
de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: The Overlook
Press, 1994), 1-15.
41
See Quinsac, Segantini, 52; Teresa Fiori and Fortunato Bellonzi, Segantini
(Milan: Electa, 1968), 339; and for the poem, see Annie-Paule Quinsac, Segantini
(Lecco: Cattaneo Editore, 1985), 346-48.
42
See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:476. She also discusses how Schopenhauer’s writings
and associations with the Symbolist encourage the significance of being connected
with Indian religions and culture, thus Illica’s action.
43
44
Luigi Illica’s Nirvana poem originally in Italian. English translation is my own.
Là su, nel l’infinito spazio ceruloe, - Nirvana irradia! –
Là, dietro e li aspri monti e a blaze grigie, - splende Nirvana! –
Là tutto è azzurro, è eterno, è riso, è cantico! – È la Nirvana! –
Là le gran spemi de li umani adergono, - dove è Nirvana –
e chi soffrì e peccò ha pace e oblio. – Tale è Nirvana,
Oh, umana questa Fede che dimentica -–e che perdona! –
Pur chi ha peccato, pria di quell dolcissimo –riso di Luce,
De la Natura dee soffir le angosce – e con Lei piangere.

Le cose a guisa degli umani han lacrime –ed hanno colpe.
Così la Mala Madre in vallea livida – per giacchi eterni
Dove non ramo inverda o fiore boccia – gira sospinta
Non ebbe un riso, un sol bacio il tuo figio, –o invano madre?
Non diè germogli di tuoi baci l’anima, – o invano madre?
Così te la tormenta del silenzio – mena e sospinge
Gelida larva con nel i occhi lacrime – fatte di giaccio!
Vedetela! Affannosamente vagola – come un foglia!...
E intorno al suo dolor tutto è silenzio; – taccion le cose.
Or ecco fiori della vallela livida – appaion alberi! –
Là da ogni ramo chiama forte un’anima– che pena ed ama;
Ed il silenzio è vinto e la umanissima –voce che dice: –
Vieni! A me vieni, o madre! Vieni e porgimi – il sen, la vita.
Vien madre! . . . Ho perdonato! . . . La fantasima – al dolce grido
Vola disiosa e porge al ramo tremolo – il seno, l‘anima. –
Oh, portento! – Guardate! Il ramo palpita! – il ramo ha vita!
Ecco! È il viso d’un bimbo, e il seno succhia – avido e bacia! –
Poi bimo e madre il grigio albero lascia – cadere avvinti...
Là su Nirvana irradia! Là su il figlio – con secco tragge
la perdonata Madre . . . I monti varcano – le due fantasime!...
Varcan l’angoscia de le nubi e volano – dove è Nirvana. –
Oh, umana queste fede che dimentica – e che perdona.
45
See note 2 for a list of accompanying drawings to the Nirvana cycle; and
Quinsac, Segantini, 2:476-85, for analysis of the paintings.
46
See Friedrick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Lampert, Laurence, in
Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), Chapter 3. See also, Facos, Symbolist Art In
Context, 52-53. In several letters (December 25, 1898 and January 5, 1899) to
Alberto Grubicy, Segantini discusses his illustration for Nietzsche’s book. See
Quinsac, Segantini (1895), 563 and 567.
47
See Meighan, “In Praise of Motherhood,” section on Realities of Motherhood,
n.p.n.: “The children of unwed mothers accounted only for 40 percent of 5,5000
babies who entered the Milan foundling home in the 1860s; the other 60 percent
came from the living couples in legal Catholic marriages.” See also, West, Fin de
Siècle, 98-99, for a view on the phenomenon of infanticide, given women’s
maternal instinct, according to criminologists of the time, such as Muzio Pazzi,
Professor at the University of Bologna.
48
See David I. Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the
Politics of Reproductive Control (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993), 77-81.
49
See H. Diane Russell, Eva/Ave (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art,
1990), 13-25, and Giuliana Pieri, The Influence of Re-Raphaelitism on fin de siècle
Italy: Art, Beauty and Culture (London: Maney Publishing, 2007), 5-21.
50
See Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 995-96.
51
Ibid., 96.
52
Ibid,, 56-57.
53
See Ibid., 96, referring to Zola’s parallelism of Albine and a tree, in The Sin of
Father Mouret.
54
See Greene, “Divisionism’s Symbolist Ascent,” 50, for an unusual view of
breast-feeding as a sado-masochistic action, “The child’s almost vampiric suckling
appears to send the woman in a state of ecstasy.” In contrast, Meighan repots that
“lactant mothers experience an angelic bliss when he child suckles the breast” in
“In Praise of Motherhood,” nn. 82, citing Pompeo Bettini, “Gli idealisti: Butti e
Previati,” in La cronaca dell’esposizione, no. 5 (21 May 1891), 36
55
Alberto Grubicy, son of the art critic Vittorio Grubicy, probably translated the
letter erroneously confusing the Italian word “lussuria” or “lust” with “luxury.”
See Quinsac, Segantini, 2:476-81.
56
See Quinsac, Segantini (1985), 747.
57
58
Ibid., 2:482-85.
59
See Simonetta Fraquelli, “Notes on Artists and Paintings,” in Radical Light,
164.
60
See Claudio Treves, Catalogo delle opere esposted in Giovanni Segantini
(Milan: nn, 1899), 21.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
VITTORIO PICA, ART CRITIC
AND AMATEUR D’ESTAMPES
DAVIDE LACAGNINA
The name Vittorio Pica (1862-1930) is not new to American readers. In

1910 James Gibbons Huneker (1860-1921), a music composer and critic
for the Music Courier and New York Sun who was educated in Europe as
a musician and then based in New York, published a novel, Promenades of
an Impressionist, a selection of profiles dedicated to a variety of old
masters and modern artists—from El Greco and Velázquez to Cézanne and
Manet, from Botticelli, Piranesi and Watteau to the strictly understood
impressionists Monet, Renoir and Degas—grouped together with fin-de-
siècle taste. It’s no surprise then to find the second chapter of Huneker’s
book dedicated to “Rops, the etcher,” “a man of genius, one of the greatest
etchers and lithographers of his century, an artist with an intense personal
line, a colossal workman and versatile inventor.” At the end of his
analysis, the author gives detailed reference to “the triumphant chorus of
Rops’s admirers” that “comprises—the authors continues—the most
critical names in France and Italy.”1
Among the prestigious names of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Emile Verhaeren,
Stéphane Mallarmé, Octave Mirbeau and Charles Baudelaire, the only
Italian mentioned by Huneker is Vittorio Pica. This shows not only Pica’s
interest in Symbolist graphics but also the international reputation the
Italian critic could count on in his epoch. A reputation which does
however find difficulty in being unanimously accepted nowadays. As a
matter of fact, although Pica’s merits have been already recognized as
translator, critic and supporter of French symbolist Literature—and it is
again in the United States that Pica was acknowledged as the “first
champion of French symbolism in Italy”2— his monumental production of
art criticism is still not well known and little investigated, especially if we
consider the wide spectrum of interests cultivated by the Italian author.
Pica was among the first in Europe to open to the Scandinavian countries,
for example, and was certainly the first in Italy to show an interest in
456 Chapter Twenty-Five
Japanese art or primitive sculpture and to the most diverse ambits of

creative intervention such as art editing, industrial and decorative arts,
graphics, architecture, performing arts and photography.
Born in Naples of an English mother and an Italian politician who was
exiled in the United Kingdom and soon after the Unification of Italy
named senator of the Reign, young Vittorio devoted himself to literary and
art criticism, writing for many different magazines in Italy, Germany,
France, England, Spain and even Portugal, since his university years at the
Faculty of Law in Naples.3 At the end of the nineteenth century he
collaborated in founding the Italian art magazine Emporium, which was
modeled on the English The Studio. In the last three decades of his life, his
commitment to art became exclusive. He was appointed vice-secretary of
the Venice Biennale for two editions (1912-1914) and after the war, full-
secretary for four editions (1920-1926). After his refusal to accept in
Venice the artists of the “Novecento Italiano” Group, lead by the art critic
Margherita Sarfatti, Pica was forced to resign from the secretariat of the
Biennale in 1927. He was replaced by Antonio Maraini, artist and critic
welcomed by Mussolini. A fact that is not only evidence of Italian fascist
cultural policy, but also a clear disclaiming of Pica’s reputation, that may
explain, at least in part, his lack of critical consideration so far. After
Pica’s death, Maraini refused to acquire the author’s personal library and
papers for the Biennale Archives. Consequently it is extremely difficult
today to reconstruct the extraordinary net of contacts kept by Pica during
his life, developed through leading figures of the artistic and literary
Symbolist milieu around the world, from Fernand Khnopff to Maurice
Denis, from Maurice Barres to Emile Verhaeren, from Felix Fénéon to
André Fontainas, from the Portuguese Eugenio de Castro to the
Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Just such a brief list of names confirms Pica
in the role of a privileged spectator of his time, undoubtedly a protagonist,
both social and intellectual, of that cultural context.4
However, as well as many other critics interested in Symbolism and
only recently returned to art criticism historiography through a new
generation of scholars,5 Pica’s fortune also suffered from that modernist
orientation of art criticism that never wanted to make rebates to its own
“mythography of modern art,” according to which any genealogy was to
be included in that particular evolutionary line—Impressionism-Cézanne-
Cubism—that has long prevailed over all other critical approach to modern
art historiography. The result was that Pica has been ignored both by the
scholarship interested in vanguards, or at least in the modernist vision of
them, which considered him too old-fashioned and backward-looking
(denying, as a consequence, the important inheritance of Symbolism in
Vittorio Pica, Art Critic and Amateur d’estampes 457
vanguard movements), and by reactionary criticism as well. In this last

case, too, colleagues looked on him suspiciously as at a “xenophile”
intellectual, little motivated to promote Italian art within the country and
abroad and too attracted by foreign “macabre” artists (as Italian critics
referred sometimes to Symbolist artists) or by those artisti d’eccezione, as
Pica used to call Les Nabis, post-impressionists, japonistes, secessionists,
idealists and “decorative artists” he so liked.
Of course, the lack of interest in Pica’s writings was directly
proportional to the scarce fortune these artists had in Italy until a few years
ago. After Roberto Longhi—perhaps one of the most influent of art
historians in Italy of the twentieth century—judged Pica as “a writer
mentally confused by decadent fumes,” you couldn’t gain a serious
reputation as a scholar, if you decided to study fin-de-siècle art,6 and not
just for the devaluation of Pica itself, but for the anathema cast against the
decadent movement. Although we may agree with Longhi, in front of
Pica’s embarrassing misunderstanding of fauve painting and other most
“extreme” presences on display at the Salon d’Automne of Paris in 1905,
we can hardly fail to recognize how coherent, in taste and critical
discourse, were the choices proposed in Pica’s book and so firmly
reproached by Longhi: the synthétiste line, the à plat brushwork, the
informal and pulsing abstraction of late Monet, the intellectualism of the
most properly Symbolist research by Gauguin, Denis, Roussel, Vuillard
and Bonnard. Longhi would have rather assured his sympathies to Seurat,
Signac, and Cézanne, since they were officially regarded as the most
immediate and accredited precedents of Cubism, that is to say the
vanguard movement par excellence (according at least to that genealogic
direct line recalled above).
As examples of Pica’s interests in European Symbolist drawings and
graphics, we can focus on a couple of articles published in Emporium in
the special section Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle (Sensazioni d’arte)
[Through the albums and the folders (Art sensations)].7 Pica presented the
artists he most appreciated by publishing their works in illustrated art
volumes he himself conceived, projected, and then took care for, as editor,
to the very last detail—a formula that was always extremely refined from
an editorial and graphic design point of view, in the layout of the pages,
the frontispieces and the illustrations, in order to make the books more
appealing to the editorial market, improve distribution and educate the
general public’s taste in art. Graphic design was considered the most
modern artistic form available through wide-scale circulation of
magazines, posters, public advertisements and illustrated printed books. A
more conscious critical approach to Pica’s editorial work should be carried
out by investigating connections, divergences and “short-circuits” between

words and images, both as an occasion for narrative accounts (description)
and theoretical concerns (interpretation) for the images and as an
opportunity to build a visual-literary discourse conducted simultaneously
on multiple levels of media communication.8
The very first article Pica published in 1896 in the section Attraverso
gli Albi e le Cartelle was dedicated to Redon, Rops, De Groux and Goya.
The introduction immediately creates the “sensations” evocated in the title
of the section and also clarifies the Italian critic’s approach to the work of
art, in some sort of religious isolation and concentration (windows and
doors closed, soft lights, silence), in which the interpretation was to be
strictly personal. The author describes a condition of “pathological
cerebral apathy,” a “bothersome state of mind,” against which the sole
solution seems “to exile oneself from the real world and to travel into the
hyperbolic fantastic worlds, taking as guides the genial masters of the
pencil and burin.” It’s no surprise then to find that the first examples refer
to the album of lithographs dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe by Odilon Redon
(1840-1916), “the vigorous drawer who, in a series of abstruse and
suggestive lithographs, succeeded in framing the most terrific hallucinations
of a brain exalted by typhus and opium.”9 Although in such an approach
the limit of Nordau’s and Lombroso’s theories on degeneration as creative
condition of modern art (or at least of that specific “degenerated”
declination otherwise classified as “decadent”), is quite evident, Pica starts
describing the six compositions in the album, soon giving up any previous
key of analysis. He quotes Jules Destrée’s catalogue of Redon’s
lithographic work,10 but he prefers his own free interpretation and
translates images in a very personal way. He asks himself:
Has the drawer meant to give form to the anguished nothingness of the
facts of our earth, so gloomy and vacuous, to men’s constant and yet vain
aspiration to explain the supreme problem of all philosophies, by looking at
the infinite, and the atrophy, the degeneration, the agony of the thought in
such hopeless research? Maybe! But why wanting to find an explication at
any cost? Isn’t it the character typical of the most really and highly
suggestive works of art to offer the most diverse interpretations, and isn’t it
in this that their most fascinating aspect lies?11
Pica had the chance to see works by Odilon Redon in 1895 at the first
edition of the Venice Biennale, where the French artist presented two
paintings.12 Pica felt Redon particularly close to his sensibility and
considered its production in line with those principles of artistic and
literary poetics of decadent address that in the overspill of the respective
linguistic registers was fed by a continuous exchange between word and

image, between the capacity of the text to collect and amplify the
suggestions arising from the experience of the vision and the power of the
artistic form, in its turn, to condense in the space of the artwork the endless
imaginative drifts of literature. In spite of the tradition of European
Naturalism of Pica’s former education—he himself was in contact with
Emile Zola—he soon after matured a special interest in Symbolist poetics
between the 1880s and the 1890s. In those years he discovered Huysmans
and the codification of an aesthetics in which art, literature and life could
be—or rather, should, by historical necessity and programmatic
declaration—live on the same poetic and existential horizon.
After the failure of the poetics of Naturalism, the generation of
intellectuals to which Pica belonged found itself forced to come to terms
with the causes of such failure. Through the exploration of the recesses of
the unconscious, and then trying to give meaning to the painful
experiences of reality, each boundary between subject and object was
deleted and a confrontation with the world became the symbolic
instrument of an existential condition of languor and longing for new
forms of expression. The sequence of the images that illustrate the article
clearly shows Pica’s attitude towards the printed paper and the poetics that
inspired his selection of artists. The choice to publish some of Redon’s
illustrations for Baudelaire’s Fleures du mal soon after those dedicated to
Poe further clarify the meaning of the intellectual correspondences
constantly researched between text and image.13
The work of Odilon Redon, with its complicated symbolism, while trying
to express both the deep poverty of human clay and the avid inspiration of
the spirit towards the Ideal, uses unexpected but always logical
deformations of the truth and amazing creations of monsters, which touch
on the grotesque and often risk seeming childish, it appears, as a whole, far
from any tradition and any common vision of art. It won’t seem so strange
then if I flatly affirm not only that it cannot be tasted at first, but also that it
is not even intended to collect the suffrage of a rather small array of these
refined spirits, who find a singular pleasure in being employees of the
artist, to discover and supplement his thin, sibylline and quite unusual
conceptions.14
Fig. 25-1. Odilon Redon, Pégase captif.

The first picture published just next to the frontispiece, on the left, was the
lithograph of the Pégase captif (Fig. 25-1), a work that Pica himself
conserved in his art collection (and not by chance then put in such a
prominent position). We find it also reproduced in the auction catalogue
with which Pica’s widow, Anna Marazzani, sold part of his collection after
his death. It is not an isolated case. According to the catalogue, Pica’s
collection of graphics could count at least on two other pieces by Redon:
Serpent-Auréole (Fig. 25-2), a lithograph produced in 50 exemplars, and
Lumière (Fig. 25-3), another lithograph in 50 exemplars signed with the
artist’s initials. Both works were published in the article of 1896.15 By
following such criteria, it is easy to discover that many of the works
published by Pica in his articles, especially in the ones dedicated to
graphics in Emporium, under the section Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle,
were his own property, in many cases gifts received by the artists
themselves or acquired through the most prestigious art merchants of the
epoch specializing in the field (as the Maison Sagot-Legarrec in Paris),
bought at international exhibitions or interchanged with other collectors
and amateurs (with the other Italian art critic Ugo Ojetti, for instance).16
Going further into the article of 1896, the paragraphs dedicated to
Félicien Rops (1833-1898) clearly specify the literary sources of Pica’s
cultural intentions. Once all the necessary distinctions had been made, he
tries to establish a parallelism between Redon and Rops, stressing their
vocation as poets-painters, as
they belong to the interesting family of those artists, who, operating an

artistic transfer, try to evocate literary emotions by drawing or, vice versa,
as Gautier and the Goncourt brothers did, to awake pictorial impressions
through the written word. The old academics judge that this overspill
between the arts is a sign of decadence, and that may be, but what an
extraordinary emotional intensity is reached by such decadents!17
If Poe was the most proper reference for Redon, Baudelaire and Barbey
d’Aurevilly are now the right ones for Rops. The artist had worked for
both authors. He illustrated Les épaves by Baudelaire (the Belgian edition
of the sonnets censored in the first French version of Les fleurs du mal)
and Les diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly (Fig. 25-4),
with his skilful burin he has done something very similar, in its deepest
inspiration, to what the two masters did with their pens, synthesizing with
rare mastery their satanic spirit in some etchings that are for sure among
18
their best ones.
Fig. 25-2. Odilon Redon, Serpent-auréole.

In order to stress such a textual-visual equivalence, Pica focuses his

attention on some frontispieces from his own collection ideated by Rops—
Le vice suprême (Fig. 25-5), Curieuse and L’initiation sentimentale—for
the homonymous novels by Joséphin Péladan. Their detailed descriptions
are full of literary references and erudite quotations as well as statements
taken from the private communications of the same painter. Pica must had
been in contact with Rops, but what is noteworthy is that again the Italian
critic’s interests as a collector determine his choices and in this case far
before the public acknowledgment of the Belgian artist in Italy. As a
matter of fact, we have to wait until 1907 to see Rops invited to the Venice
Biennale (and again in 1909) and, it easy to imagine, thanks only to Pica’s
intervention.19 Again his passion for collecting is evident. In the article he
claims to possess more than fifty works by Rops; he regrets missing the
purchase of the two albums with Cent légers croquis pour réjouir les
honnêtes gentes (1877-1880) for sale at the Hôtel Drouot, and he also
spends some words on that minor production of stationery—visiting or
invitation cards, ex-libris, headed notepaper and posters—as well as on the
less known graphic works dedicated to rural subjects. The frontispieces of
Péladan’s books above mentioned belonged to Pica, and this is why we
find them exposed at the Biennale—Le vice suprême, for instance in
1909—as well as being in his private collection. This is the case of L’oncle
Claes et la tante Johanna quoted and reproduced in his article of 1896 and
yet present in the Toscanini auction catalogue of 1931.20
Among the many other examples we can choose from—Bernard, De
Groux, Ensor, Khnopff, Munch, Toorop, Valloton—quite a remarkable
case study is offered by Pica’s interest in August Rodin’s graphic
production. Pica was one of the first few critics of the epoch, and certainly
the only Italian, who paid special attention to the artist’s drawings as well
as to his plastic works. He aimed to establish a relation between the two
forms in order to better interpret Rodin’s works in marble, bronze or
plaster which were—also in this case—not immediately readable by the
general public and, as we know, misunderstood and rejected even by most
art professionals from a strictly academic background. The occasion was
given by one of the last articles published in the section Attraverso gli Albi
e le Cartelle and dedicated to the drawings of three sculptors: the Italian
Vincenzo Gemito (1852-1929), the Belgian Constantin Meunier (1831-
1905), and the French Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).
Looking at the drawings by Auguste Rodin, more than the ones by

Carpeaux and Barye, it is evident that they are and cannot but be carried
out by a sculptor.
Fig. 25-3. Odilon Redon, Lumière.
It follows that their value is mainly documentary and evocative.

Documentary, because they help us penetrate deeper in the inner
psychological expansion of the creative genius of their author. Suggestive,
because their remarkable merit is to let us see, behind I do not know what
mysterious veil, what of new, of sharp and profound lies in the grace of the
rhythmic dynamics of their arabesques, which, while expressing, with

harsh synthesis, the fundamental line of a human, divine or bestial figure,
fixes its immediacy of movement and expression.21
The dynamic line of Rodin’s drawings, like the plastic movement of his
sculptures, is all read and interpreted in a psychological-existential sense.
According to Pica, the value of the French artist lies in his capacity to give
the truth of an expression, the very immediate perception of reality
through the shaping of the pulsing, living, matter, personally experienced
and “felt” both physically—in the act of modeling or operating plaster,
bronze or marble—and intellectually, by giving form to human soul-states.
The practice of drawing itself and the exemplars published, especially the
pen-drawings (Fig. 25-7), were meant then as documents of such
inexorable creative vital impulse. The intimate correspondence between
drawing and sculpture—“the graphic work by Rodin, certainly less varied,
but no less abundant, was held synchronously with his sculptural work”—
is clearly affirmed by Pica more than once in the article.22
The documents that remain of Pica’s private collection register twelve
drawings signed by the artist himself, a dry-point, the Printemps, that we
see published in the reissue of the same article in the fourth volume of the
second edition of the collection Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle and also
on the cover page of the Toscanini auction catalogue (Fig. 25-6), and an
etching with the portrait of Antonin Proust, with a personal dedication by
the artist.23 As seen before with Redon, it is possible that the drawings Pica
used for the layout of his article of 1916 (four of which were
“unpublished” according to the caption [Fig. 25-8-10]), were the same
ones listed in the catalogue of the first auction sale held at the Casa
d’Artisti in Milan. Pica probably visited the exhibition of Rodin’s
drawings on display between October and November 1908 at the Maison
Devambez, an important printer’s firm established in 1826 in Passage des
Panoramas in Paris. The catalogue was prefaced by Louis Vauxcelles, an
art critic unfairly known more for his scorn for French vanguards rather
than for his merits as a sensitive interpreter of symbolist art.24 The
presence of two etchings, Le circle and Victor Hugo, at the Venice
Biennale the following year must be put in strict relation with the Parisian
exhibition at Devambez’s.25
The facts analyzed so far show Pica’s modus operandi. He used to
gather first-hand information directly from the artists he was in contact
with. He discussed and agreed with them over the selection of the works
and asked them for images of high quality resolution to be published in his
articles. Moreover, crossing the dates of Pica’s articles and the acquisitions
made by Italian museums, we can hardly fail to notice the extraordinary
Fig. 25-4. Félicien Rops, illustrations for Le bonheur dans le crime (left below)
and the book Les diaboliques (right above) by Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly.
Fig. 25-5. Félicien Rops, illustration for the novel Le vice suprême by Joséphin
Péladan.
timeliness of Pica’s suggestions, as if he were acting more as an art dealer

than as an art critic, sponsoring or assuming the responsibility of the
purchases. Beside his interests as a collector, we should not forget that
Pica was also responsible for the sales department of the Venice Biennale
in 1912 and in 1914.26
On the other hand, Pica’s constant effort to promote the purchase of
modern art through the major public collections in Italy (Venice, Rome,
but also the famous Artists’ Self-portraits Gallery of the Uffizi, in
Florence, by encouraging donations from the artists themselves) finds a
concrete counterpart in the broad information given on international
artists, little or not known in Italy, through widely distributed press. If a
personal economical interest cannot be excluded in promoting the artists
he himself collected, the tone of his articles and the many pictures of
himself leafing through his beloved albums and folders of graphic works
in his studios of Naples and Milan27 document unequivocally his
unconditioned passion in spite of any commercial implication. Actually, it
is only after his death that his young widow, Anna Marazzani, decided to
sell her husband’s art collections along with his personal library privately,
through the Casa d’Artisti and the Toscanini auction house of Milan. It
was sad proof that Pica wasn’t a wealthy man in life or at least not enough
for his fortune survive him, if his wife was compelled to act as she did,
especially after the resolute refusal of the Biennale to buy his library or to
assign a life annuity to the widow.28
Despite the blindness of Maraini, the openings that Pica so boldly
marked seem indisputable at a closer look, especially when we consider
the renewal of taste for art criticism and for the practice of art itself within
that Symbolist milieu so important to better comprehend the birth of
vanguards in Italy. It is only thanks to Pica that a new generation of Italian
artists was able to reach an international visual heritage as never before.
More punctual comparative textual analysis, between the artists
reproduced by Pica in his articles and contemporary artistic research in
Italy, could give really impressive results in documenting which were the
visual sources many artists adopted for their own works. Anticipating the
results of research still in course, I can only say that you would be
surprised to discover the important role played by the graphic works of
authors like Munch or the more unexpected Spanish Hermén Anglada in
the pre-futurist debut of Boccioni, both as a visual artist and an art critic.29
Considering all this, Vittorio Pica’s merits are countless. Think for
example of the exhibition of African sculpture he organized at the Venice
Biennale in 1922 in order to educate the Italian public about cubist and
futurist primitivism.30 That’s why he can’t really be dismissed, as he has
been until now (sometimes too hurriedly), because of an ideological and

meta-historical misunderstanding of vanguard values—these values being
abstract, too—intended as a parameter of distinction between good art and
bad art and, as a consequence, between good art criticism and bad art
criticism. The general audience of collectors and art lovers, but also the so-
called art professionals, is so evidently in debt with Pica to make seem
suspicious that conspiracy of silence which has undervalued his incidence
so far. As a matter of fact, Pica didn’t waive dogmas or precepts meant to
be good for any occasion. He didn’t want to systemize his thoughts within
a rigid theoretical set, but just to express more “modest” personal opinions,
meditated and proposed to his “beloved readers”—as he often referred to
his faithful admirers—with all honesty and limits of his intellectual vanity.
Fig. 25-6. Auguste Rodin, Printemps.

Fig. 25-7. Auguste Rodin, studies.

Fig. 25-8. Auguste Rodin, studies for female nudes in different poses.
Fig. 25-1. Odilon Redon, Pégase captif. Lithograph published in Vittorio
Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops -
De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 122.
Fig. 25-2. Odilon Redon, Serpent-auréole. Lithograph published in

Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon
- Rops - De Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 126.
Fig. 25-3. Odilon Redon, Lumière. Lithograph (published in Vittorio Pica,

“Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De
Groux - Goya”, Emporium III (1896): 125.
Fig. 25-4. Félicien Rops, illustrations for the tale Le bonheur dans le crime
(left below) and the book Les diaboliques (right above) by Jules-Amédée
Barbey d’Aurevilly. Etchings published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli
albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”,
Emporium III (1896): 130.
Fig. 25-5. Félicien Rops, illustration for the novel Le vice suprême by
Joséphin Péladan. Etching published in Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e
le cartelle (sensazioni d'arte). I. Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya”,
Emporium III (1896): 128.
Fig. 25-6. Auguste Rodin, Printemps. Dry-point published on the cover

page of Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica. Eaux-fortes, Pointes
Sèches, Vernis Mous, Lithographies des Grands Maîtres du XIXème Siècle
(Milano, Antiquariato W. Toscanini, 9 december 1931).
Fig. 25-7. Auguste Rodin, studies. Pen-drawings published in Vittorio

Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni. Gemito - Meunier - Rodin”,
Emporium XLIII (1916): 402.
drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni.
Gemito - Meunier - Rodin”, Emporium XLIII (1916): 419.
drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni.
Pen-drawings published in Vittorio Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni.
Notes

1
James Jibbons Hunecker, Promenades of an Impressionist (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 33
2
Olga Ragusa, “Vittorio Pica: First Champion of French Symbolism in Italy,”
Italica 35 (1958): 255-61. On Pica, critic and translator of French symbolist
literature, see also Luciano Erba, presentation to Vittorio Pica, Letteratura
d’eccezione, ed. Ernesto Citro (Genova: Costa & Nolan, 1987): 5-10 and the most
recent Shirley W. Vinall, “French Symbolism and Italian Poetry: 1880-1920,” in
Patrick McGuinness, ed., Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin the Siècle: French
and European Perspectives (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000): 244-263;
Nicola D’Antuono, Vittorio Pica: Un visionario tra Napoli e l’Europa (Roma:
Carocci, 2002); Vittorio Pica, “Votre fidèle ami de Naples,” Lettere a Edmond de
Goncourt (1881-1896), ed. Nunzio Ruggiero (Napoli: Guida, 2004) and
Alessandro Gaudio, La sinistra estrema dell’arte: Vittorio Pica alle origini
dell’estetismo in Italia (Rome: Vecchiarelli Editore, 2006). On Pica’s personality
as art critic see Anna Cambedda, “L’informazione sull’arte straniera” in Italia
nella critica di Vittorio Pica, ed. Gianna Piantoni, Roma 1911 (Roma: De Luca
editori d’arte, 1980): 89-96 and Davide Lacagnina, “Votre œuvre si originale et si
puissante. Vittorio Pica scrive a Joaquín Sorolla,” Materia, 5 (2005): 69-89;
Lacagnina, “Avanguardia, identità nazionale e tradizione del moderno: Ignacio
Zuloaga e la critica italiana (a partire da due articoli di Vittorio Pica),” in Giorgio
Bacci, Massimo Ferretti and Miriam Fileti Mazza, ed., Emporium. Parole e figure
tra il 1895 e il 1964 (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2009), 403-33; Lacagnina, “Le
penombre di un giardino spagnolo. Vittorio Pica i la fortuna de Santiago Rusiñol a
Itàlia,” in Vinyet Panyella, ed., Santiago Rusiñol, del Modernisme al Noucentisme
(Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans-Societat Catalana de Llengua i Literatura,
2010): in press.
3
Pica’s bibliography, still incomplete, can be rebuilt (to the extent of what is
known) by crossing the titles recollected under the voice “Vittorio Pica” by Sergio
Samek Lodovici, Storici, teorici e critici delle arti figurative d’Italia dal 1800 al
1940 (Rome: Tosi, 1946): 284-7, and those published in Mariantonietta Picone
Petrusa, ed., Il manifesto. Arte e comunicazione nelle origini della pubblicità
(Naples: Liguori, 1994): 145-59 (with a complete register of all articles Pica
published in Emporium), in Nicola D’Antuono, Vittorio Pica: 175-200 and, for any
title until 1898, by Alessandro Gaudio, La sinistra estrema dell’arte: 141-160.
4
On Maraini’s refusal see Giuliana Donzello, Arte e collezionismo. Fradeletto e
Pica segretari alle Biennali veneziane 1895-1926 (Firenze: Firenze Libri, 1987),

57-61. The disputes related to the participation of the “Novecento Italiano” Group
in the Venice Biennale exhibitions in the ‘20s are reported in Leonardo
Dudreville’s manuscript published by Rossana Bossaglia, Il “Novecento italiano”.
Storia, documenti, iconografia (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1979), 65-77.
5
See for instance the most recent Françoise Lucbert, Entre le voir et le dire. La
critique d'art des écrivains dans la presse symboliste en France de 1882 à 1906
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), Catherine Méneux, ed., Regards
de critiques d'art. Autour de Roger Marx (1859-1913) (Rennes: Presses
universitaires de Rennes [Paris]: Institut national d'histoire de l'art, 2009) and the
forthcoming proceedings of the international colloquium Gustave Kahn (1859-
1936). Ecrivain symboliste et critique d'art (Paris, Musée d’art et d’histoire du
Judaïsme, 22-23 November 2006).
6
Roberto Longhi, “L’Impressionismo e il gusto degli italiani,” preface to John
Rewald, Storia dell’Impressionismo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1949), xx, now also in
Roberto Longhi, Scritti sull’Otto e Novecento: 1925-1956 (Firenze: Sansoni,
1984), 15. The Italian art historian referred to Vittorio Pica, Gl’impressionisti
francesi (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1908), that, in spite of all
limits Longhi pointed out, had the merit of popularizing the subject for the first
time in Italy with extraordinary visual documentation, at least one illustration per
page, and even before the otherwise well-known exhibits of impressionist painting
of Florence (Prima Mostra Italiana dell'Impressionismo, 1910) and Venice (XII
Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia, 1920). On the reception
of Impressionism in Italy see Maria Mimita Lamberti, “Vittorio Pica e
l’Impressionismo in Italia,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe
di Lettere e Filosofia, 5 (1975): 1149-1201; Flavio Fergonzi, “Firenze 1910-
Venezia 1920: Emilio Cecchi, i quadri francesi e le difficoltà
dell’impressionismo,” Bollettino d’arte 79 (1993): 1-26; Jean-François Rodriguez,
La réception de l’Impressionnisme à Florence en 1910 (Venezia: Istituto Veneto di
Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 1994) and the most recent Francesca Bardazzi, ed.,
Cézanne a Firenze. Due collezionisti e la mostra dell’Impressionismo del 1910
(Milano: Electa, 2007). For the reception of Symbolism in Italy, we have to wait
until Barilli’s studies in the late 1960s—Renato Barilli, ed., Soggettività e
oggettività del linguaggio simbolista (Milano: Fabbri, 1967)—and Damigella’s
contribution in the early 1980s—Anna Maria Damigella, La pittura simbolista in
Italia 1885-1900 (Torino: Einaudi, 1981)—to attest to a more mature critical
appraisal.
7
All articles by Pica appearing in this section were recollected in four different
volumes with the same title and published in two prestigious editions: Vittorio
Pica, Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle (Sensazioni d’arte) (Bergamo: Istituto
Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1901-1904, 1st edition, and 1904-1921, 2nd edition).
8
It would be unfair to forget the names of the artists that helped Pica to build his
monumental editorial work, by mentioning at least the names of Alfredo Baruffi,
Benvenuto Disertori and especially Alberto Martini, whose signatures often occur
in the covers, in the frames, in the initials of his books and even in the decoration
of his private papers (letters, invitations, visiting cards). On the relation Pica-

Martini see Marco Lorandi, ed., Un'affettuosa stretta di mano. L'epistolario di
Vittorio Pica ad Alberto Martini (Monza: Viennepierre Edizioni, 1994). As
evidence of Pica’s pre-eminent interest in graphics, even his last most important
publication, before his death, was dedicated to the subject: Vittorio Pica and
Aniceto del Massa, Atlas de la gravure moderne (Firenze: Rinascimento del libro,
1928).
9
Vittorio Pica, “Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (sensazioni d’arte). I. Redon - Rops
- De Groux - Goya,” Emporium III (1896): 123. All translations into English are
mine.
L’unico rimedio contro questo fastidioso stato dello spirito, contro questa
patologica apatia celebrale è di esiliarsi dal mondo reale e di viaggiare
negli iperbolici mondi fantastici, prendendo per guida i geniali maestri
della matita e del bulino. . . . Odilon Redon, il vigoroso disegnatore che in
una serie di astruse e suggestive litografie, ha saputo fermare le più
terrifiche allucinazioni di un cervello esaltato dal tifo e dall’oppio.
10
Jules Destrée, L’œuvre lithographique de Odilon Redon (Bruxelles: Deman,
1891).
11
Pica, “Redon - Rops - De Groux – Goya,” 123-4.
Ha inteso il disegnatore indicare il nulla angoscioso delle cose sulla nostra
terra, così tristemente tetra e vacua, l’aspirazione perenne e pur tanto vana
dell’uomo ad esplicare il supremo problema delle filosofie ed a guardare
nell’infinito, e l’atrofia, la degenerazione, l’agonia del pensiero in tale
ricerca senza speme? Forse! Perché volere ad ogni costo una precisa
esplicazione? Non è proprio il carattere delle opere veramente ed altamente
suggestive, di prestarsi alle più svariate intepretazioni, e non istà proprio in
ciò il loro fascino maggiore?
12
Actually Pica had already dedicated an article to Redon the year before. Vittorio
Pica, “Odilon Redon,” La Riforma, October 8, 1894.
13
Pica, “Redon - Rops - De Groux – Goya,” 124.
14
Ibid., 126-7.
L’opera di Odilon Redon, col suo complicato simbolismo, che ad
esprimere nell’istesso tempo la profonda miseria della creta umana e
l’avida ispirazione dello spirito verso l’Ideale, ricorre ad impensate ma
sempre logiche deformazioni del vero e ad incredibili creazioni di mostri,
sfiorando a volte il grottesco e minacciando sovente di cadere nel puerile,
appare, nel suo complesso, lontana da ogni tradizione e da ogni abituale
visione d’arte. Non sembrerà quindi strano che io recisamente affermi, che
essa non soltanto non può venire gustata di primo acchito, ma è addirittura
destinata a non raccogliere che il suffragio di un’assai minuscola schiera di
quegli spiriti raffinati, i quali trovano un singolare diletto a farsi i
collaboratori dell’artista, a scovrirne ed a completarne le concezioni sottili,
sibilline ed affatto fuori dal commune.
15
Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica. Eaux-fortes, Pointes Sèches, Vernis
Mous, Lithographies des Grands Maîtres du XIXème Siècle, Auction Catalogue
(Milano, Antiquariato W. Toscanini, december 9, 1931): items 542-4 and

illustration XV. Another exemplar of the lithograph Lumière of 1893 is to be
identified with that one entitled Luce on display at the Venice Biennale in 1920 in
the French Section (XII Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della città di Venezia.
Catalogo [Venezia: C. Ferrari, 1920]: 126, item 83) and bought for its collection of
graphics by The International Modern Art Gallery of Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (Flavia
Scotton, ed., Venezia. Ca’ Pesaro. Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna. I
disegni e le stampe. Catalogo generale [Venezia: Musei Civici Veneziani, 2002]:
106, item 2596).
16
See for instance the letters exchanged with the Maison Sagot-Legarrec (Paris,
Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, archives 86, box 96: Italie/Pica, Vittorio [Naples]) or
the ones addressed to Ugo Ojetti (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna,
Archivio storico, Fondo Ugo Ojetti, cassetta 58/5, I-II). Both funds, as far as Pica
is concerned, are being edited in the widest context of a study I’m conducting on
him.
17
Pica, “Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya,” 127.
Appartengono all’interessante famiglia di quegli artisti che, operando una
trasposizione d’arte, sforzansi di suscitare emozioni letterarie attraverso il
disegno o, viceversa, così come hanno fatto Gautier ed i fratelli Goncourt,
di risvegliare impressioni pittoriche con la parola scritta. I parrucconi
sentenziano severamente che questo sconfinare di un’arte in un’altra attesti
decadenza, e sia pure, ma quale straordinaria intensità emozionale
raggiungono codesti decadenti!
18
Ibid., 127-8.
Col suo sapiente bulino ha fatto opera assai somigliante, come intima
ispirazione, a quella fatta dai due maestri della penna, dei quali egli ha, con
rara maestria, sintetizzato lo spirito satanico in alcune stupende acqueforti
che sono certo tra le sue migliori.
19
Pica’s official involvement within the structure of the Biennale dates back only
to 1912. Nevertheless, it is certain that Pica is constantly monitoring the event in
the chronicles for Emporium and other national newspapers that he began
immediately to recollect in volumes of large distribution and commercial success,
first for the publisher Pierro of Naples and then (1899-1907) for the Istituto
Italiano di Arti Grafiche of Bergamo: Vittorio Pica, L’Arte Europea a Venezia
(Napoli: Pierro, 1896); L’Arte Mondiale a Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di
Arti Grafiche, 1897); L’Arte Mondiale alla III Esposizione di Venezia (Bergamo:
Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1899); L’Arte Mondiale alla IV Esposizione di
Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1901); L’Arte Mondiale alla
V Esposizione di Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche, 1903);
L’Arte Mondiale a Venezia nel 1905 (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano di Arti Grafiche,
1905); L’Arte Mondiale alla VII Esposizione di Venezia (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano
di Arti Grafiche, 1907). However, in some of the choices made by the artistic
direction of the Biennale, the imprint of Pica, or, if nothing else, its indirect
influence, can be recognized in the display of a special section of Japanese art for
the second edition in 1897, or in attention paid to graphics, especially from
northern Europe, with the two exhibitions of Dutch etchings, in 1895 and in 1897,

curated by Philip Zilcken. In 1907 the committee appointed by the Municipality of
Venice for the purchases at the Biennale suggested buying some etchings by Rops:
“Relazioni delle commissioni per gli acquisti al Sindaco di Venezia, 1907,” in
Catalogo della Galleria internazionale d’arte moderna della città di Venezia
(Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Arti Grafiche, 1913): 18-20. Members of the
committee were Davide Calandra, Pietro Fragiacomo, Gaetano Moretti, Ettore Tito
and Giovanni Tesorone.
20
Pica, “Redon - Rops - De Groux - Goya,” 129 and 131 (illustration right below)
and Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica, item 549.
21
Pica, “I disegni di tre scultori moderni. Gemito - Meunier – Rodin,” Emporium
XLIII (1916), 419.
Dai disegni, invece, di Auguste Rodin, come e più ancora che da quelli di
Carpeaux e del Barye, evidente appare che essi sono e che non possono
essere che di uno scultore. // Ne consegue che il loro valore è sopra tutto
documentario e suggestivo. Documentario, perché giovano a farci
penetrare assai oltre nell’intima elaborazione psicologica del genio creativo
del loro autore. Suggestivo, perché il singolare pregio ne risiede non meno
in quanto lasciano scorgere, dietro non so dire quale velo misterioso, di
nuovo di sottile e di profondo che nella grazia ritmica e dinamica dei loro
arabeschi, i quali, mentre esprimono, con efficace sintesi, la linea
fondamentale di una figura divina umana o belluina che sia, ne fissano la
istantaneità del movimento e dell’espressione.
22
Pica, “Gemito - Meunier – Rodin,” 421. “Ebbene l’opera grafica del Rodin, certo
meno varia ma non meno abbondante, si è svolta sincrona all’opera sua scultorea.”
On the parallelism between Rodin and Bergson’s theory of the élan vital see Luca
Quattrocchi, “Rodin e Bergson: tra materia e memoria,” This Century’s Review 1
(2006), http://www.thiscenturyreview.com/article.html?&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[t
t_news]=33&tx_ttnews[backPid]=17&cHash=4a3f1af97e.
23
The twelve drawings are documented in Collezione Vittorio Pica, Auction
Catalogue (Milano, Casa d’Artisti, 4-16 marzo 1931), items 39-50; the dry-point
and the etching in Catalogue de la Collection Vittorio Pica, items 546-7. The text
of the article by Pica, “Gemito - Meunier - Rodin” was republished under the same
title in Pica, Attraverso gli Albi e le Cartelle (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti
Grafiche, 1904-1921): 4:129-66.
24
Exposition de dessins d'Auguste Rodin (Paris: Chez Devambez, October 19 –
November 5, 1908), preface by Louis Vauxcelles. See, on him, Lorenzo Giusti,
“Louis Vauxcelles e la genesi del fauvismo,” Ricerche di storia dell'arte 81
(2003): 5-22.
25
VIII Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia. Catalogo illustrato
(Venezia: Ferrari, 1909): 150, items 97-98.
26
See, for instance, Italy’s purchasing of Rodin’s works. Pica was a member of the
committee appointed by the Municipality of Venice that proposed the purchase of
Les bourgeois de Calais in 1901: see “Relazioni delle commissioni per gli acquisti
al Sindaco di Venezia, 1901,” in Catalogo della Galleria internazionale d’arte
moderna della città di Venezia, 11-4. Many of Pica’s suggestions to Antonio

Fradeletto, secretary of the first Venice Biennales, about the artists to invite and the
works to buy, are documented by Paola Zatti, “Le prime Biennali veneziane (1895-
1912): il contributo di Vittorio Pica,” Venezia Arti 7 (1993): 111-6. On Le penseur,
bought in 1907 by Count Grimani and donated to Ca’ Pesaro, see Alessandro
Stella, Cronistoria della Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia
1895-1912 (Venezia: Fabris, s.d.), 88. L’homme qui marche, exposed at the
International Art Exhibition of Rome in 1911, where Pica was the curator of the
foreign sections, was bought by a group of amateurs and then donated to the
French government that assigned it to its own diplomatic seat in Rome at Palazzo
Farnese. The statue was removed from the palace courtyard in 1923 and transferred
to the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Lyon and then (1986) to the Musée d’Orsay (RF
4094). See Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “L’Età del Bronzo, 1877,” in Ibid.,
ed., Rodin e l’Italia (Rome: De Luca, 2001). 48. It is still in Rome that the
exemplar n. 22 of the fortunate series of L’âge d’airain was bought for the
collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. About Rodin’s
reception in Italy see also Flavio Fergonzi, “Auguste Rodin e gli scultori italiani
(1889-1915). 1,” Prospettiva 89-90 (1998): 40-73 and Fergonzi, “Auguste Rodin e
gli scultori italiani (1889-1915). 2,” Prospettiva 95-96 (1999): 24-50.
27
See the photo-portraits of Pica published in the obituary signed by Raffaele
Calzini, “In memoriam: Vittorio Pica,” Emporium 71 (1930): 259-66.
28
Soon after Pica’s death, his widow addressed some letters to the Ojetti asking for
help in this sense (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Archivio storico,
Fondo Ugo Ojetti, cassetta 58/5, II).
29
The importance of Anglada as a possible visual source for Boccioni’s work
before his adhesion to Futurism was first proposed by Maria Mimita Lamberti,
“Vittorio Pica e l’Impressionismo in Italia,” 1181. Regarding the influences
derived from Munch, see the latest considerations by Ilaria Schiaffini, Umberto
Boccioni. Stati d’animo. Teoria e pittura (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale,
2002): 128 and 151, note 52.
30
Carlo Anti and Aldobrandino Mochi, “Mostra di scultura negra,” in XIII
Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia. Catalogo (Milano:
Bestetti & Tumminelli, 1922): 41-44.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ANGELO CONTI AS THE RUSKIN

AND PATER OF ITALY:
PROMOTER AND ELUCIDATOR OF SYMBOLISM
ANNA MAZZANTI
Not less than in other countries, Symbolism in Italy is based on a

complex environment, on the intermingling of ideas and art criticism,
music, philosophy, literature, photographic experimentation and
architecture. Angelo Conti (Fig. 26-1a-b), writer and art theorist, who
adopted the penname 'Doctor Mysticus,' became the leading spirit of this
movement in Italy. My aim is to show to what extent Symbolism was
fostered in Italy from his thought, to explore his role in the movement
described by Segantini at the end of his short life as Naturalismo
simbolista (realistic Symbolism).
Although a medical student, Conti (born in Rome in 1860) had, by
1885, been writing for five years for art periodicals in Rome. A brilliant
and difficult young man, he was passionate about experimental music and
fascinated by Schopenhauer. He had laid hold of the German original of
The World as Will and Representation, before his friend Gabriele
D’Annunzio presented him with the French translation when it appeared in
1886.1 At this time his aesthetic ideas were reaching maturity.
The artist expresses the shared identity of man and nature: only the artist
has the ability to see that there is always one and always the same power
revealed within us as thought, externalized as color and form. Byron wrote
that High mountains are a feeling, and Amiel that a landscape is a state of
the soul.
And again, Shelley clearly felt the identity between man and nature,
and saw thought diffused, moving the smallest particles in this immense
universe. He, before any other modern artist, revealed the soul of things.
482 Chapter Twenty-Six
Fig. 26-1a. Mario de Maria, photograph portrait of Angelo Conti, about 1886.
Angelo Conti as the Ruskin and Pater of Italy 483

Fig. 26-1b. Mario de Maria, photograph portrait of Angelo Conti at the Ca’ d’Oro
(?) in Venice, 1896 Rome.
These references were used by Conti to summarize his own position in the
pages of the Tribuna in February 1889.2 Here he gives the artist Mario de
Maria (known as Marius pictor) unreserved praise: “he knows how to look
at and to admire the great paintings [of the past] just as he now knows how
to see and reproduce the soul of things”: almost a reincarnation of Shelley!
Conti particularly admired the painting Moonlight. Tables at an inn at
Prati di Castello (Fig. 26-2), a small landscape celebrated for its symbolic
energy, largely generated by the ambiguous light, which suggests neither
day nor night. Conti described it as a cerebral light, inspired by Rembrandt
(whom Redon also admired), while the deciphering of events reminds us
of the vivid narratives of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly. As a matter of fact, the
painting was known to have been the scene of a murder: the suffocating
atmosphere is charged with the violence of the event, and death has left in
its wake a brooding silence. It calls to mind “the intimate state of silence”3
that follows a musical performance, music being a predominant theme in
the Symbolist world. It is also a theme voiced in Conti’s earliest articles
and in his first treatise on aesthetics, his Giorgione of 1898, and it persists
in his essay Beata Riva.4 Music “tends to free itself from symbols,” or
rather is “removed from causality and has an invisible symbol that
awakens the heart, and disperses.”5 Pure art, therefore. Moreover, even
Odilon Redon asserted that “the most moving art is music, unrestrained,
radiant, and exultant,” because of its power to elevate “thoughts to
dreams.”6 This, as Angelo Conti was quick to perceive, touched the heart
of the Symbolist quest.
Conti described Mario de Maria as a ‘musical painter.’ Referring to
Book III of the first volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and
Representation, the silences depicted in de Maria’s landscapes (Fig. 26-3)
are material representations of the ideal of art: “tone and form are
structured like harmony and dissonance in the great sea of symphonic
conception.”

Fig. 26-2. Mario de Maria, Moonlight. Tables at an inn at Prati di Castello, 1884.
Fig. 26-3. Mario de Maria, Egloga The end of a summer’s day, 1899-1909.
Fig. 26-4. Mario de Maria, La barca a torsio (The moored boat), 1895.
Fig. 26-5. Francesco Saverio Castracane degli Antelminelli, Fluvial, sea and fossil
Diatomaceæ microphotography, 1877 from Studi sulle Diatomee.
Fig. 26-6. Hilma af Klint Group IV, the ten largest, infancy, 1907.
Conti saw the artist and nature as active subjects. There is no isolated
impulse towards the search for the voice of nature, which otherwise might
be seen as no more than “zoology, botany, and mineralogy.” We should
remember that while he was writing about art, he was also engaged in
isolating bacilli under the microscope and in identifying visual and
acoustic assonances. He studied under scientists of international renown
such as Pietro Blaserna, Jacob Moleschott, and Francesco Saverio
Castracane degli Antelminelli,7 whose discoveries offered stimulus to
artists. For example, the abbot Castracane’s advances in microphotography
with diatomaceæ revealed fluorescent organisms that appear to float in a
nocturnal light—organisms such as those that swarm on the surfaces of
Marius Pictor’s paintings (Fig. 26-4). The extraordinary enlargements
(Fig. 26-5), which, at the first Roman Amateur Photographic Exhibition of
1889, captured the attention of critics and of Conti himself,8 revealed “the
infinitely small” hidden in nature and unearthed an intriguing
“intermediate state between plants and animals.” Similarly, at Bordeaux,
the microscope of Armand Clavaud, to Redon’s curious eye, was alive
with synthetic and ‘abstract’ forms, such as were soon to appear on the
symbolist canvases of Kupka, ýiurlionis or Hilma af Klimt (Fig. 26-6).
But in the “consoling understanding” between de Maria and Conti or
between Redon and Clavaud, perception was still measured according to
the law of necessity.
Otherwise, according to Conti, “Painting is an art not of imitation but
of transformation.” Convinced of this, in 1886 he encouraged the
juxtaposition of Gabriele D’Annunzio poems, as evocative of visions and
atmospheric magic as of finely wrought classical cameos, with
illustrations by the Roman Symbolists,9 who in Redon’s words worked
“with eyes wide open to the visible world.” I should like to draw (Fig. 26-
7a-b, 26-8) a comparison between the illustrations of Mario de Maria for
D’Annunzio’s verse and Redon’s work, even though Redon shows a
greater independence from the world of the microscope than Huysmans
supposed, to the extent that he could “indulge freely in the representation
of the imaginary.”10 In Roman circles, “science will help poetry to stay
alive, it will give it splendid life,” the ‘Mystic Doctor’ wrote, in tune with
the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, with the principle of selection
theorized by Hippolyte Taine in the Philosophie de l’art and with Émile
Zola’s interpretation of art as “sécrétion humaine.” It is perhaps more
appropriate to speak of Spiritual Naturalism in Italy, a term borrowed from
Huysmans’s novel Là-bas (1891) and fortuitously appropriated by Conti:
because the work denied the aberrant positivist materialism, “the
democracy of art”, without moving into the improbable, “drawing in the

air another route to reach the from here and the after,” nor defeating the
narrative frame or superficial sensitivity in the poetry and illustrations of
D’Annunzio’s Isaotta.
Fig. 26-7a. Mario de Maria, illustration for L’Alunna by Gabriele D’Annunzio,



Fig. 26-7b. Mario de Maria, illustration for L’Alunna by Gabriele D’Annunzio,


Fig. 26-8. Odilon Redon, Germination (Dans le rêve, 2), 1879.

Fig. 26-9. Odilon Redon, Araignée qui sourit (The smiling spider), 1888.

At that time, Darwin’s evolutionary theories and the theory of relativity

excited tremendous interest even among orthodox Symbolists, with
repercussions in Italy, for example when between 1888 and 1890 Previati
(Fig. 26-9, 26-10) illustrated the Italian print of Extraordinary Tales by
Edgard Allan Poe, also devoured by Conti and de Maria. In the plausible
mysteries narrated by Poe, such as in Felicien Rops’ “new and audacious
life” of Satanism, Conti recognized a route of clarification for the artist
which also served to help the outside world to reach an understanding
inspired by superior ideas (Fig. 26-11, 26-12).11
Fig. 26-10. Gaetano Previati, Spider and Flies, 1888-90.

Fig. 26-11. Félicien Rops, Rare Fish, 1877.

Fig. 26-12. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Allegory, 1909 ca.
In this environment, the nine illustrators of Isaotta (on par with the
finest Arts and Craft productions, they used chromatic heliotype for the
first time in Italy (Fig. 26-13, 26-14, 26-15), united in a fraternity named
In Arte Libertas. They were “animated by art and desirous to give a
conscientious and independent manifestation of their own principles.”12
The cultural mission of which they believed themselves to be the Apostles
was capable of harmonizing a variety of styles: from metamorphoses by
moonlight to the pale blondes of Giuseppe Cellini and Giulio Aristide
Sartorio, languishing like Tennyson’s lily.

Fig. 26-13. Giuseppe Cellini, Garisinda: E sul dal corda l’anima sospira (Up the
Heart, Spirit sighs), 1886.
Ever the pre-Raphaelite spirit flourished in Rome. The English painters

showed their work in exhibitions of In Arte Libertas, and many of them
spent time in the city: Leighton, Charles Fairfax-Murray, Burne-Jones and
Marie Spartali, the Greek pre-Raphaelite beauty, “Rossetti and Burne-
Jones personified” (Roger Fry), and her step-daughter, the painter Lisa
Stillman. These English/new-Botticelli beautiful ladies often posed as
tableau vivant in a count Gegè Primoli’s photography (Fig. 26-16).

Fig. 26-14 and 26-15. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Donna Francesca, Ballata VI,
illustrations for Isaotta Guttadauro, 1886.

Fig. 26-16. Giuseppe Primoli, Concert. Marie and Lisa Stillman, Giorgina Costa,
1890-92.

Fig. 26-17. Giuseppe Primoli, The marquise Sanfelice, the count Primoli and
Sartorio pose as tableau vivant, 1890-92.
As a young critic conversant with the latest developments in

international thought, Conti was inevitably drawn to the salon of Count
Primoli,13 a Parisian outpost in the heart of Rome. Primoli was the friend
and patron of artists—as we see in an eccentric photograph he took of
himself together with the artist Sartorio (Fig. 26-17). He delighted in
‘irregular’ photography, the Italian name for amateur work, with the
opportunity it gave for experimentation and spontaneity.14
Among the many amateur photographers in Rome at the time was another
Roman nobleman, Maffeo Colonna Sciarra. He took on responsibility for the
journal Tribuna, to which Conti contributed. Colonna Sciarra also had an
impressive art collection and gained notoriety for attempting to export

important works such as Caravaggio’s Cardsharps and Sebastiano del

Piombo’s Viola player (Fig. 26-18, 26-19, 26-20). It is hard to imagine that
the pronounced realism of Caravaggio and the mysterious atmosphere of
Giorgione and Sebastiano del Piombo could not have infiltrated the
sensitivity and imagination of the Roman Pre-Raphaelites, just as the fathers
of Pre-Raphaelitism had done! Sartorio wrote admiringly of Burne-Jones’s
boldness in returning to the masters of the fifteenth century “who
deliberately abandoned the laws of perspective or created arbitrary lighting
in their concern for a harmonious vision of space.”15 The widespread
practice of creating tableaux vivants is explicable in this context, and was
founded on theories derived from Walter Pater and Hippolyte Taine.
Primoli’s lens focused frequently on the magnificent gardens on the Pincio,
as too did that of a highly individual pictorial photographer Gabrielle
Hébert, wife of the director of the French Academy, Ernest Hébert. The
tableaux they devised were interpreted by D’Annunzio’s wife, Maria
Hardouin, and by other members of the Roman nobility, or by Stillman,
decked out as fifteenth-century Madonnas. (Fig. 26-21, 26-22a-b, 26-23, 26-
24). They were either pervaded by an art pour l’art melancholy, like the
Roman paintings of Ernest Hébert (admired first by Theophile Gautier and
then by Péladan, as well as by Conti), or clearly influenced by the conviction
that a new Renaissance was imminent. This would presuppose an
interpretation of the past as described in the Philosophie de l’Art: the revival
of dormant ideas, to join with Schopenhauer, and therefore “font des
tableaux vivants à côté des tableaux peints.”16
Fig. 26-18. Caravaggio, Cardsharps.


Fig. 26-20. John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848-1849 Liverpool, Walker Art
Gallery.

Fig. 26-21. Gabrielle Hebèrt, Eléonore d’Ukermann poses on the wood, 1891.


Fig. 26-22a. Ernest Hébert, To the Heros without Glory, 1888 from “La Tribuna
illustrata,” 1891, Roma, Museo di Roma.


Fig. 26-22b. Ernest Hébert, Roma sdegnata, Roma, Museo di Roma.

Fig. 26-23. Giuseppe Primoli, Maria Hardouin Gallese e la marquise Sanfelice

pose as Annunciation, 1890ca.

Fig. 26-24. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1849-50.

Fig. 26-25. Giuseppe Primoli, The marquise Sanfelice, 1890.

Between 1890 and 1891, Giulio Aristide Sartorio painted one of his
most explicitly Pre-Raphaelite tableau vivant pictures for Primoli,
interpreted by the usual suspects including Lisa Stillman. The muse both
of Rossetti and of Burne-Jones, she also captured the heart of Sartorio. He
had confided to Primoli that one might attribute to her “all the finest moral
and physical qualities poetically conceivable in a woman.” (Fig. 26-25,
26-26, Plate 26-1)17 But in Sartorio’s painting of the two processions of
virgins, he sacrifices their individuality for considerations of ideal form
and color, a trait Conti recognized in the paintings by Burne-Jones at the
exhibitions organized by the In Arte Libertas movement. Nevertheless
fresh and natural light, reminiscent of Corot, instills the painting with the
spiritualist naturalism already remarked on in the visionary and nocturnal
landscape painting.
Plate 26-1. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, The wise and foolish Virgins, 1890-91.

The musical arrangement of form, line and chromatic strengths,

culminating in the gold-green of the heavenly ascension, invokes a visual
metaphor of a sentimental journey towards the infinite, of being
overpowered by the ideal, as produced by the music of Bach, Listz, and
Beethoven. From 1885 this could be heard in select clandestine concerts
attended by Conti and de Maria, by the “music-loving scientists,” and by
D’Annunzio, who described them in the Invincibile. This appeared in
episodes in the Tribuna (January, 1890) with illustrations by Sartorio at
the very time this painting was conceived. No less spiritual for Conti was
the Jewish music played to accompany the liturgy of the synagogue: an
intonation “long and monotonous, insistent in the minor tones, with
moving pauses.”18 Such music revived “the spirit of many generations,”
like the procession of women in Sartorio’s painting. When the Rabbi
approached the “radiance of Elohim” he appeared to “go back in time”—
beyond the threshold, into the pure radiant light that marks the vanishing
point of the painting. In his depiction of the apse, Sartorio seems to recall
the mosaic decoration carried out by Burne-Jones for the English church
of St. Paul within the Walls, “certainly the most significant work of
religious art in Rome in the later nineteenth century.”19 He was struck by
the “muted color, almost the slate grey” of flesh in the old paintings, or at
least of the way it then appeared in the work of Leonardo and Giorgione.
Similarly, the green tone could be found in Giorgione. In Conti’s closing
dedication to Mario de Maria in his treatise on Giorgione, he confirmed
his assessment of him as the breviary of aesthetics for the modern painter.
De Maria moved to Venice in 1891 and was followed two years later
by Conti, who, now as museum curator, had asked to be transferred from
the Uffizi to the Galleria dell’Accademia. Artists there were drawn to
Symbolism, and Mario de Maria was, of course, first among those who
quickly responded to Conti’s exhortations. In 1893, the year of Conti’s
arrival, de Maria painted an unusual Portrait of Daniela von Bülow (Fig. 26-
27, 26-28), granddaughter of Franz Listz, stepdaughter of Richard Wagner,
and wife to the German art historian Henry Thode. De Maria explained how
he aimed to cloak “the face and the entire sentiment” in an atmosphere
colored by the Giorgionesque (Pater had spoken of “Giorgionesque, an
influence, a spirit or type in art”)20 and hence the title Green Vision. The
chromatic and musical timbre borrowed from Bellini by Giorgione
demonstrated to Conti the truth of Pater’s celebrated aphorism that “all art
constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” English aestheticism
converged with that of Conti: a surrogate between Pater and Schopenhauer
as he balanced between proposing the priority of style as the regulating
strength of the work as seen in the Venetian artists and the idealistic

philosophical nature of representation.

Therefore, at the end of the nineteenth century, interest in the Venetian
painters’ techniques, in the city where color had been given new life in the
sixteenth century, was certainly influenced by reflections on Pater, and also
by the presence there of his “Italian disciple” as D’Annunzio calls Conti in
his story Fuoco, also set in Venice. De Maria proclaimed an apology for the
trade in some of his notes, which seems the antithesis of the future idealism
of Benedetto Croce: “any idea can only be communicated as representation
mediated by technique, which is nothing but its objectivization.”21 These
words recall Pater, for whom ideal art was the coincidence of matter and
form, and Conti’s view of art as “practical metaphysics.” Artists in the guise
of magicians or alchemists experimented with color and varnishes as they
aspired to give “to matter that did not yet respond to the new will, the most
secret and least perceptible movements of life, isolating in them their own
idea,” just as the masters of the past had done.
Fig. 26-26. Edward Burne-Jones, Psiche’s Wedding, 1895.

Fig. 26-27. Mario de Maria, Portrait of Daniela von Bülow (Green Vision), 1893.

Fig. 26-28. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna degli alberelli.

Fig. 26-29. Cesare Laurenti, Beautiful Mask, 1900 ca.

Fig. 26-30. Cesare Laurenti, Conversation, 1900 ca.
Fig. 26-31. Vittorio Bressanin, Modesty and Vanity, 1899.

Fig. 26-32 and 26-33. Mario de Maria, Casa dei Tre Oci, 1912-13.

Fig. 26-34. Exterior of the Museum Mariano Fortuny, Venice, Palazzo Pesaro
degli Orfei.

Fig. 26-35. Interior of the Museum Mariano Fortuny, Venice, Palazzo Pesaro degli
Orfei.
Fig. 26-36. Mario de Maria, Chiesa e Campo dei Giustiziati in Val d’Inferno,
1907.

Fig. 26-37. Pordenone, The Family of the Satyr or The wounded Satyr.
For de Maria, who was said to remain closeted in his studio to converse
with Bellini, Cima de Conegliano, Titian, Carpaccio and Giorgione, the
result was a ‘smalto vecchio veneziano’: an egg tempera treated with
glazes of natural oils, a recipe he chose to keep secret. He rediscovered the
way to recreate the hard surfaces of Venetian painting of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. Similarly the artist-magician Mariano Fortuny and
Cesare Laurenti or Vittorio Bressanin22 invented and commercialized their
own temperas. They painted works that even in their form looked to the
old masters (Fig. 26-29, 26-30, 26-31): to Palma rather than to Titian or
Bellini, adopting similar attitudes and convictions as the Pre-Raphaelites.
Venice also offered a backdrop to the popular tableaux vivants. Symbolist
houses such as that of the Tre Oci, designed by Mario de Maria, and the
neo-renaissance building for Fortuny, ateliers, behavior and dress often
suggest a revival (Fig. 26-32, 26-33, 26-34, 26-35): witness the delphos
(costume worn by Eleonora Duse) designed by Fortuny and the famous
Titian-inspired capes worn by Fortuny himself. Witness too the old
masters collected by de Maria, including one of the versions of Christ
carrying the Cross, its attribution debated between Giorgione and Bellini,
and a small Pordenone with a mysterious iconography, the inspiration for
an equally ambiguous painting by de Maria himself (Fig. 26-36, 26-37).
Conti also had contact with a little known but fervent group of English
aesthetes in the city. They centered on the Palazzo Cappello, where Henry
James has set The Aspern Papers. The palazzo had been rented by the
American artist and writer Eugene Benson,23 together with an adjoining
vegetable-garden, which gained mythical status in the writings of his
guests. It was supposed to have been inspired by Cardinal Bembo’s
description of the park in Gli Asolani, which “doubtless Giorgione saw
and enjoyed,” as Benson wrote in the belief that the freest and most

mysterious subjects were derived from the same source.24 De Maria

introduced Benson to Conti as a sophisticated connoisseur of Venetian art:
he thought Benson would be the ideal author of the frontispiece to Conti’s
Giorgione, which was in fact never executed. Nevertheless Benson did
take an active role in the creation of the book, freely offering his advice to
the author. Once Conti arrived in Venice, he frequented the Palazzo
Cappello group even when they migrated to Asolo. In the summer Benson,
with his wife Violetta, whose daughter from her first marriage was Julia
Constance Fletcher, better known as George Fleming, moved to this
hilltop retreat a few kilometers beyond Giorgione’s birthplace, where the
Giorgionesque “really descends from him to our own time.”25 For
Giorgione’s art, as Pater declared, belonged not to the past but to the
human spirit. ‘Asolando,’ they aspired to “the ideal life of the soul,” as
Mrs. Benson wrote to Conti.26 They sought to make their own lives living
masterpieces according to the precepts in Pater’s novel Marius the
Epicurean, first reviewed in Italy by Vernon Lee and discussed at length
in an article by Benson in 1885. Life was conducted as a constant tableau
vivant, as the titles of Benson’s paintings suggest: Sunday Morning in
Titian’s Country, A Distinguished Company at Titian’s Garden, Ariadne,
and an Orpheus and Eurydice of 1907, like so many paintings that borrow
from the past, whether from antiquity or the sixteenth century, from Puvis
de Chavannes to Lord Leighton (Fig. 26-38, 26-39, 26-40).
Fig. 26-38. Eugene Benson, Orpheus wakes Eurydice on the river Lete, 1907.

Fig. 26-39. Frederic Leighton, Idyll, 1880-81.
The evocation of illustrious models and the consonance with nature

recall Ruskin, to whom Benson makes clear reference to In Giorgione’s
Country of 1882, modeled on the even more famous School of Giorgione
by Pater (1877). Profound then was the influence of the environment on
their artist creativity, recalling the enthusiastic interpretation of the
‘bellezza sfrangiata’ of the ‘stones of Venice.’ De Maria, in one of his
masterpieces, was able to evoke, it was said, “the phantom of imperial
Byzantium” in the secret vitality he instilled in his painting of the Ottoman
warehouse, the Fondaco dei Turchi (1909) (Plate 26-2), then the subject of
debate about approaches to architectural restoration in the Lagoon. From
his earliest writings, Conti emerges as convinced that “nature alone cannot
attain the idea, though assisted by the artist it sees its aspirations realized,
and itself overtaken by the work of genius.” This is what the ‘sentimento
giorgionesco’ (significantly, this phrase heads one of the most important
chapters in Conti’s treatise) meant for the Symbolists gathered in Venice:
“the perfect ideal we are privileged to contemplate in Giorgione,” as
Violetta Benson wrote to Conti, in the enthusiasm following her
translation of some extracts from Pater’s A Study of Dyonisus27 devoted to
that ideal, which she made for her friend.

Fig. 26-40. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Summer, 1891, detail

Plate 26-2. Mario de Maria, The Fondaco of Turkishs in Venice, 1909.
But it is only in the Beata Riva (1900)—reverting to Dante’s Purgatorio

(and its Lete river) at the turn of the century—that definitive form is given
to the act of faith in contemplative and metaphysical activity. At this time
Conti was coming increasingly into contact with the thinking of other
idealists: with the pantheism and Platonism of Vittore Grubicy de Dragon
(artist and theorist of Italian Divisionism) and of Domenico Tumiati,
exegesist of Segantini. He turned towards an interpretation of art as a
“religious expression of feeling,”28 to the point of finally substituting
religious for artistic yearning.
At this stage, however, art was allowed a significant margin of action:
“as the first prayer worthy of ascending towards the infinite.” The works
of Italian symbolist artists take on the appearance of larvae from “the
living silence of ideas,” remote reminders of a naturalistic existence (Fig.
26-41, 26-42, 26-43). Witness the heightened osmotic luministic mistiness
in de Maria, or the highly individual atmospheric effects in Grubicy and
Segantini, the fruits of similar intentions.

Fig. 26-41. Mario de Maria, The square at Borca, Cadore (Moonlight at Borca)
1909.

Fig. 26-42. Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Sinfonia crepuscolare (Lago Maggiore),

1896.
Fig. 26-43. Giovanni Segantini, Springtime in the Alps (The Allegory of Spring),
1897.

Fig. 26-1a. Mario de Maria, photograph portrait of Angelo Conti, about
1886 Rome, Conti Estate.
Fig. 26-1b. Mario de Maria, photograph portrait of Angelo Conti at the

Ca’ d’Oro (?) in Venice, 1896 Rome, Conti Estate.
Fig. 26-2. Mario de Maria, Moonlight. Tables at an inn at Prati di

Castello,1884, Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. Su concessione
del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.
Fig. 26-3. Mario de Maria, Egloga The end of a summer’s day, 1899-1909,
Venice, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro.
Fig. 26-4. Mario de Maria, La barca a torsio (The moored boat), 1895
Piacenza, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci-Oddi.
Fig. 26-5. Francesco Saverio Castracane degli Antelminelli, Fluvial, sea

and fossil Diatomaceæ microphotography, 1877 from Studi sulle Diatomee
(Rome: Tipografia della pace, 1877) table, 171.
Fig. 26-6. Hilma af Klint Group IV, the ten largest, infancy, 1907
Stokolm, The Hilma af Klint Foundation.
Fig. 26-7a. Mario de Maria, illustration for L’Alunna by Gabriele

D’Annunzio, Isaotta Guttadauro, 1886-87.
Fig. 26-7b. Mario de Maria, illustration for L’Alunna by Gabriele

D’Annunzio, Isaotta Guttadauro, 1886-87.
Fig. 26-8. Odilon Redon, Germination (Dans le rêve, 2), 1879, Paris,
Biblioteque National Français.
Fig. 26-9. Odilon Redon, Araignée qui sourit (The smiling spider), 1888
Paris, Biblioteque National Français.
Fig. 26-10. Gaetano Previati, Spider and Flies, 1888-90 Milano, Private
colletion.
Fig. 26-11. Félicien Rops, Rare Fish, 1877 Paris, Private collection.

Fig. 26-12. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Allegory, 1909 ca, Rome, Private
collection.
Fig. 26-13. Giuseppe Cellini, Garisinda: E sul dal corda l’anima sospira
(Up the Heart, Spirit sighs), illustration for Isaotta Guttadauro, 1886.
Fig. 26-14 and 26-15. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Donna Francesca, Ballata
VI, illustrations for Isaotta Guttadauro, 1886.
Fig. 26-16. Giuseppe Primoli, Concert. Marie and Lisa Stillman, Giorgina
Costa 1890-92, Rome, Primoli Foundation.
Fig. 26-17. Giuseppe Primoli, The marquise Sanfelice, the count Primoli
and Sartorio pose as tableau vivant, 1890-92, Rome, Primoli Foundation.
Fig. 26-18. Caravaggio, Cardsharps, ex-collection Sciarra, now Fort

Worth, Kimbell Art Museum.
Fig. 26-20. John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848-1849 Liverpool, Walker

Art Gallery.
Fig. 26-21. Gabrielle Hebèrt, Eléonore d’Ukermann poses on the wood,

1891 emultion print La Tronche, Musée Hebert.
Fig. 26-22a and 26-22b. Ernest Hébert, To the Heros without Glory, 1888
from “La Tribuna illustrata”, 1891; Ernest Hébert, Roma sdegnata, Roma,
Museo di Roma.
Fig. 26-23. Giuseppe Primoli, Maria Hardouin Gallese e la marquise

Sanfelice pose as Annunciation 1890ca., Rome, Primoli Foundation.
Fig. 26-24. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1849-50

London, Tate Gallery.
Fig. 26-25. Giuseppe Primoli, The marquise Sanfelice, 1890 Primoli

Foundation.
Fig. 26-26. Edward Burne-Jones, Psiche’s Wedding, 1895 Bruxelles,

Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts.

Fig. 26-27. Mario de Maria, Portrait of Daniela von Bülow (Green

Vision), 1893 Unknown site.
Fig. 26-28. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna degli alberelli. Venice, Galleria

dell’Accademia.
Fig. 26-29 and 26-30. Cesare Laurenti, Beautiful Mask and Conversation,
1900 ca Unknown sites.
Fig. 26-31. Vittorio Bressanin, Modesty and Vanity, 1899 Venice, Galleria
Internazionale di Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro.
Fig. 26-32 and 26-33. Mario de Maria, Casa dei Tre Oci, 1912-13 Venice,
Giudecca.
Fig. 26-34 and 26-35. Museum Mariano Fortuny, Venice, Palazzo Pesaro
degli Orfei.
Fig. 26-36. Mario de Maria, Chiesa e Campo dei Giustiziati in Val

d’Inferno, 1907 Trieste, Civico Museo Rivoltella.
Fig. 26-37. Pordenone, The Family of the Satyr or The wounded Satyr,
Private collection (ex-Colletion of Mario de Maria).
Fig. 26-38. Eugene Benson, Orpheus wakes Eurydice on the river Lete,
1907 Asolo, Museo Civico.
Fig. 26-39. Frederic Leighton, Idyll, 1880-81 Private collection.
Fig. 26-40. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Summer, 1891 detail. The

Cleveland Museum of Art.
Fig. 26-41. Mario de Maria, The square at Borca, Cadore (Moonlight at

Borca) 1909 Private collection.
Fig. 26-42. Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Sinfonia crepuscolare (Lago

Maggiore), 1896 Milano, Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna.
Fig. 26-43. Giovanni Segantini, Springtime in the Alps (The Allegory of

Spring) 1897 New York, Private collection.

List of Plates
Plate 26-1. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, The wise and foolish Virgins, 1890-
91, Roma, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.
Plate 26-2. Mario de Maria, The Fondaco of Turkishs in Venice, 1909,

Roma, collezione privata.
Notes

1
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Leipzig: F. A.
Brockhaus). The French ed., Le monde comme volonte et comme representation,
trans. J. A. Catacuzene (Paris: Perrin, 1886) amply annotated by Conti is held in
the Gabinetto G.P.Vieussex in Florence, as part of the Conti Estate.
2
Doctor Mysticus, “L’arte a Roma,” La Tribuna, February 28, 1889.
3
Ibid.
4
Angelo Conti, Giorgione (Firenze: Alinari, 1896); Angelo Conti, La beata riva.
Trattato dell’oblìo, (Milano: Treves, 1900; 2nd ed. Venezia: Marsilio 2000).
5
See “La musica nella pittura,” in Giorgione (Firenze: Alinari, 1896), 35-44,
recently republished by Ricciarda Ricorda (Novi Ligure: Città del silenzio, 2007).
6
Odilon Redon, À soi-même (Paris: 1922) Italian ed., A se stesso, ed. Stefano
Chiodi (Milan: Abscondita, 2004), 29.
7
They were eminent scientists and all professors at La Sapienza, University of
Rome.
8
Collodion (Angelo Conti), “I fotografi,” La Tribuna, May 21, 1889.
9
See Isaotta Guttadauro (Rome: Danesi, 1886). This celebrated and precious
collection of poems by the young D’Annunzio was printed in the elegant manner
of the pre-Raphaelites.
10
See Joris-Karl Huysmans, “Le monster,” in Certains (Paris, 1889) consulted in
the Italian trans. Dentro, contro, oltre il presente: l’itinerario di Huysmans
nell’opera d’arte, ed. Luca Quattrocchi (Milan: Abscondita, 2004), 95, 173. In
addition, André Guyaux, Christian Heck et al., Huysman Une esthétique de la
décadence, actes du colloque de Bâle, Mulhouse et Colmar, recherches des
Universités Rhénanes (Paris: Librarie Honoré Champion, 1987).
11
Among many other articles on this subject I refer the reader to Doctor Mysticus,
“Il Satanismo,” Capitan Fracassa, September 29, 1890.
12
Ettore Ferrari, “In arte libertas report,” E.Ferrari papers, filza 1, file 99,
Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome.
13
Princess Matilde Buonaparte’s grandson, Giuseppe Primoli, had studied in Paris
(1853-1870). Even after he was established in Rome he continued to be involved
in Parisian intellectual circles and was the great friend of Théophile Gautier and
Edmond de Goucourt. See Marcello Spaziani, Con Gegè Primoli nella Roma
bizantina (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1962); Lamberto Vitali, Un
fotografo fin de siècle: il conte Primoli (Torin: Einaudi [1968], 1981).


14
He was called the “re dell’istantanea” (see Collodion [Angelo Conti], “I
fotografi,” La Tribuna, May 21, 1889 and Richiel [Angelo Conti], “Il re
dell’istantanea,” La Tribuna illustrata, 1891). From 1888 he was on the board of
the Amateur Photographers Society in Rome.
15
La Rassegna letteraria, July 1893. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, “A proposito
dell’Esposizione nella Royal Academy,” La Nuova Rassegna, a. I, vol. II, 25, July
9, 1893, 43-45; and also “Edward Burne-Jones,” La Nuova Rassegna, a. I, vol. II,
33, September 3, 1893, 304-309.
16
Joséphin Péladan, Ernest Hébert Son oeuvre et son temps (Paris: Librarie
Delagrave, 1910), 86. On page 266 we read that Roma sdegnata, appears “as the
symbolic frontespiece of all his works and also as a leavetaking. It serves as the
magnificent penant to the ex voto Agli eroi morti senza gloria in which a proud
muse derived from a Sistine sybil is seated on the roof of the Villa Medici in Rome
at sunset.” Péladan is fascinated by this “vestale di gloria ancestrale,” “druidesse
de gloire.” He writes: “We have to go back to Correggio or Giorgione to find such
a perfumed temptress . . . the amber limbs of Giorgione in a pose by
Michelangelo.” See also Maria Elisa Tittoni, “La Roma sdegnata di Ernest
Hébert,” in Scritti in onore di Gianna Piantoni. Testimonianze e contributi, ed.
Stefania Frezzotti and Patrizia Rosazza Ferraris (Rome: De Luca Editori, 2007),
103-108.
17
For this and the following quotations: Doctor Mysticus, “Concerti romani. In via
Belsiana,” Capitan Fracassa, March 6, 1886; and Doctor Mysticus, “Concerti
romani. Musica ebraica,” Capitan Fracassa, undated (but circa March 1886).
Angelo Conti Estate, Contemporary Archive, Gabinetto G.P.Vieussex in Florence,
Italy.
18
Primoli Estate, Correspondence: G.A.Sartorio, n. 3519, July 1st, 1890. Primoli
Fondation, Rome.
19
Giulio Figurelli, “St. Paul’s within the Walls” in Burne-Jones dal
preraffaellismo al simbolismo, ed. Maria Teresa Benedetti and Gianna Piantoni
(Milano:Mazzotta, 1986), 194.
20
Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” (Fortnightly Review, 22, October 1,
1877) then in The Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1879), 111.
21
Even for the following quotations, Marius Pictor, Pensieri che mi sorgono
pensando alla Biennale, 1907. Manuscripts, Angelo Conti Estate, Contemporary
Archive, Gabinetto G.P.Vieussex in Florence, Italy; some of de Maria’s thoughts
are collected by Romualdo Pantini, “Marius Pictor”, Nuova Antologia, 143,
September-October 1909, 39.
22
Mariano Fortuny (Granada, Spain, 1871-Venice, Italy, 1949), painter, designer
of celebrated fabrics and lamps, also designed and restored his XV century house
Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei (now Fortuny Museum) in Venice; Cesare Laurenti
(Mesola, Ferrara, Italy, 1954-Venice, 1936) painter, architect of the Pescheria
Rialto (fishmarket) in Venice, decorator of Hotel Storione in Padoa, the first Art
Nouveau work in the Veneto; Vittorio Bressanin (Musile di Piave, 1860-Venice,
1941) Symbolist painter in the lagoon, influenced both by the pre-Raphaelites and
by Titian and Giorgione.


23
On Eugene Benson (New York 1839 – Venice 1908) see the chapter “Eugene
Benson e i nobili spiriti della laguna,” in Anna Mazzanti, Simbolismo italiano fra
arte e critica. Mario de Maria e Angelo Conti (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2007), 182-
190.
24
Eugene Benson, “Giorgione’s Country,” in Art and Nature in Italy (Boston:
Roberts Brothers, 1882), 15-18.
25
Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” in The Renaissance, 121-122.
26
Angelo Conti Estate, Correspondance. Violet Benson, 113, July 27, 1895.
Contemporary Archive, Gabinetto G.P.Vieussex in Florence, Italy.
27
Walter Pater, “A study of Dyonisus”, Fortnightly Review, December 1st, 1876.
Angelo Conti Estate, Correspondance. Violet Benson, 112, March 25, 1894.
Contemporary Archive, Gabinetto G.P.Vieussex in Florence, Italy.
28
Angelo Conti, La beata riva, 44. And also for the following quotation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A POWERLESS SEEKER:
MEREZHKOVSKY’S ROMANCE OF LEONARDO
AS LIFE WRITING
JULIA FRIEDMAN
Dmitrii Merezhkovsky’s novel, known to English-speaking readers as

The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, was published in its Russian original
under a different title: Vozrozhdenie bogov. Leonardo da Vinci (The
Resurrection of the Gods. Leonardo da Vinci). He wrote it as the middle
part of the trilogy Christ and Antichrist that began with Death of the Gods
(Julian the Apostate) and ended with Christ and Antichrist (Peter and
Alexis).1 The book’s 1931 nomination for the Nobel Prize points to its
significance: exceptionally ambitious in its scope, both chronologically
and philosophically, the trilogy was also one of the earliest examples of the
new genre that came to be known as biographie romancée.2 By the early
1930s, the genre included a number of extraordinarily popular historic-
biographical novels by such writers as André Marois, Emil Ludwig,
Ramain Rolland, Giles Lytton Strachey, and Yurii Tynianov. Yet the
nomination did not result in the Prize, and most critical commentary
agrees on the primacy of the trilogy’s philosophical and spiritual agenda
over its literary rendering. Beginning with the writings of his compatriot
and contemporary, the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, Merezhkovsky’s
novel came to be seen as a continuation of his work as a thinker who
happened to possess “a great literary talent:”
[Merezhkovsky] was an extraordinarily prolific writer but he was not a

notable artist; his novels make interesting reading and give evidence of
much erudition, but they are immensely lacking in artistry; they are a
vehicle for his ideological schemes, and it was said of them that they were
mixture of ideology and archeology.3
532 Chapter Twenty-Seven
Perhaps, due to this alleged lack of autonomous artistic value, in the apt
words of another critic, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, “this once-
famous novel has survived only peripherally in the ghetto of out-of-print
historical novels and as a prompt riposte to Freud’s timeworn psycho-
biographical essay on Leonardo.”4 My argument here is that the “ideology
and archeology” of the novel connect life with art in a way only
conceivable within the framework of the Symbolist movement.
Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo da Vinci is as much an autobiographie romancée
as it is a biographie romancée, that is to say it is as much about
Merezhkovsky himself as it is about Leonardo. Its autobiographical layers,
which I see as an integral part of the book, lift the text from the ranks of
historical novels into the realm of modernist meta-fiction.
According to Merezhkovsky’s wife, the poet and critic Zinaida Gippius
(1869–1945), the novel was “conceived in [his] soul” during their first
joint trip to Italy in 1891, when Merezhkovsky confessed to her his
“exceptional kinship” with that country.5 But it was not until five years
later, in the spring of 1896, that they returned, now with an explicit goal of
studying the physical surroundings of Leonardo, who was to become the
focus for the second novel of the Christ-Antichrist trilogy. The novel came
out in its entirety, in a serialized form, in the journal Bozhii mir (God’s
World) in 1900,6 and the following year, its text was published as a
separate volume. During the five years that separated his first and second
Italian trips, Merezhkovsky laid out the blueprint for his Leonardo
character in a 1894 poem entitled “Leonardo da Vinci.”7 In it, Leonardo,
who is “indifferent to all earthly passions,” is said to have “penetrated the
deepest temptations/ of all duality.” “A prophet, a demon or a magician”
who is “safeguarding the eternal mystery,” the Leonardo of the poem is “a
Godlike man.”
Although these traits remained the core of Leonardo’s characterization
in the novel, unlike the poem, The Romance of Leonardo systematically
presents its protagonist as a precursor, not a divine presence in human
guise.8 The Leonardo of The Romance is wise, generous, and pure, but his
lack of will weakens his genius. In prose, Leonardo’s most distinguishable
quality, noted by generations of critics, is his inability to implement his
ideas fully, to complete his projects, and to impart his wisdom to his own
pupils. In the words of one of the novel’s prophetic characters, the
suggestively named Mona Cassandra, Leonardo,
…does but strive yet does not attain, . . . he seeketh but findeth not, . . .
knoweth but doth not realize. He is a forerunner for him that cometh after
him, and who is greater than he.9
Merezhkovsky’s Romance of Leonardo as Life Writing 533
While the idea of Leonardo as a precursor was part of Merezhkovsky’s

vision of the artist from the beginning—in his poem of 1894
Merezhkovsky already referred to Leonardo as “the forerunner / Of the
still unknown day,” the emphasis on the inability to implement his God-
like plans is unique to the novel. This fundamental character trait is
portrayed as a consequence of his concern to “penetrate . . . the deepest
temptations / of all duality.” As Leonardo observes the duality of the world
in all its manifestations, he loses his ability to act. Perhaps the most
poignant example of his inactivity in the novel is the description of the
unrealized plan of freeing the young girl Maria, who is held captive by
Cesare Borgia. Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo plot her release, but
when Borgia learns about their plan and orders the girl’s murder, Leonardo
breathes a metaphorical sigh of relief. Distressed as he is to learn about
this crime “in the deepest recess of his heart,” Leonardo nevertheless
detects “a sense of release, of liberation, at the thought that there was no
further need of action.”10 Any need to act is a burden to Leonardo. Almost
at the end of his life, upon seeing Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine
Chapel and realizing that his own artistic legacy will probably pale before
it, he bitterly acknowledges this rift between theory and practice—“his
own integrity in contemplation made still more tormenting for him the
consciousness of his impotence in action.”11
Notably, Berdiaev ascribed the same “impotence in action” to the
author of The Romance himself. Speaking of Merezhkovsky’s concern
with the thesis and antithesis way of thinking, Berdiaev blames his
“fundamentally-divided, disintegrated consciousness which has lost its
capacity for choice and action” for the failure of Merezhkovsky’s ideas to
supply the “basis for any action whatsoever.”12 This rather harsh
evaluation is corroborated by Merezhkovsky’s other contemporaries as
well as by today’s scholars. The author of the Cambridge History of
Russian Symbolism, Avril Pyman, cites a poem of 1903 addressed to
Merezhkovsky by Konstantin Bal’mont, in which Bal’mont accuses the
writer of artificially bifurcating the world around him.13 Pyman seconds
Bal’mont’s vision of Merezhkovsky as guilty of a “cold duality, the
inability to create true symbols out of the fusion of the object perceived
with the individual sensibility of the perceiving subject, the artist.” The
Christ-Antichrist trilogy, according to Pyman, “has many merits, but its
ultimate failure is the sum of its author’s failure to create spontaneously,
from his own inner self, rather than to compare and compile.”14 Such a
vision of Merezhkovsky’s artistry as cerebral at the expense of subjective
reality coincides with the novel’s account of Leonardo as being incapacitated
by his contemplation of the world which, as he sees it, is torn apart by

opposing forces.
In the novel, Merezhkovsky makes no attempt to conceal the
bifurcation of his protagonist. He even presents Leonardo’s paintings as
“albertian windows” that showcase the writer’s ideas on the divisions
behind Leonardo’s character.15 For example The Last Supper,16 by virtue
of its juxtaposition with the cast for the Francesco Sforza equestrian statue,
provides an excellent forum for discussion of the human-divine nexus (the
chapter in which the two works is portrayed is tellingly called “Ecce
Deus—Ecce Homo”).17 We first see the painting through the eyes of
Leonardo’s pupil Giovanni Beltraffio (Boltraffio), who eventually commits
suicide, unable to cope with the idea of Leonardo’s dualism. Consumed by
doubt about his teacher’s double nature, Giovanni is eager to take the
verisimilitude and the truthful passion of the mural as proof of Leonardo’s
Christianity: “So that is the real Leonardo! And yet I doubted, well-nigh
believing slander. Can the man who created this be an atheist? Who among
men is nearer to Christ than he!”18 A short time later, as he is looking at the
inscription “Ecce Deus” on the Sforza monument, the perplexed Giovanni
works up his courage to ask Leonardo how he could create such desperate
works. Leonardo responds that “these two are twins” and that their parallel
creation was necessary for finishing them.19 His “calm, wandering eyes”
and his “Why can it not?,” addressed to the bewildered Giovanni, who is
unable to comprehend the possibility of seeing a sculpture of Francesco
Sforza and a painting Christ as pendants, are meant to confirm Leonardo’s
Godman-like dismissal of the accepted human-divine hierarchy.20 Just as
well, in his Christian humility and compassion, when he asks for a
reprieve for the Gascon bowmen who have destroyed his cast of the Sforza
statue, and in his “demonic” pride as he tries to defy man’s inability to fly,
Leonardo refuses to commit to a single religious dimension.21 To use the
words of Leonardo’s other student and (in the novel) his detractor Cesare
Sesto, Leonardo appears to be “a Janus two-faced: one face toward Christ,
one toward Antichrist.”22
In another painting, the Virgin of the Rocks,23 two separate currents
merge, and the painting is presented as “the creation both of a great artist
and a great scientist,”24—true Christianity subsumes the pagan past
through nature.25 There, Leonardo’s succeeds in painting “living beauty,”
“mute music,” “a mystic hymn to the Most Pure Virgin, the Mother of
Veritable one” through “the blending of shade and light, the laws of
vegetable life, the structure of human body, the structure of the earth, the
mechanics of folds, the mechanics of feminine curls, which twist like the
flowing of whirlpools, so that the angle of descent is equal to the angle of

refraction.”26
Merezhkovsky transcends the idea of a simple binary in his description
of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne,27 introducing the number three. As
Leonardo explains to Giovanni, who is once again perplexed by the
master’s ostensibly equal concern given to the painting and construction
equipment he was designing for Caesar Borgia, it is not just a
personification of love born by knowledge,28 but a triangle of elements
which channel certain perpetual energy: “love, the force of Spirit, by
which worlds are moved, flows, streams from sky to earth, from mother to
daughter, from daughter to grandson, the mysterious Lamb, in order to
complete its eternal circle and return to Its Source.”29 The unending
interrelation between the first two elements—love and knowledge—and
the necessity to the third element, the Sacrifice of the Mysterious Lamb,
points to the symbolic importance of the number three for Merezhkovsky,
the thinker. The number three of Merezhkovsky’s cosmology is firmly
connected with Zinaida Gippius.30 Anyone familiar with Russian
Symbolism knows about the long-lasting and close bonds between the
spouses. Merezhkovsky and Gippius were “so closely connected that it is
impossible to speak about one of them without giving due to the other.”31
Gippius perpetuated this notion by saying that from her union with
Merezhkovsky “were born new thoughts and new insights which no longer
belonged to him alone, or to me alone. In all probability, they belonged to
both of us.”32 This intellectual fusion has led most critics to consider the
opinions of both when describing concepts set forward by Merezhkovsky.33
The Merezhkovskys distinguished three phases in their concept of the
history of mankind and its future:
The thesis, the flesh, the pre-Christian state of world evolution is the
revelation of the First Divine Hypostasis, God the Father. Christianity—the
stage of the antithesis, spirit—marks the revelation of the Second
Hypostasis, God the Son. The final, post—Christian, future stage will be
the revelation of the Third Hypostasis, God the Holy Spirit, in which all
three Hypostases will be united.34
They also emphasized the importance of the Trinity and hoped to awaken
in man an attraction to the “‘Three in One’ which is reflected in all aspects
of life.”35 Gippius wrote of her own worldview that it could be visualized
as an “all-embracing triangle in the structure of the world and as an
uninterrupted merging of the Three Principles, indivisible and yet separate
from one another.”36 Just before the nineteenth century had expired, the
Merezhkovskys initiated the so-called “Religious-Philosophical meetings,”37
and soon after formed “an inner church,” a cell of three people seeking to
resolve “The Mystery of the Three.” According to Bernice Rosenthal,
the “inner church” composed of the three, and the three “humanities”
revealed in the Bible, both indicate the Merezhkovskys’s tendency to
resolve all problems by juxtaposing conflicting elements in sets of three
which include a mediating factor. . . . As the “inner church” gained a few
converts, it was organized in concentric circles of “threes” radiating out
from the parent stem.38
This scheme of the three components, one of which mediates between the
other two, became a key concept shared by the Merezhkovskys’ real life
and the work of fiction about a Renaissance genius.
The Romance of Leonardo is replete with triangles. One of the most
interesting examples is the artistic triangle that includes Michelangelo and
Raphael, with Leonardo as a “mediating component.” Michelangelo is
presented to the reader as a self-appointed competitor of Leonardo—
young, fast and ambitious, but also petty and excessively temperamental.
In contrast to him, Leonardo is a wise and forgiving adversary who
understands the talent and significance of Michelangelo and regrets his
personal shortcomings. Raphael, who is introduced immediately after
Michelangelo, is described as his absolute opposite. He is a reverent,
humble, and grateful disciple of Leonardo. Unlike Michelangelo, whose
dubious social graces and bad looks force him into a solitary position of a
“worker-artist” covered with marble chips and mocked by the crowd,
Raphael’s impeccable manners, serene beauty and the ease, almost
incidental way of painting, made him the darling of the ladies and the
courtiers. He is untroubled, virtually to a point of dullness; his face, which
displays “meaningless tranquility” is contrasted to that of Michelangelo
who is a personification of Fury.39 When placed next to Michelangelo,
Leonardo appears less masculine: “before the furious force of Buonarotti,
the feminine charm of Leonardo seemed infinite weakness,” but when he
is compared to a tender and pliable Raphael, Leonardo is a paragon of
manhood.40
Another triangle, or rather a cluster of intersecting triangles, is
presented in the novel through the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Bergamini)
and Lucretia Crivelli.41 The “mediator” here is the Duke of Milan,
Ludovico Sforzo (Il Moro), whose marital infidelity towards his wife,
Beatrice D’Este creates the first triangle that consists of the two spouses
and his long-time mistress Cecilia Bergamini. The second triangle is
formed when Lucretia Crivelli, reluctantly, becomes his second mistress.
And although Il Moro dreams about all three women locked in a sisterly
embrace, it is not until the death of the Duchess of Milan that Luctetia
Crivelli and Cecilia Bergamini finally fulfill this fantasy of a voluntary
triple union.42 The Duke’s late wife, Beatrice D’Este, is present in spirit,
“gazing down from heaven and blessing” at Il Moro and his two
mistresses.43
Not surprisingly, the triangulation of relationships was a prominent
motif in the real life of the Merezhkovskys. The best known is the sixteen-
year long “celibate triple union” with Dmitrii Filosofov, which came right
after the completion of The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci.44 But even
prior to that, throughout the 1890s, Gippius span a web of the romantic
triangles,45 described at length in Olga Matich’s recent book Erotic
Utopia: Decadent Imagination in Russian Fin-de-Siècle.46 Of special
interest here is Gippius’ involvement with Akim Volynsky, “Russia’s first
modernist critic and editor of the influential journal Severnyi vestnik
(Northern Herald).”47 The Gippius-Volynsky affair commenced in early
1894 (it was marked by a love poem Gippius dedicated to Volynsky) and
continued until a nasty public break-up of 1896–1897.48 In the spring of
1896, when Merezhkovsky undertook his second trip to Italy to study
Leonardo’s physical surroundings, he did not go alone; Gippius and
Volynsky traveled to Italy as well. According to a Volynsky specialist, “the
purpose of the journey was scholarly: both Volynsky and Merezhkovsky
had developed a consuming interest in the Italian Renaissance, and each
conducted research.”49 However, in a more partial source, Gippius’s later
memoirs, a different picture emerges. Her version of events is informed by
her hostility towards the critic, whom she ridicules for his lack of
refinement, pointing out that until that trip he had never been abroad and
was “incapable of telling a statue from a painting.”50 Instead of conducting
his own research, in Gippius’s recollections, Volynsky is seen as
shadowing her husband and interfering with his work. The already strained
relationship between Gippius and Volynsky continued to deteriorate during
the trip, and in the early summer of 1896 he left the Merezhkovskys in
Milan.51 Because Merezhkovsky had by then printed his “Leonardo da
Vinci” poem and the first volume of the Christ and Antichrist trilogy in
Volynsky’s journal Severnyi Vestnik (The Northern Herald), he was
expecting to print his work on Leonardo there as well.52 But in 1897-1898
Volynsky placed his own series of articles on Leonardo in the journal and
subsequently refused to serialize Merezhkovsky’s novel.53 Two years later,
in 1900, he published a lavishly illustrated monograph about Leonardo. Its
second edition came out in 1909, the year Volynsky was made an honorary
citizen of Milan.
The two diverging approaches to the character of historical Leonardo

in general, and his masterpiece Mona Lisa54 in particular, reveal much
about Merezhkovsky’s understanding of love and art. Volynsky’s sinister
vision of the portrait stems from his conviction that Leonardo is a
“complicated talent” lacking in “moral feeling,” and “a great virtuoso
spreading the poison of voluptuous demonism through of his predatory
genius.”55 “Soulless, magnificent Leonardo da Vinci” paints a picture of a
woman “without temperament, without the inner fire, barren in her
feelings,” characterized by “moral impotence, covered up with an enigmatic
smile.”56 Citing Gabriel Seailles,57 Volynsky talks about Mona Lisa’s
resemblance to Leonardo concluding that this painting could not have been
the result of love between the painter and his model (as Hippolyte Taine
had suggested earlier), but of “an experiment over a live Mona Lisa, filled
with his ideas.”58
As he ponders human love and artistic infinity, Merezhkovsky also
raises the question of the connection between the live woman and her
depiction on canvas. Tormented by having to choose between the earthly
feeling for the live woman and her eternal painted image, his Leonardo
momentarily breaks the spell of inaction to find the solution in realizing
his love for Mona Lisa in the painting: “And that which he could not do in
life, he did in contemplation: blended the two images into one, united the
actuality and the reflection—the living and the immortal.”59 But when the
artist learns of Mona Lisa’s death, he is taken aback by a terrible
realization that “he had taken her life from the living woman to bestow it
upon the un-living.”60 For Merezhkovsky, Leonardo is anything but a
“predatory genius;” his terror at the possibility of the metaphorical murder
of Mona Lisa brings about the only (!) moment in the novel where he
looses faith in empirical knowledge. Moreover, as Merezhkovsky’s
Leonardo paints Mona Lisa’s portrait, he sees the very process of painting
as “profound and mystic caresses” that “bring forth an immortal image, of
a new being, which was being conceived, being born of them both, even as
a child is born of its father and mother.” 61 This connection of the sitter and
the artist in a transporting (sexual) act is significant here because, through
the act of painting Mona Lisa, Leonardo transcends the temporal existence
to become the forerunner (predtecha) of the New Age.62 And if the “new
being” in the Mona Lisa is “a changing, a feminine double of Leonardo
himself,”63 then its eternal character makes the relationship between the
artist and his sitter into what Gippius and Merezhkovsky described as true
love, the kind that creates a mysterious tie between love and immortality,
the kind that cannot repeat itself and is unchangeable.64 Such love allows
for “the transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the temporal into
the eternal” where the perfect human, the Godman is created.
In contrast to the union between a man and a woman based on
procreation (and exemplified in the novel by Machiavelli’s marriage), for
Gippius and Merezhkovsky, the ultimate goal of love, the unification of
“two in one,” is to allow one person to see oneself through another.65
Traditional marriage, they believed, impedes individuality, creativity, and
the search for truth.66 A truer union is one where the masculine and the
feminine unite in a single, androgynous entity. Human beings, according to
Gippius, are fundamentally bisexual and the “male-female” of one person
seeks to establish a “correspondingly-reversed” union with another.67
When Leonardo’s pupil Francesco Malzi sees the painting of St. John the
Baptist, he thinks of this “correspondingly-reversed” fusion of Leonardo’s
femininity and Mona Lisa’s masculinity.68 To him, St. John resembles both
Mona Lisa and Leonardo “as a son resembles his father and mother.”69
This mixing of two genders is directly connected with the theme of the
androgyne supremacy that was brought to the Merezhkovskys, most
immediately, through the writings of the Russian philosopher Vladimir
Soloviev. In his series of articles titled The Meaning of Love (1892-94),
Soloviev wrote that “the true human being . . . Cannot be merely a man or
merely a woman, but must be the higher unity of the two. To realize this
unity . . . is the direct task of love.”70 But it was Gippius and
Merezhkovsky who extended the philosopher’s ideas to Christian deities,
claiming the bisexuality of God (both Father and Mother, male and
female) and of Christ, whose resurrection was “the return to the state of
the complete individual a the whole sex, the androgyne.”71 Their
androgyne was the perfect individual, capable of experiencing the mystery
of the “two” in the sexual act, is linked with their “metaphysics of love.”72
Needless to say, the Godman of the Third Humanity will be androgynous
as well.
Merezhkovsky’s framing of androgyny as the summit of Leonardo’s
painting was not so much fiction as it was a reflection of his real-life
predicament. Based on the description the Merezhkovsky marriage by
Vladimir Zlobin, his secretary and part of another famous triple union with
Gippius and Merezhkovsky, there was a “correspondingly-reversed” role
allocation in their joint intellectual projects: “she inseminates, he gestates
and gives birth. She is the seed, he is the soil . . . ”73 Such reversal is not at
all surprising. It is commonly known that in real life Zinaida Gippius was
a cross-dresser, and her self-fashioning as a man extended to an assumed
male poetic persona and male pseudonyms. It is unclear weather Gippius
was also a hermaphrodite, as some of her contemporaries believed, but her
stance was purposefully androgynous.74 In 1900, the year the The

Romance of Leonardo was published, Gippius wrote:
I do not desire exclusive femininity, just as I do not desire exclusive

masculinity. Each time someone is insulted and dissatisfied with me; with
women, my femininity is active, with men—my masculinity. In my
thoughts, my desires, in my spirit—I am more a man; in my body—I am
more a woman. Yet, they are so fused together that I know nothing.75
In the novel, the portrait of Mona Lisa invested with Leonardo’s

knowledge, and the essence of the live sitter, becomes a total entity that
could “conceive,” together with Leonardo, the figure in another painting.
The “child” of the painter and the painting, John the Baptist, embodies the
androgynous character that comes from the amalgamation of the
“correspondingly-reversed” womanlike live Leonardo and his portrait of a
masculinized woman. This slippage between life and art corresponds to a
different slippage instrumental to the novel’s creation and its purpose. I
would argue that in his implicit self-identification with the main character
(Leonardo), Merezhkovsky mimicked the very transgression he ascribed to
the painter. By incorporating the real life features—the religious search,
the human triangles, the androgynous “two in one” of the his union with
Zinaida Gippius—the writer performed an act of typical symbolist life-
creation (zhiznetvorchestvo).76 He shaped the image of Leonardo from the
elements (human, metaphysical, and religious) taken from his own life,
and the novel became a laboratory in which he scrutinized the
contemporaneous paradigms of sex and religion. Because, as practically
every commentator of the novel has noticed, Merezhkovsky’s goals
surpassed mere fiction writing, The Romance of Leonardo was but an
instrument in his utopian search for the New Christianity in real, historical
future.
Notes
1
Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, Voskresshie bogi. (Leonardo da Vinci). Vols. 2 & 3 of
Sobraniie sochinenii (Moscow: Tipografiia Sytina, 1914). Dmitrii Merezhkovsky
(Merejkowski), The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci. trans. Bernard Guilbert
Guerney (New York: Random House, 1931). First edition 1901; second edition
1903; third edition 1906. After that, the novel was included in the 1911 Sobranie
sochinennii (Collected Works) of Merezhkovsky. It was translated into English and
French by 1902, and into German by 1903.
2
Waclaw Lednicki is the first one to apply the term biographie romancée to the
novel. He contented that Merezhkovsky was “the obvious father of the genre.”
Waclaw Lednicki, “D.S. Merezhkovsky, 1865–1941,” Russian Review, 1, no. 2

(April 1942): 83.
3
Nikolai Berdiaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), 224–5. Michail Tsetlin sided with Berdyev:
“The genre of the novel presented for Merezhkovsky merely a suitable form for
revealing his own spiritual antinomies and problems.” Mikhail Tsetlin, “D.S.
Merezhkovsky, 1865–1941,” Novoeselie (New York, 1942 [2]): 150. Temira
Pachmuss similarly deemphasized the aesthetic component as she referred to
Merezhkovsky’s biographies as “religious and philosophical essays not lacking in
literary value.” Temira Pachmuss, D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile: the Master of the
Genre of Biographie Romancée (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 30. In an opinion of
another critic, George Cheron, Merezhkovsky’s biographies are “theological and
metaphysical essays, which are freely fused onto a biographical skeleton.” George
Cheron, “Book review of T. Pachmuss’ D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile: the Master of
the Genre of Biographie Romancée,” SEEJ, 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 370. A
contemporary Italian scholar, Eridano Bazzarelli, described the novel as a “literary
diorama” where “against the background of not too detailed depictions one can see
the foreground filled with three-dimensional figures.” Eridano Bazzarelli. D. S.
Merezhkovsky: mysl’ i slovo (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), 51.
4
Peter G. Christensen, “Merezhkovsky and Berdiaev: Leonardo and the Meaning
of the Creative Act,” Symposium 45, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 180. See also Sigmund
Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (New York: Norton and
Co., 1990).
5
Zinaida Gippius-Merezhkovskaia, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky (Paris: YMCA Press,
1951), 59.
6
The first few books (chapters) of Resurrection of the Gods (Leonardo da Vinci)
were printed in the journal Nachalo in 1899.
7
Published in 1895 in Severyny vestnik, 5.
8
At the first glance, the portrayal of Leonardo da Vinci in Merezhkovsky’s novel
appears to be defined by the nature of its author as a fin-de-siècle writer, and as
such, an heir to the Romantic notions of artistic genius. Merezhkovsky’s belief in
the power of clashing the ostensible opposites (pagan/Christian, male/female)
against each other is at the base of his understanding of Leonardo. Perhaps the best
simile description of Leonardo in the book comes in the shape of Leonardo’s own
explanation of the arc structure: “an arc is nothing else save force, born of to united
and opposed weaknesses,” 148. Throughout the novel, Merezhkovsky portrays
Leonardo as a Romantic creator configuring for him the traditional “artist myth”
complete with superhuman qualities, solitude in the crowd, relativism of his views,
melancholy, and his profound reverence for nature—its magnitude and its riddles.
9
Merejkowski, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, 501.
10
Ibid., 422–23.
11
Ibid., 534.
12
Nikolai Berdiaev, Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, trans.
Katharine Lampert (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950), 149.
13
Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1994), 129. This opinion is seconded by Pachmuss who wrote that the
Merezhkovskys were eager to see duality in everything around them, “in the
structure of the world, with its contraposition of Heaven and earth; in love, with its
spiritual and sexual aspects, and in the human personality, with its male-female
components.” Temira Pachmuss, D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile: the Master of the
Genre of Biographie Romancée, 76-77.
14
Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism, 129. Russian critics have traditionally
presented the novel as the result of the cult of “contradictions” or “unification,”
thus ignoring, according to Mints, Merezhkovsky’s “synthesizing” efforts, see
Zinaida Mints, Voskreshie bogi, vol. 2. of Khristos i antichrist (Moskva: Kniga,
1990), 371.
15
Curiously, Walter Pater argued the same “programic” use of painting by
Leonardo himself: “And so it comes to pass that though he handles sacred subjects
continually, he is the most profane of painters; the given person or subject, Saint
John in the Desert, or the Virgin on the knees of Saint Anne, is often merely the
pretext for a kind of work which carries one altogether beyond the range of its
conventional associations.” Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 119.
16
1498, Mixed technique, 460 x 880 cm, Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie,
Milan.
17
Merezhkovsky also uses The Last Supper to outline the important traits of
Leonardo’s character. Describing the start of the mural’s deterioration, which
followed the manmade flooding of the site, he notes that Leonardo’s unusual
choice of medium was dictated as much by his desire for innovation, as by his lack
of the “rapidity and surety” necessary for working on wet plaster. The Romance of
Leonardo da Vinci, 330.
18
Ibid., 49-50.
19
Ibid., 54.
20
Pyman describes Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo as being above good and evil. A
History of Russian Symbolism, 33.
21
It should be quite clear to the reader that in Merezhkovsky’s eyes Leonardo’s
Christianity is not only strong, but also enlightened by his will to renew it through
the knowledge of nature. When Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan is taken to the holy
bonfire by followers of Savonarola, Giovanni’s reaction shows the monstrosity of
the destructive act that takes place against the background of dancing religious
fanatics in the state of rapture. The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, 201–202. The
scene ends with the appearance of Leonardo, his face calm as ever, taking
Giovanni by his hand and leading him out of the crowd. Merezhkovsky’s depiction
of Leonardo pouring over the freshly excavated statue of Venus with an
“expression determined calm and penetrating curiosity,” is meant to support
Leonardo’s utterance about the need to learn from nature, as the original source of
beauty, and not from the artists of antiquity that have mastered beauty of nature.
Merezhkovksy, 26. It may be that the Christ-Antichrist trilogy is “that peculiar
paganized christianism or christianized paganism.” Lednicki, “D.S. Merezhkovsky,
1865–1941,” 82. In many places in the novel paganism and Christianity are
metaphorically fused as in the church bell recast from a pagan statue, or in a
palimpsest of a Christian hymn written by a scribe into an ancient book over a
pagan hymn to Aphrodite, or in the two amulets worn by Ludovico Sforza—one
containing the relics of St. Christopher, another pieces of an Egyptian mummy. Yet,
Leonardo, the character, should not be seen as a “paganized Christian” but as a
Christian who strives to reproduce the beauty inherent in nature.
22
Merezhkovsky, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, 198.
23
1483-86, Oil on panel, 199 x 122 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
24
25
Merezhkovsky knew that in 1893 Walter Pater had already expressed the idea
that Leonardo, as a Renaissance painter, represented not so much a return to
antiquity as a return to nature. Pater wrote that through this return to nature
Leonardo “was seeking to satisfy a boundless curiosity by her perpetual surprises.”
The Renaissance, 98-99.
26
27
c. 1510, Oil on wood, 168 x 130 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
28
Merezhkovsky’s seemingly enigmatic phrase “great love is the daughter of great
knowledge” refers to the Madonna of the Rocks. Ibid., 348. In his description of
Madonna and Child with St. Anne the daughter-mother relationship between beauty
and love is literal. “Maria is absolute love, Anna—absolute knowledge. Maria
knows because she loves, Anna loves because she knows.” Sobranie sochinennii,
book XIII, 10, 187/2; not in the translation.
29
Ibid., book XIII, 10, 188/2.
30
Consistently with other real life/fictional parallels pertaining to the novel,
Gippius has been nicknamed Belaia diavolitsa (The White She-devil), in reference
to the antic marble sculptures and the prophetic pagan/Christian character
Cassandra of The Romance of Leonardo. The nickname was given to Gippius by
church dignitaries attending the Religious-Philosophical Society because of
Gippius’ preference for white dresses and her ostensibly ominous persona. Zlobin,
cited in Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de
Siecle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 213. Irina Odoevtseva
wrote in her memoirs that Gippius confirmed that she was known as the White
She-Devil. Irina Odoevtseva, Na beregakh Seny (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1989), 56.
31
Temira Pachmuss, Zinaida Hippius: An Intellectual Profile (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 55.
32
Cited in Pachmuss, Ibid., 55. See Pachmuss’s note 1, 80, where she talks about
the tremendous extant of Gippius’ influence on Merezhkovsky.
33
This is true for the period that followed their marriage in 1889. (They remained
together for 52 years, until his death in 1941.)
34
Pachmuss, D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile, 57–59. See James P. Scanlan, “The New
Religious Consciousness: Merezhkovskii and Berdiaev,” Canadian Slavonic Studies,
4, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 17–35.: “The third stage, . . . object and subject, flesh and
spirit, the ultimate unification of the First Kingdom of the Father and the Second
Kingdom of the Son in the Third Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Flesh. The
Third Testament will be revelation of the Three in One.”
35
Pachmuss, Zinaida Hippius, 60.
36
“In Merezhkovsky’s philosophy the mystical number “three” was of paramount
significance.” Ibid., 57.
37
Matich believes that they were Gippius’s brainchild. Erotic Utopia, 20.
38
Bernice Rosenthal, D.S. Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age: The Development of a
Revolutionary Mentality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 100. In 1901
Gippius began actively seeking someone to form a triple union with her and
Merezhkovsky; this union would function as the secret, conspiratorial nucleus of
the Church of the Third Testament.” Ibid., 192. On March 29, 1900 (Holy Thursday,
which commemorates the Last Supper) the triple “wedding” with Filosofov took
place: “the threesome removed all rings (Gippius had seven) associated with past
relationships and replaced them with crosses, which they hung around one
another’s necks, to mark the Trinitarian wedding.” The union was dissolved a few
months later but in 1905 they reunited and began to live as a “married” threesome
in (troebrachnost’), a ménage a trois. Ibid., 198.
39
Merezhkovsky, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, 471, 483-484.
40
Ibid., 484. One of the initial descriptions of Leonardo mentions his face “full
with delicate, almost lady-like beauty” and his “beautiful hand . . . With long and
fine fingers, just like woman’s hand,” 37; later, his beard is described as “soft like
the silk of a young girl’s curls,” 166.
41
Gippius wore a diamond dangling over her forehead (Andrei Bely, cited in
Matich, Erotic Utopia, 177), recalling a female portrait with a diamond on the
forehead and smooth dark hair covering her ear. It is supposed to represent Lucretia
Crivelli: “shiny black hair covering her ears, with a feroniere thread with a
diamond in the middle of her forehead.” Ibid., 245. This painting, although
officially attributed to Leonardo, is probably not by him, and almost certainly does
not represent Lucrezia Crivelli. It was once known as a Portrait of a Lady and is
still occasionally referred to as La Belle Féronnière.
42
43
Ibid., 247.
44
Matich insists that “Gippius’s uncertain sexual identity and unconventional
[celibate] marriage help to define the Merezhkovskys’ erotic utopia.” She links the
collectivity of the unconsummated love triangles with the “celibate triple union”
with Filosofov, “an ideological ménage a trois.” Ibid., 163.
45
Dmitry Filosofov compared Gippius’ approach to personal affairs to a spider
spinning a web set up to entangle those around him. Cited in Jenifer Presto,
Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation
of Flesh (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 294, note 61.
46
Matich describes Gippius’s triangles as “erotic dramas” and “epistolary
manipulation.” Erotic Utopia, 181. Among the combinations she lists are: Gipius,
Minsky, Chervinsky; Gippius, Minsky (begin of rel. 1891), Volynsky, (began
1894); Gippius, Minsky, Vengerov, Gippius. Minsky, Vil’kina, Gippius, Volynsky,
Vil’kina, Gippius, Volynsky, Lubov’ Gurevich; Minsky Vil’kina Vengerova.
According to Matich, Gippius articulated a conceptual model of triangular desire as

early as 1895. But after 1899, when the Merezhkovskys began to think about
creating their Church of the Third Testament, Gippius view of triangular desire
became increasingly ideological. Ibid., 191. I would propose the possibility that
that The Romance strengthened the “threefold” model, taking it beyond borders of
eroticism and epistolary manipulation.
47
Stanley Rabinowitz, “A ‘Fairy Tale of Love?’: The Relationship of Zinaida
Gippius and Akim Volynsky.” (Unpublished Materials), Oxford Slavonic Papers,
New Series, 24 (1991): 121.
48
Rabinowitz dates Gippius–Volynsky relationship 1894-97 (their correspondence
consists of 89 letters and two poems, “Priznaniie” (Jan., 1894) and “Liubov’ —
Odna” published in Severnyi Vestnik, the autograph dedicated to Volynsky, 132.
“Priznaniie” is one of her very few poems where she speaks of herself in the
feminine gender. “Liubov’ — Odna” is about eternal fidelity in love, one of her
best poems, transl. into German by Rilke. Characteristically, in her later, published
writings she denied the fact of corresponding with Volynsky extensively.
Rabinowitz, “A ‘Fairy Tale of Love?,’” 131.
49
Ibid., 127.
50
Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, 70.
51
Rabinowitz describes the final break up between Gippius and Volynsky. In her
most dramatic letter written over the period of some ten days (dated 24 May - 5
June 1896), she confessed to Volynsky that she has foreseen the difficulty of the
month they spent together (with Merezhkovsky) in Italy, and told him that if only
Volynsky had asked her to follow him to Paris when he left Milan, she would have
done so (Rabinowitz, “A ‘Fairy Tale of Love?,’” 142). Later Gippius recalled
things differently, maintaining that Volynsky parted with them in Florence; see
Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, 71. What seems to have happened, however, is that
Volynsky did not invite her to join him as he was going to Paris see a female
friend. This put Gippius in the throws of jealousy and effectively ended their
relationship; see Rabinowitz, “A ‘Fairy Tale of Love?,’” 141, letter no. 17.
52
Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, 70.
53
Stanley Rabinowitz, “A Room of His Own: The Life and Work of Akim
Volynsky,” Russian Review, 50, no. 3 (July 1991): 300.
54
c. 1503-5, Oil on panel, 77 x 53 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris
55
Akim Volynsky, Leonardo-da-Vinci (Kiev: Tip. S.V. Kul’zhenko, 1909), 43, 100.
56
Ibid., 211, 124.
57
Seailles, Gabriel, Leonard de Vinci, l’artiste et le savant, 1892.
58
Volynsky, Leonardo-da-Vinci, 137, 148.
59
60
Ibid., 489
61
Ibid., 474.
62
In “Taina triekh” (“Mystery of the Three”) (Prague, 1925), Merezhkovsky talks
about sex as a window into the forth dimension: “The whole body lives in three
dimensions, whereas Sex lives in a fourth.” 48, quoted in Pachmuss, 71 As such,
explains Pachmuss, “only in sexual experience is it possible to transcend our

empirical and temporal existence,” 72.
63
64
65
See, for example, Gippus’ letter to Zlobin: “[look] At yourself—through me.”
Matich points out that “the message is that two could become one in a refracting
and reflecting mirror by making their bodies transparent to each other. Erotic
Utopia, 207-208.
66
Machiavelli, who is presented as one of Leonardo’s reflections, has a wife and a
child that distract him from his main purpose in life: that of a writer and a thinker:
“one or the other: either wife or politics,” 116/2. This rises from Merezhkovsky’s
early attitudes to love. Bedford offers a very interesting discussion of his early
poetry where Merezhkovsky spoke about the “tragedy of love . . . was that the
souls of two persons could never merge and become one.” For Merezhkovsky, love
“held the terrors of enslavement. [He] knew that it was possible to fall under the
sway of a loved person, so that one’s will is lost completely. For an extremely
proud man who exulted in his freedom, this prospect was not appealing, and he
expressed his opinion if love as slavery in no uncertain terms.” Charles Bedford,
The Seeker: D.S. Merezhkovskiy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1975), 23-
24.
67
Pachmuss, D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile, 73-74. Also see Pachmuss, Zinaida
Hippius, 92-93.
68
The idea of the androgyne is actually brought up by one of the characters in the
novel, the poet and courtier of Francis I Saint-Gelais, who describes St. John the
Baptist as an attempt “to resurrect that which no longer exist in nature, wishing to
unite the beginnings severed by the god, — the male and the female.”
69
Ibid., 556.
70
Vladimir Soloviev, “Smysl liubvi” (1892–1894), Sobraniie sochinenii (St.
Peterburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, n.d.), 7:24.
Cited in Matich, Erotic Utopia, 209. Vasily Rozanov claimed that one might
almost present it as an aphorism: “any talent is hermaphroditic.” Liudi lunnogo
sveta. Metafizika khristianstva (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1911), 246, note 1.
71
“Hippius stressed the bisexuality of human nature and regretted that its male and
female components are united in a harmonious way, as there are in God and Christ
. . . As God the Father is bisexual, so is the Son, in Whom the Masculine and
Feminine are harmoniously blended, because in the divine and perfect order of the
universe God the Father and god the Son form One Unity, One Whole.” The same
understanding of Christ as the mix of male and female stood for Merezhkovsky
himself. Pachmuss, Zinaida Hippius, 73. According to Bedford: “the basis of his
[Merezhkovsky’s] belief in the Holy Ghost as the Eternal Mother was not derived
exclusively from his own logic, but from an apocryphal source in which Christ
speaks of ‘My Mother, the Holy Ghost.’ God is therefore Father and Mother, male
and female—a bisexual Supreme Being… Christ had to be male and female in
order to fit into [Merezhkovsky’s] concept of resurrection as being the return to the
state of the complete individual and the whole sex, the androgyne.” The Seeker:
D.S. Merezhkovskiy, 161–62.
72
73
Vladimir Zlobin: “v ikh brake rukovodiashchaia, muzhskaia rol’ prinadlezhit ne
emu, a ei. Ona ochen’ zhenstvenna, on — muzhesven, no v plane tvorcheskom,
metafizicheskom, roli perevernuty. Oplodotvoriaet ona, vynashivaet, rozhaet on.
Ona—semia, on—pochva . . . ” Vladimir Zlobin, Tiazhelaia dusha (Washington:
Ardis, 1970), 19.
74
See Matich, Erotic Utopia, 172 and 177, who also points out that Gippius’ use of
a cigarette holder was taken, at the time, as a sign of a transgressive, lesbian
sexuality.
75
Cited in Ibid., 209. Matich believes that although Gippius was familiar with the
contemporary studies in psychopathology and the degeneration theory she tended
to connect sex with metaphysics. Ibid., 194.
76
See Pachmuss on Merezhkovsky’s biographie romancée as revealing his life-
creating (zhiznetvorchesvo). D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile, 46-47.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE PARANOIAC DISCOURSE OF SYMBOLISM
AND DELUSION OF PERSECUTION:
FEODOR SOLOGUB AND ANDREI BELY
OLGA SKONECHNAYA
We must not forget that madness is a phenomenon of thought.

—Jacques Lacan
The theme of persecution is present in all the currents of Russian

Symbolism. We can find it both in the works of Decadent writers and in
those of the so-called “younger” Symbolists.
We will attempt to establish certain links between the clinical paranoiac
mentality and the poetics of Sologub and Bely,1 without touching upon (as
some studies do) the psychological character of the authors, and at the
same time keeping in mind only the literary strategy reflected in their
prose.
Let us begin with a look at the paranoiac symptoms, described by early
psychiatry, dating to the late nineteenth century, which can be found in
textbooks that were accessible to the Symbolists themselves. Richard
Kraft-Ebing, and Sergei Korsakov after him, include paranoia in the
category of the so-called “initial insanity.” Delusion grows out of the
initial “absurd thought” and represents an error of the mind. A false idea is
usually rooted in a sense of a new interpretation of the outside world and
in the principle of absolute focus on oneself. A paranoiac is characterized
“by constant readiness to find a connection between accidental outside
events and his own personality.”2 The delusion strives to justify, to explain
the peculiar connection between the ego and the world. As a result there
appears an unshakable and uncritical paranoiac system, which, nevertheless,
adheres to the formal logic of mental functioning. As Kraft-Ebing puts it,
the patient is characterized by “an ability to combine ideas and to
rationalize.”
As the disease progresses, we may discern an initial stage, which is
marked by depressive anxiety, vague premonitions, doubts regarding reality
Paranoiac Discourse of the Symbolism and the Delusion of Persecution 549
and painful yearning to understand its secret mechanisms. The patient

suspects hidden meanings in objects of everyday life, in natural phenomena,
in the actions and moods of other people. Korsakov defines this stage of
emerging psychosis as the delusion of estimation or the delusion of
meanings. He points out that the paranoiac has a tendency to see symbols
everywhere: a cloud in the sky, growing trees, a landscape, a wallpaper
design—all give birth to special interpretations.
The second stage brings sudden understanding, an insight. Conviction
replaces doubts. Reality, which seemed inexplicable before, becomes a
coherent universe with the ego of the patient occupying its center. “He is
the object of all influences,”3 writes Korsakov. We may say that the idea of
total persecution emerges as an answer to a certain question. From now on,
persecution becomes the only possible meaning, showing through the
vague images of reality. But the persecution itself needs to be explained.
“The paranoiac,” writes Kraft-Ebing,
does not know why he is being hunted; but little by little he reaches the
conclusion that he has become an unfortunate victim of some conspiracy
… Depending on his political views or on his social status the patient
begins to think that he is falling a prey to some gang of Jesuits, Franc-
Masons, Social Democrats, Spiritists, etc., or to believe that he is
persecuted by the secret police, by his neighbor.4
In this way the secondary delusion accentuates the factor of the cause and
turns it into a conspiracy theory as a sort of “causa prima.”
Kraft-Ebing also describes in detail the reaction of the persecuted
person, who begins his own hunt for imaginary enemies. The actors of the
delusion turn into mirror figures, which French psychiatry defines as
“persécuteurs persécutés”.
In those years one of the most influential theories was that of paranoiac
constitution, which later, in 1932 Jacques Lacan criticized in his dissertation.5
It stated that paranoia simply represents the development of certain basic
characteristics of the personality. According to Kraft-Ebing, “mental
derangement very often appears as something like a hypertrophy of an
abnormal character. Thus, for instance, we can see that a distrustful
individual, who since early age was concentrated on himself and preferred
to be alone, suddenly falls a prey to the delusion of persecution, while a
man who is brute, self-satisfied and weird in terms of his views regarding
law becomes an insanely litigious person.”6
The influence of this theory can be seen in The Pitiful Demon. The
main hero, Peredonov's, insanity seems to be rooted in his unpleasant
character. He appears to be a copy of some portrait of an “insanely
550 Chapter Twenty-Eight
litigious person.” We know that Sologub had a model—a mentally

deranged teacher named Strakhov, who worked together with the writer at
a school in the provincial town Velikiye Luki.7 At the same time, the plot
of the story carefully follows the process described in textbooks.8 Sologub
depicts the stages that the delusion goes through, how the persecuted
person likes to change his appearance (Peredonov wants to “have a
Spanish haircut,” which reminds us both of Kraft-Ebing’s details of his
clinical presentation and of the Notes of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol).
Sometimes, as Kraft-Ebing writes, the patient begins to act and may try to
kill his persecutor, like Peredonov does with his imaginary double,
Pavlushka, who, as the protagonist believes, wants to take his place, marry
his bride and receive the job of an inspector instead of him.
We are justified in interpreting The Pitiful Demon as an illustration of a
clinical case, a story that deals with the transformation of an individual
with a bad character into a lunatic. It will be remarked that, staying faithful
to the idea of his character, Sologub not only turns to the realistic tradition,
but remains within its boundaries. Peredonov here is a representative of a
specific social-psychological type, the same “little man,” who expands in
the constructions of his own delirium.
We must also keep in mind the fact that The Pitiful Demon is one of the
first novels where Realism and Naturalism coexist with Symbolism, or
evolve into the latter.9 Symbolism is primarily concerned not with the
character of a personage, but with the issues of seeing, of perception, of
interpreting reality.
For Sologub, just like for Andrei Bely, paranoia is not a variation of a
character, but a specific form of cognition.
If we may attempt to define in general terms the Symbolist notion of
clinical psychosis, then we can interpret it in terms of being unable to cope
with a new feeling of the ephemeral, with the insufficiency of material
presence, with finding oneself unprepared for metaphysical experience and
for reading the signs of another reality that shows through the visible. The
ailment of modern man is that he sees things in a different way; the hints
are already visible, but their meaning is unclear.
So the world, with all its senselessness, urges Peredonov to become
suspiciously alert, to keep asking endless questions about cause and aim,
since exterior existence must have some deep explanation. Nothing lives
and happens without a reason, but is created by someone with a purpose.
“Why?—he was thinking sadly and could not understand.—Why is
that cat on the fence?”10 “They brought all this darkness, why?”11 Seeking
for an answer, he was always
looking behind an object. For this reason in his eyes objects would become
double, would fade, flicker. Who was he looking for? Informers. They were
hiding behind every object. Enemies sent against Peredonov a whole army
of informers.12
An informer, a persecutor or simply a shadow—this is the hidden essence

of things, the universal meaning concealed in phenomena.
In Sologub's case, this approach to reality can be traced back to Arthur
Schopenhauer, whom he admired so much. Peredonov's way of seeing
things is impaired by the laws of the world’s will or by the laws of
plurality: time, space, causality. These laws seem to obscure the ideal
prototype of a phenomenon, its ideal prime cause as an eternal entity,
forcing it to exist only within relations with its double. The rule of total
competition reigns in the universe of plurality, when one's double, the
shadow “other,” strives to eliminate the individual, to deprive him of his
personality. The supposed unity of these others, “the army of informers”, is
determined by still another turn of causality or a sense of purpose—a
conspiracy (“the enemies are sending informers”). The conspiracy
structures paranoiac reality, appearing as a malicious intent in opposition
to divine intention, to the ideal prime cause of the World, which creates a
unique and integral ego.
Peredonov's way of seeing shapes the poetics of the novel and its
language. The space of The Pitiful Demon represents a universe of mirror
maneuvers of the protagonist and his enemies—neighbors, brides,
colleagues, who endlessly devise new malicious plans, turn into informers
and malefactors.
Paranoia, as a model of cognition, can also be found in the works of
Andrei Bely. This writer follows the poetics of Sologub, but he moves
even further away from the tradition of realistically depicting a character.
The reality of his novels is the reality of a delirium. In the contemporary
world delirium, as he said himself, became a fact of life. Now the city is
the scene where the story unfolds, and, at the same time, the stage is the
sick ego,13 which goes through a process of dissolution or the altering of
meanings: objects change their habitual places and names abandon things.
Phenomena that are uprooted from their usual position in the world, just
like in The Pitiful Demon, try to find a reason for their appearance and
receive an answer: there is a purpose here, it is not accidental. So in the
novel Petersburg the hero realizes: “this small house was not for nothing.”
“Not for nothing” means according to the law of persecution.
As the author himself notes, the space of Petersburg is the space of a
mind game. This is why each personage is being haunted by his own
thoughts, which are externalized in other characters.
At the same time, Bely's texts abound with special presences, which
are typical for clinical delirium—agents of influence: Masons, members of
sects or even bacilli, harmful cells, nervous currents, etc. They may be
called personages-conductors, because they tie the interior and the exterior,
the ego (the “brain” or the “stomach”), and the world. This role of
conductors-persecutors, acting in the sphere of mental processes, points to
their connection with the categories of Immanuel Kant in Bely's demonic
interpretation.
In Kant's philosophy, the subject, as the unity of the logical functions
of the mind, constitutes the world of objects or nature. In Bely's opinion,
reality, created by a rational subject, is a phantasmagoria. The cognizant
ego, the subject realizes itself as a broken delirious consciousness, while
the objects it creates are a combination of reason (interior) and feeling
(exterior). Reason is not capable of understanding or dominating feeling,
which is why it is persecuted by its own defective creations. Masons,
police agents, and bacilli are subject-object connections, logical operations
that organize the delirious chaos.
Any thought is always active, including abstract thought, as Bely
writes in his essay “On the Meaning of Cognition.” The Kantian cognitive
act is penetrated by evil will and produces systematized delirium or
contemporary reality. Causality is the universal law of discursive thinking,
which has no knowledge of the higher cause, i.e. God. Causality in
combination with the will is a conspiracy or a certain type of a collective
brain, directing the functioning of mental movements or Masons.
However, the thought, in the quoted essay, has no need for conductors and
carriers. Bely speaks here directly about “Kant's conspiracy,” “the
conspiracy of abstraction.”14
But cognition as persecution is opposed by a different type—cognition-
joining, symbolization, love; by a cognitive act, when the ego and the
world, the subject and the object are united in a single universal Meaning.
This is achieved, as Bely believes, by intuition, which transcends logic and
feeling. The writer tries in his essays to work out a comprehensive
epistemological system. His poetics reflect an endless process of fighting
between two cognitions, where persecution always triumphs.
Thus paranoia becomes a cognitive strategy or a type of world outlook,
which determines not so much the image of the personage, but literary
language. In this sense the depiction of psychosis, created by the
Symbolists, turns out to be deeper than the clinical research, conducted by
psychiatrists of their time.
We may notice the fact that the notion of psychosis, especially in
Bely's version, has certain connections with Lacan's linguistic concept of
paranoia. Our work only aims at outlining these links.

Let us point out certain affinities between the paranoiac strategy of
Symbolism and Lacan's theory. First of all, Lacan spoke against the notion
of psychic integrity. It is an illusion since at the basis of our “normal” ego
there lies a model of alienation, which is partly neutralized by verbal
activity, by connecting a sign with the flow of meanings. As the signifying
chain breaks, the illusion is destroyed, while alienation acquires absolute
value.
As Symbolists believed, an integral ego does not exist in the physical
world, but is “programmed;” it preexists in the ideal world. Man can reach
this integrity only with the help of some special actions, intuitive
cognition, which unites phenomena with hidden essence. With all the
differences between the linguistic and the metaphysical symbol, we must
emphasize one important common feature: Lacan's subject and the
Symbolist integral ego are born and function only in the sphere of
activities connected with signs.
Since, as Lacan affirms, psychosis is the distortion of the structure of
the language, it manifests itself primarily in the formal features of the
patient's speech. The speech and its characteristics are the only documents
of the sickness.
Since the paranoiac text of Symbolism is an example of reading
incorrectly the signs of the other reality, and since these mistakes create
poetic language, paranoia represents a feature of style.
We may finally note that Lacan connected psychosis with the process
of dissolution and reorganization of language and meaning that
accompanies the birth of a new religion, new philosophy.15 Symbolism
manifests the revolution of poetics and order of thoughts. They open the
way for a vortex of new meanings and reorganize language structures. In a
Symbolist vision, like in a delirious imagination, this reorganization
appears as the destruction of the Universe, as the end of the World.
Notes
1
Among contemporary works regarding this subject (concerning prose): Magnus
Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj's Novel Peterburg
(Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 1982); Vadim Rudnev “Psikhoticheskii
discurs" (Psychotic Discourse), Slovar Bezumiya (The Dictionary of Insanity)
(Moscow: Klass, 2007), 264-265; V. Rudnev, “Melkii bes Feodora Sologuba: ot
Paranoi k Shizofrenii,” Filosofia Yazyka I Semiotika Bezumiya (“Feodor Sologub’s
The Pitiful Demon: from Paranoia to Schizophrenia,” The Philosophy of Language
and the Semiotics of Insanity) (Moscow: RGB, 2007), 396-411; ɋ. Guéry. ''Une
histoire de la folie à l'Age d'argent,'' in l'Age d'argent dans la culture
russe//Modernité russes 7. (“A Story of Insanity in the Silver Age,” in The Silver
Age in Russian Culture), ed. J.-C. Lanne (Lyon: 2007), 279-290; O. Skonechnaya,
“Russkii Paranoidalnii Roman: ot Peterburga k Priglasheniyu na Kazn,” Semiotika
Strakha (“Russian Paranoiac Novel: from Petersburg to An Invitation to an
Execution,” The Semiotics of Insanity), ed. N. Buhks and F. Conte (Paris-Moscow:
Evropa, 2005), 185-204; “Tot Kto Stoit za Nimi, ili Zametki o Paranoidalnoi
Poetiki Andreiya Belogo,” Semiotika Bezumiya (“The One Who Stands behind
them or Notes on the Paranoiac Poetics of Andrei Bely,” The Semiotics of
Insanity), ed. N. Buhks (Moscow-Paris: Evropa, 2005), 116-127; “O Figure
Umensheniya u Feodora Sologuba” (Regarding the Diminutive Figure in Feodor
Sologub’s Works), Slavic Almanac 14, no. 2 (2008): 162-170
2
Richard von Kraft–Ebing, Uchebnik Psykhiatrii (A Manual of Psychiatry) (St.
Petersburg: K.L. Rikker, 1897), 525.
3
Sergey Sergeevich Korsakov, Kurs Psikhyatrii (A Course of Psychiatry) (St.
Petersburg: Kushnerev y K, 1893), 390.
4
Kraft-Ebing, Uchebnik Psykhiatrii, 531.
5
Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 57.
6
Ibid., 513.
7
B.U. Ulanovskaya, “O Prototipakh Romana F. Sologuba Melki Bes“ (Regarding
the Prototypes of F. Sologub’s Novel The Pitiful Demon), Russkaia Literatura, 3
(1969), 183-184.
8
Regarding Sologub’s knowledge of psychopathology see M. Pavlova, Pisatel-
inspektor. Feodor Sologub y F.K. Teternikov (Writer–inspector. Feodor Sologub
and F.K. Teternikov), (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2007), 232.
9
On the influence of Naturalism, the “Experimental Novel,” and on the
transformation of Naturalism into Symbolism see Ibid., 146-168; 232; 238.
10
Fyodor Sologub, The Pitiful Demon (Moscow: Khudozhesvennaya Literatura,
1988), 222.
11
Ibid., 212.
12
Ibid., 180
13
The theme of delirium concerning the St. Petersburg conspiracy brings to mind
an authentic document of insanity, an event described in V. Kandinski’s book On
Pseudo-Hallucinations. See Skonechnaya, “Skandal y Bred o Kontse Sveta”
(Scandal and Delirium regarding the End of the World), Semiotika Skandala (The
Semiotics of Scandal.) Ed. N. Buhks (Moscow-Paris: 'Evropa', 2008), 329.
14
A. Bely, Smysle Posnaniya (On the Meaning of Knowledge) (Petrograd: Epokha,
1922), 13.
15
Lacan, Le Séminaire, vol. 3, Les Psychoses (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981), 226.
“La sortie d'un signifiant nouveau . . . l'apparition d'un régistre comme celui d'une
nouvelle réligion, par example, n'est pas quelque chose que nous pouvons
manipuler facilement . . . Il y a virage des significations, changement du sentiment
commun . . . mais il y a aussi toutes sortes de phénomènes dits révèlatoires qui
peuvent paraître assez perturbant pour que les termes dont nous nous servons dans
les psychoses n'y soient absolument inappropriés. L'apparition d'une nouvelle
structure dans les relations entre les signifiants de base . . . ont un caractère
ravageant.” (The emergence of a new significant . . . , the appearance of such a
dimension, for example, as a new religion, is not something that we can easily
control . . . Turns of meanings appear, changes in the general feeling, . . . but also a
multitude of various phenomena of so-called revelations, which may seem to be to
pretty disturbing; so that the notions that we use in connection with the psychoses
regarding them would not seem absolutely inappropriate. The appearance of a new
structure in base significant . . . has a destructive character.)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT
AND ITS EFFECTS ON TURKISH LITERATURE
HÜSEYIN ALTINDIù
The Symbolist movement flourished in Europe during the last two

decades of the nineteenth century; first in French prose and verse,
followed by visual arts. It was largely a reaction against Naturalism and
Realism, anti-idealistic movements that attempted to capture reality in its
gritty particularity and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over ideal.
Unlike their preceding generation, they saw art as being subjective,
ambiguous, and mysterious, and instead of looking outward into the world
for their subject matter, it came from their emotions, dreams, and spiritual
psyche.
In literature, the movement had its roots in Les Fleurs de mal (The
Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Baudelaire. The aesthetic was developed by
Stephane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 70s. In the
1880s, the aesthetic was articulated through a series of manifestoes and
attracted a generation of writers. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which
Baudelaire greatly admired and translated into French, were a significant
influence and the source of many stock tropes and images.
Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths
that could only be accessed by indirect methods. Therefore, they wrote in a
suggestive and metaphorical manner, endowing special images or objects
with symbolic meaning. It would be difficult to point to an instance in
which a word has wandered further from its original meaning and moved
from a narrow and local use to an extraordinarily broad and comprehensive
meaning. As a result of this, some poets published a manifesto. The
Symbolist Manifesto was published in 1886 by Jean Moréas, who
announced that Symbolism was hostile to plain meanings, declamations,
false sentimentality, and matter-of-fact description. In the manifesto,
which was published in the major Parisian newspaper Le Figaro, Moréas
described Symbolism as an
The Symbolist Movement and Its Effects on Turkish Literature 557
Enemy of teaching, of declamation, of false sensitivity, of objective

description, Symbolic poetry seeks to clothe the idea in a perceptible form
that nevertheless will not be the ultimate goal in itself, but, which, even as
it serves to express the idea, remains subject to it. The idea for its part must
not allow itself to be deprived of sumptuous robes of external analogies;
for the essential character of symbolic art is never to reach the Idea itself.
Accordingly, in this art, the depictions of nature, the actions of human
beings, all the concrete phenomena would not manifest themselves; these
are but appearances perceptible to the senses destined to represent their
esoteric affinities with primordial ideas.1
To be able to allow greater room for fluidity, the Symbolist poets wanted
to liberate techniques of versification. Symbolist poems sought to evoke
rather than to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of
the poet’s soul.
Turkish-French Relations
Considering the relationship between modern Turkish poetry and
French poetry as a fact emanating from a vast framework of a plan of
civilization, I would like to emphasize that it would be unjust to qualify it
as simple imitation, and that such a step would forcefully restrict the
context when it would be desirable that this relationship be treated
meaningfully in the light of certain critical approaches based on modern
literary theory. The civilization project that I mentioned is the civilization
project of Ottoman-Turkish society. Since the eighteenth century, Turkish
society has been in a process called modernization or westernization. This
process was meant to either imitate or adapt some of the institutions and
norms of the West to the public. While adapting some values and norms
from the west, some Turkish intellectuals—politicians, writers, poets,
etc.—preferred to stay ''Turkish,'' keeping their own forms and following
the innovations in the west; a kind of integration was their choice. Our
intellectual history insisted on both staying traditional, as Oriental, and
being forced into modernity. For this reason, Turkish poets should be
considered from this point of view as we cannot put the Turkish poets out
of the mentioned intellectual history.
When we look at literary history from this perspective, we see that the
Ottoman Empire had close contact with France. Both sides had political
and cultural partnerships in the past. They opened a high school,
Galatasaray Lisesi (High School), in Istanbul whose medium of instruction
is French. Most of the intellectuals of the day went to this school. The
utilization of French culture and literature was a sign of being modern and
558 Chapter Twenty-Nine
westernized in those days. Thanks to this, French gained popularity among

the public; Turkish poets and writers learned French and went to France to
study. Most of the students who studied at Galatasaray Lisesi later became
poets, journalists, politicians and so on. For years, French was the most
common and important foreign language in Turkey. French language and
French culture were vehicles to carry western thought and innovations in
every field to Turkey. The poets and writers of the day translated French
literature—novels and poems—into Turkish. In this way, every movement
in western literature was carried to the Turkish literature by their
contemporaries.
Our scholars belonging to the period of renovation have followed
Western philosophy and philosophers and informed Ottoman society of
these currents of thoughts. The philosophical currents of this period not
only affected that era, but also affected the Republican era and our present
time. Their effects have not ended after entering Turkey; rather, their
existence has lasted through today. Most of the intellectuals were educated
in western colleges and were influenced by French Literature.2
In Turkey, like in many European literatures, Symbolists were directly
influenced by French poets and poetry. Cenap ùehabettin, who was the
first poet to use symbolism in Turkish literature, went to Paris for expertise
after graduating from the faculty of Medicine. When he was in France, he
followed the popular literary movements and read Verlaine and Mallarmé.
He was especially influenced by Verlaine. Some French poets, such as
Charles Guarin, were his close friends. Upon returning to Turkey, he had
some of his poems published. The poems were so different and new that
they attracted attention of the public. Some readers and critics even
thought they were translations from French literature as the spirit and
essence was different from the traditional poetry. The words and phrases
he used had never been used before. The rhythm is immediately seen in
Cenap’s poems. There are no coincidences in the text of his poems. On the
contrary, he uses the words and phrases consciously. He disregards the
opinions of the public. At this point we can see Moréas’ influence on him
as “all the concrete phenomena would not manifest themselves; these are
but appearances perceptible to the senses destined to represent their
esoteric affinities with primordial ideas.” He is unaware of the problems
that the community has. His poems do not reflect the sociological
background of the community.
Akyüz stated in his book that in his poems, Cenap gave priority to
simile, music, and images. He brought new and different images to
Turkish poetry. He advocated the superiority of the art in poetry and the
fact that the poems could not be written in a language that everybody can
understand; that is to say, the poem should be esoteric.3 ùehabettin is the

first poet to use sonnet and terse rime. We follow the traces of Symbolists
in Cenap’s poems. Dizdaro÷lu states that Cenap regarded Symbolism as a
system of simile and metaphor. The elaborate similes give the reader an
effect, an impression, rather than a realistic description. We should bear in
mind that Symbolism seeks not to describe but to suggest and evoke
sensations in the reader’s mind. For that reason, his works are not exactly
considered true examples of Symbolism. What he had done was to reflect
the western influence. Halit Ziya Uúaklıgil, poet and writer, states that
“With Cenap’s poem, the Turkish poetry and verse reached at a level of its
western contemporaries.” Uúaklıgil indicates that Turkish language has
never been used so pure and clear before.4 Haúim, on the other hand, used
symbolism as a discipline, and his leading role cannot be denied.5 Haúim
plays with sounds and meaning and uses words as much for their sound as
for meaning.
The incomprehensible and complicated language of the poetry can be
seen in fiction and art too. Like poetry, the writers under the influence of
French literature used unfamiliar phrases and new words; sometimes they
used triple or quadruple phrases.6 The Symbolist movement had an
influence not only in literature but in art as well. In Turkish art, Osman
Hamdi Bey, like many other Turkish intellectuals, was one of the most
important figures that was influenced by French symbolism and literary
currents and adapted them into Turkish art. He was sent to Paris to study
Law. However, some time later, he decided that he would prefer to study
art and changed his major. When in France, he was highly influenced by
the French artists. His most famous work, which is thought to be the best
example of symbolism in Turkish art, is Kaplumba÷a Terbiyecisi (Tortoise
Tamer). Since my article is on the effects of the movement on language
and literature, I will not analyze his art in detail.
Yahya Kemal, one of the most famous Turkish poets who stayed in
France between 1903-1912, states that he read one of Mallarmé’s articles
in 1905 where he advises people to read Verlaine’s Fetes Glandes if they
want to learn how to write a poem. He added that he followed his master’s
(Kemal called Mallarmé master) advice and read Fetes Glandes, which
inspired him a lot. He wrote in Turkish but without imitating him.
Admired for the fluidity and impressionistic imagery of his verse, Verlaine
succeeded in liberating the musicality of the French language from the
restrictions of its classical, formal structure. It is this feature that most
Turkish symbolists tried to adapt—musicality and new forms of the
language. In Verlaine’s poems we can see the gardens of the Palace of
Versailles, tiranons, etc. Kemal believed that this approach could be
adapted to Turkish poetry and wrote poems on “Lale Devri” (the Tulip
Period—a period when Ottoman Empire reached its golden age and rulers
spent most of their time enjoying the life in magnificent palaces). This
poem is the combination of the old and new forms. According to modern
poetry, the vocabulary and syntax—that is, the word order—should be
different from that of the daily language. The language, of course, is a type
of the daily language. However, daily spoken style should be different.
In this part of the paper I would like to discuss the works of Ahmet
Haúim. Hâúim's early poetry was very much in the Parnassian and
Decadent vein of the poets Tevfik Fikret (1867–1915) and Cenab
ùahâbeddin (1870–1934), early influences who were a part of the
Edebiyyât-ı Cedîde (New Literature) movement. Hâúim's later poetry,
however—collected in Göl Saatleri and Piyâle—evidences more of a
French Symbolist influence, particularly that of Henri de Régnier, whom
Hâúim greatly admired. This late poetry can, to a certain extent, be seen to
adhere to the Fecr-i Âtî movement's variation of the Symbolist motto:
"Sanat úahsî ve muhteremdir" (Art is personal and sacred). In line with this
motto and with the Symbolist movement in general, much of his poetry
was more indirect than direct, using thick imagery so as to create a strong
sensory impression, as in the opening lines of his famous poem from the
book Piyâle, "Merdiven" (Staircase):
Slowly, slowly will you mount this Staircase

—A heap of sun-tinged leaves upon your skirts—
And for a while gaze weeping at the sky . . .
The waters darken and your face grows pale,
Look at the scarlet air, for evening comes . . .
Bowed towards the earth, the roses endless glow,
Flame-like the nightingales bleed upon the boughs;
Has marble turned to bronze, do waters burn?
This is a secret tongue that fills the soul
Look at the scarlet air, for evening comes . . .
(Translated by Bernard Lewis)
[A÷ır a÷ır çıkacaksın bu merdivenlerden,

Eteklerinde güneú rengi bir yı÷ın yaprak
Ve bir zaman bakacaksın semaya a÷layarak . . .
Sular sarardı . . . yüzün perde perde solmakta
Kızıl havaları seyret ki akúam olmakta . . .
E÷ilmiú arza, kanar, muttasıl kanar güller,
Durur alev gibi dallarda kanlı bülbüller,
Sular mı yandı? Neden tunca benziyor mermer?
Bir lisanı hafidir ki, ruha dolmakta,
Kızıl havaları seyret ki akúam olmakta . . . ]
Haúim, with his poetic and literary works, is a profound master who
provides his reader with new depth and provisions, and he is also
considered the most important representative of the Symbolist movement
in Turkish literature. In science and literature, it has always been the fact
that when you have something new to say, it is inevitable that you will
receive much more criticism than acclaim. For this reason, he was severely
criticized by the traditional poets, as they had never seen such images and
usage of the language. Bezirci, for example, stated that though he was
influenced by the French symbolists and used similar images, his
descriptions of nature were more like an impressionist understanding.7
Some critics, such as øsmail Parlatır and Bilge Ercilasun, supported this
view. Kemal Özmen, on the other hand, claimed that symbolism and
impressionism cannot be separated; for that reason, he believes that “since
Haúim is symbolist, he is also an impressionist.”8
We can see the reflections of symbolic elements in Haúim’s poems.
One of the great changes that Symbolism contributed to Turkish language
and poetry is that, before Haúim’s Symbolist approach, nature was
verbalized in the literal manner as it was observed by the poet. In other
words, the poet reflected nature like a mirror. In his poems, Haúim
changed nature based on his observations and recreated it with the help of
symbols and images. It seems that Haúim was influenced by Baudelaire’s
poem “Correspondences.” In his poems we can see the integration of
human with nature as a result of this influence.
In his new style he could visualize an image in all aspects of a form. In
this kind of composition, the borders of which are clearly defined, all the
lines were combined around the same emotion, showing a unity that was
not common in Turkish Literature. He combined some elements of music
and art in his poetry. In other words, we can see the Symbolist preoccupation
with music and musicality of language. He achieved all these innovations
under the influence of French literature.
Haúim’s poems can be divided into three periods. The first period is the
time when he did not have a particular philosophy, searching for his way.
In the second period, his personality had an influence on his poems. It is in
this period that the influence of French Symbolist poet Regnier on him is
apparent. The third period is the summit where he reaches maturity both in
character and usage of language. He produced impressionist poems in the
second period of his poetry, particularly under the influence of the
Symbolist poet Regnier. He had recollections, illustrating the melancholy
of his mother and painting the entire world of imagination the color of
melancholy. He tackled the redness of the afternoons, which was a kind of
transfiguration of melancholy, to picture these colors especially. Many
researchers underline the point that he worked just like an impressionist

painter in capturing the moment observed.9
Haúim’s early poetry was written in classical Ottoman style. His poems
in his first period give the idea that he only thought about love. He wrote
his poems to an unknown lover. As a person, he did not like the light and
daytime because the images that the light display increase the conflict of
the inner thoughts and forces the limits of endurance. However, after his
study of poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the Symbolist poetry of Arthur
Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and others, his poetic style changed. In
1909, he joined the Fecr-i Ati (Dawn of the Future) literary circle, but he
gradually drew apart from this group and developed his own style.
Following the French masters, Haúim worked to develop the Turkish
Symbolist movement. His poetry at times seems intentionally obscure;
nevertheless, he creates images and moods of great beauty and sensitivity.
Tanpınar comments on Haúim’s poetry: “We, today’s generation,
entered the life of art and art under Haúim’s star . . . With him, we for the
first time met a big poet like the European ones; we learned from him the
necessity of the existential world.10 Ahmet Haúim provides the first
encounter of Turkish poetry with western poetry. Nurullah Ataç noted,
in a time when Turkish poetry has chosen the way to teach the public
ethical rules of the community and teach the facts denying itself, Ahmet
Haúim found the real poetry in French poets and when he introduced that
form to the Turkish poetry we were amazed, we were in a position of
drunkenness.11
What Part of Him is Symbolist?

Haúim’s version of Symbolism rejects all attempts to represent the
perceptible world directly or instruct the reader straightforwardly. Instead,
he advocates allusive language that will allow the idea to be intuited by
readers through a series of analogies. He makes clear that, for Symbolism,
the importance of subject matter lies beyond the perceptible world.
His Symbolism lies in the fact that he was in a pessimistic and
inauspicious suffering world like Baudelaire and sometimes in his style of
choosing vocabulary like those of Mallarmé. The vocabulary he used
consists of the repetition of certain words: Fire, invitation, night, grief,
green, yellow, dim, shadow, light, moon, oriental ruby, branch of a tree,
leaf, water, top, star, high hills, flame, sun, red, blaze, aurora, gold,
darkness, moonlight, dream, desert, gazelle, nightingale, daydream, etc.12
Haúim, like many other symbolist poets, uses objects not because of
their physical structure but because of their colors. As Yeats wrote,
All sounds, all colors, all forms either because of their preordained
energies or because of long association evoke indefinable and yet precise
emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied
powers whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound,
and color, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one
another, they become as it were one sound, one color, one form and evoke
and emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one
emotion.13
For that reason, for him there is no gold but yellow; coral meant Red.
Ongun explains that there is unity in Haúim’s poems. Even some poems
that seem to be individual units and written with different titles seem to be
written as parts of a larger composition in order to ease the reading.
“Merdiven” (Staircase) and “Bir günün sonunda Arzu” (A wish at the end
of a day) are examples of this type.14 Hassan distinguishes ''symbol'' into
two distinct categories as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” symbol, which I
prefer to describe as implicit and explicit. In his article Hassan states that:
The intrinsic symbol is one in which the suggestive powers are largely
inherent; it carries them wherever it goes, and derives them form popular
traditions, myths, history, from the very roots of the language. Such
symbols possess a circle of common associations, no matter how these
associations may be modified by the context. On the other hand, the
extrinsic symbol, which may be a word otherwise neutral, is activated by
the pressure of its context, is almost created by it. What the poem invests in
such a symbol is returned in kind; the associations, the power to resolve
and evoke, if the poem be successful, are released internally.15
From this point of view, when we first read the poem, the first thing that
attracts the readers’ attention is the description of vivid nature. It is
striking that, like his other poems, “night and red” are dominant symbols
in this poem. When the title of the poem is analyzed, we can see that it
bears two meanings, explicit and implicit. At first sight, the title reminds
us the physical object that we use, the “Staircase” itself. However, the
implicit meaning most probably symbolizes life. There is a metaphor
within the word “Staircase;” only by giving the reference to the Staircase,
life is implied. I feel greatly that this word is a great symbol as it may be
associated with different meanings for everyone. For some it is life, but for
others it may symbolize the challenges of life. For ùahin, the staircase
symbolizes elevation that will save him from his existing situation.16
However, the third line, “And for a while gaze weeping at the sky . . . ,”
shows that he has not yet reached his goals. As far as I am concerned, the
Staircase symbolizes salvation that will save him from his position and
carry him up to the heaven or to the lover for reunion. It is noteworthy that
the image of the Staircase is used with the four elements: fire, water, air
and earth.
In this poem, appropriate to his style, Haúim reveals the feelings and
ideas implicitly. In his article on “Merdiven” (Staircase), Parmaksız
explains that by using subordinate adjectives such as a heap of leaves in
the color of sun, bloody nightingales in flame like branches, and red
weather, he tries to have the readers guess the hidden meaning instead of
telling them explicitly.17 With the bloody red and flame of the night, the
poet decorates his own cosmos.18 The analogy explains the game of
resemblance between the universe as the macrocosm and man as the
microcosmic unit.
As we stated before, the poem is closer to musicality and rhythm than
to thoughts. “Merdiven” is a perfect example of this paradigm shift.
Though the first line, “Slowly, slowly will you mount this Staircase,”
actually seems to be an imperative, it is embodied with harmony and
associations. Referencing this, we can say that the poet is successful at
achieving the proper poetic feeling. Symbolist experiments with the
auditory appeal of verse were further carried to rhyme itself. What we now
call slant rhymes, consonantal and assonantal rhymes, were considered by
the poets as a means of suggesting relationships within the poem that a
more direct and emphatic rhyme might obscure. In this poem the words
somakta/olmakta, güller/bülbüller, dolmakta/olmakta rhyme and help to
form the rhythm. The alliteration of the sound “r” also supports the unity
in the poem. The words with “r” alliteration are a÷ır a÷ır, bir,
merdivenlerden, ateklerinde, rengi, yaprak, a÷layarak, sular, sarardı,
perde perde, ruha, seyret, arza, kanar, güller, durur, benziyor, mermer. In
addition, the anaphoric repetition of “Kızıl havaları seyret ki akúam
olmakta—” (Look at the scarlet air, for evening comes . . . ) plays an
integral role in conveying the meaning and rhythm to the reader.
Parmaksız states that the word “night” is another symbol, and by repeating
it, the poet wants to announce something to the readers. “Night” in a sense
reminds us of death.19 The hidden grief in the poem is due to the
approaching death or end of life.
Haúim describes such a scene so totally in ten lines that you cannot
find any absence in the poem. The fact that the poem begins with “a÷ır
a÷ır” (slowly and slowly) and finishes with the line “Look at the scarlet
air, for evening comes . . .” is meaningful. The symbols and words imply
that as the sun goes down slowly, people live their lives day by day and
reach the end. At the end of the poem the words “secret language,”
“nature,” “birds,” “leaves”—in short everything that belongs to this
world—tell us the truth that we are approaching towards the end. The poet
implies that there is a difference between looking and seeing. If we
perceive this truth, we will find the meaning of life as well. Haúim felt this
with his whole heart, and the harmony in his poem and the order of the
words gives us the same feeling if we read between the lines. The words
he has chosen and the language he has used in his poems reflect the poet’s
soul.
The elements that belong to the outer world like water, trees, birds, that
is to say, the whole of nature, seem different at dusk. Anyone who has not
found what she or he has wanted from life has left lots of grief in the past,
and he or she must approach the end of life with this agony. ùahin explains
that the grief that the night and setting sun create in people compels them
to look at the sky in helplessness.20 The physical appearance of the elderly
is given with the phrase “The waters darken and your face grows pale”—
with the twilight, unhappiness, boredom and tiredness. These feelings fill
the spirit of the people and carry them into pessimism. In Haúim’s, poems
“fire” becomes a necklace worn on the neck of poetry. Word and meaning
that are the blood of the language rise in the vertical dimension by
efflorescing with heavenly blazes. This motion, increased in the vertical
dimension, changes into loneliness and longing that burns the subject by
permeating to the horizontal dimension. In Haúim’s poems, fire is a
symbol with the highest association power. The fire that lies down on
water, by burying all the images of sexuality into the twilight, creates
invisible associational nests beneath the visible. In this poem Haúim
explains the destructive and spreading power of fire with the following
lines: “The waters darken and your face grows pale/ Look at the scarlet air,
for evening comes . . .” The fact that the waters are darkened and the face
grows pale and changes into elderliness are all related to the changing of
spreading and absorbing power of the time into the redness of the fire.
Time corrodes the chemistry of fire inwardly, as the time is always in the
summit of its power. The redness symbolically associates the fire. With the
redness, the color of fire, Haúim rebels against the destruction or clearance
of humanity by darkness. Fire is a heavenly God that freshens up Haúim’s
subconscious and physical appearance. He exemplifies the contradictory
harmony of the fire and water. Fire is masculine on water, whereas water
is feminine. Symbolically, fire represents man, while water represents
women. According to Özcan, in his poems Haúim carries the light to the
collective unconscious mythic fields beyond individual sensations
assigning a secret meaning to it and make use of its association power.21
In the following lines, by coding the meanings of “fire,” he created a
strong meaning climate:
Bowed towards the earth, the roses endless glow,

Flame-like the nightingales bleed upon the boughs;
Has marble turned to bronze, do waters burn?
It is perfectly obvious that an identical analogical correspondence with fire

can be found in all these metaphors, whose only common element is the
color red, the one that most clearly represents the symbolic force of fire
and therefore also concomitant experiences such as love and passion. It is
the fire and its association with power that dominates the lines. With the
words “flame like,” “endless,” “bleed,” “burn,” and “bronze,” the poet
tries to explain to us the appearance of his mythic world via the language
of fire. The symbolic fire in his poems is a secret light that leaves its traces
by making vertical and horizontal jumps in the corridors of the conscious
and subconscious.
To strengthen the meaning of the color of the rose, twilight is associated
with blood. The burning action of fire on water creates a series of
contradictory images that reflect the two halves of the lover’s tormented
nature. The writer may want to imply the pain that the day finishes and
night comes, that life is finishing and that the unknown, darkness, is
coming, which causes this grief. According to ùahin, the fire burning on
water is in a position to harvest the inner feelings of a person, his or her
external life, dreams, and reality, and increases it up to “the sky,” that is to
say, to the conscious mind. With the reflection of the sun’s rays, the water
at dusk time resembles fire. It is a natural event that the white marble
reflected the sun and seemed to be bronze. With these examples we can
see the impressionistic traces in his poem as well.
When compared to Henri de Regnier’s poems, which had a great
influence on Haúim, we can find significant similarities in Haúim’s poetry.
Regnier generally described nightfall, sunset, and night, and he used roses,
birds, straws, stars and flowers. Blood, flame, fire, red, golden, sorrow,
and dream were the common symbols that Regnier used.22
In another poem, “A Wish at the End of a Day,” which consists of
three stanzas, Ahmet Haúim continues to use Symbolist images, mostly the
ones Regnier used. In this symbolic landscape, the poet, with a great
desire, who is badly in need of living, wants to cry out the fact that he
wants to eternalize the scene. The scene describes the things, the beauties
of life of which the poet is deprived. The poem was found meaningless
when it was written.23 Upon criticism, Haúim had to write an article on the
“meaning in poetry” in which he argued that meaning and clarity are not
the first elements in poetry and stressed that musicality and rhythm should
be the first things to attend to. Apaydın states that in order to give
prominence to musicality, he uses groups of phonic and sound repetitions.
In the first stanza we see this with the sound of “g” in the following words
-gözümün, güller, gibi, gün.24 The word güller (roses) is used four times
and the word gibi (like) is used twice to create harmony. We can see this
harmony in all three stanzas. Apaydın claims that the sound repetitions are
not only related to harmony but also they serve the meaning of the poem.25
The image of “golden towers” symbolizes sunrise, when birds fly from
their nests and are the harbingers of the morning: “From the golden towers
birds again/ Announce the repetition of life.” The golden towers remind us
of a castle, and the birds are like the guards blowing their reveille. In the
first stanza the poet criticizes the shortness of the sunrise with the image of
a lamenting rose. In fact, the poet is known as the one who loves nights.
He does not want it to finish. He reflects his opinion with the help of the
symbolically lamenting rose. In addition, the fact that roses are moaning
more than the straw reminds us of the earlier references. That is to say the
fact that “the straw is moaning” has connotations in Ottoman Turkish
literature. In Sufi literature straw and reed, which is made of straw, were
given some privileges of knowing some secrets from creation. The sound
that comes from the reed symbolizes the distance, being far away, from
God. Haúim created a new image by saying that roses are moaning more
than the straw.
Another often used symbol in Haúim’s poems is night. Night with the
richness of the color that it created has an atmosphere that takes Haúim
away from his real world. Therefore, in the last two stanzas of the poem.
the word night is repeated six times: “Akúam, yine akúam, yine akúam/ Bir
sırma kemerdir suya baksam/Akúam, yine akúam, yine akúam/Göllerde bir
dem bir kamıú olsam.” We can claim that the word “night” created a
chance for the poet to be able to experience another world. To prove this
opportunity for experience, poetic associations of the some words used
will be sufficient. The second line in the last stanza, “Bir sırma kemerdir
suya baksam” (When looked at the water it is like a golden arc), attracts
the readers’ attention to the reflection of the images and colors on the
water. They are like golden arches, and reflections seemed much better
than original objects. He used the reflective feature of the water. For this
clarity of reflection, water should be calm and smooth. On the other hand,
the reflection of the object is not the reality. They are upside down on the
water. The scenes and images he created were turned upside down and far
from clearness like the shapes reflected on calm water.
With the help of the last line, Haúim wishes something at the end of a
day: “Göllerde bu dem bir kamıú olsam!” (I wish I were a straw on the
lakes at this time of the night!). With the word kamıú (straw) the poet
found a symbolic meaning that would help him to climb up to the sky like
the flying of birds to their nests just before the night. The word straw is
used differently from Ottoman Turkish usage; with the help of golden arc
it gives the message that it may be an arrow ready to be thrown towards
the desired. In other words, it can be said that with the word straw and
with its connotations the necessity to migrate to another world might be
emphasized.
As a result, though it may not be as exactly as it is in his European
counterparts' style, Ahmet Haúim is considered the representative of the
Symbolist movement in Turkish literature. As explained before, due to
oriental thought and years of literary culture and understanding, Turkish
intellectuals did not copy the currents in the western world as they were;
rather, they sometimes preferred to comment on them or use them from
their own point of view. However, the influence of French literature and
symbolists on Haúim is evident in his poems.
Notes
1
Jean Moréas, “Manifeste du symbolisme,” Le Figaro, September 18, 1886, 60.
2
Hüseyin Sado÷lu, Türkiyede Ulusçuluk ve Dil politikaları (østanbul: Bilgi
Üniversitesi yayınları, 2003), 70.
3
Kenan Akyüz, Batı Etkisinde Türk úiiri Antolojisi (østanbul: ønkılap Yayınları,
1985), 607.
4
Halit Ziya Uúaklıgil, “Türk Klasikleri-Cenap ùehabettin” (Istanbul: Varlık
Yayınları, 1964), 7.
5
Hikmet Dizdaro÷lu, Türk Klasikleri (Istanbul: Varlık Yayınları, 1964), 13.
6
Agah Sırrı Levend, Türk Dilinin Geliúme ve Sadeleúme Evreleri (Ankara: Ankara
Universitesi Basımevi, 1972), 25.
7
Asım Bezirci, Ahmet Haúim Bütün ùiirleri (Istanbul: Gözlem yayınları, 1979),
296.
8
Kemal Özmen, “Ahmet Haúim Sembolist mi Emprestyonist mi?” Ça÷daú Türk
EdebiyatınaEleútirel Bir Bakıú Nevin Önberk Arma÷anı (Ankara, 1977), 317.
9
Pelin ùahin Tekinalp, “Landscapes from Ahmet Haúim and Hüseyin Avni Lifij,”
Turkish Studies International Periodical For the Languages, Literature, and
History of Turkish or Turcic 4, no. 1 (2009), 686.
10
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Edebiyat Üzerine makaleler (MEB yayınları, 1969),
305.
11
Nurullah Ataç, Günlerin Getirdi÷i (Istanbul: Akba Kitabevi, 1946), 58.
12
Cemil Sena Ongun, Sanat Sistemleri ve A. Haúimin sembolizmi (Cumhuriyet
Kitap, 1947), 61.
13
W. B. Yeats, “The Symbolism of Poetry,” Ideas of Good and Evil (London:
Bullen, 1903), 243.
14
Ongun, Sanat Sistemleri ve A. Haúimin sembolizmi, 61.
15
Hassan H. Ihab, “Edith Sitwell and the Symbolist Tradition,” Comparative
Literature 7, no. 3 (Summer 1955, Duke University Press), 244.

16
Veysel ùahin, “Ahmet Haúim’in ùiirinde Ateúin Dili,” Arayıúlar 15 (2006), 43-
48.
17
Mehmet Nuri Parmaksız, “Ahmet Haúim’in Merdiven ùiiri Üzerine bir Tahlil
Denemesi,” Bilim ve Aklın Aydınlı÷ı Dergisi 85 (Mart 2007), 38-42.
18
Mehmet Kaplan, ùiir Tahlilleri (Istanbul: 1994), 24.
19
Parmaksız, “Ahmet Haúim’in Merdiven ùiiri Üzerine bir Tahlil Denemesi,” 38-
42.
20
ùahin, “Ahmet Haúim’in ùiirinde Ateúin Dili,” 43-48
21
Tarık Özcan, “Denizin Ça÷rısı, Türk Dili Dergisi” (Ankara: A÷ustos, 2004),
174-178.
22
Mehmet Fuat, Ahmet Haúim Yaúamı Sanatçı Kiúili÷i Yapıtları (De Yayınevi,
1977), 24.
23
Abdülhak ùinasi, “Ahmet Haúim ùiiri ve Hayatı” (Istanbul: Hilmi Kitabevi,
1963), 62.
24
Mustafa Apaydın, “Ahmet Haúim’in Bir Günün Sonunda Arzu ùiiri Üzerine
Düúünceler,” Türkoloji Dergisi (Ankara Üniversitesi, DTCF Yay . C.12 S 11997),
195.
25
Ibid., 206-7
PART III:
CONSEQUENCES OF THE SYMBOLIST

MOVEMENT
CHAPTER THIRTY
PAUL KLEE, THE FEMME FATALE,
AND SYMBOLISM
JONATHAN PERKINS
The Swiss modernist artist Paul Klee, who lived from 1879-1940,
emerged out of a culture steeped in the Symbolist aesthetic. This paper will
examine a group of works by Klee that deal with a central trope in
Symbolism: the femme fatale. As our model for symbolist imagery and
style, we will focus on the German symbolist Franz von Stuck. Stuck was
the most prominent teacher of Klee while he was an art student in Munich
around the turn of the century. Stuck’s paintings of seductive but evil
women form a fascinating comparison to and contrast with Klee’s works
with similar themes. Klee’s artworks retain some aspects of Stuck’s
characteristic femme fatale imagery, while the younger artist asserts his
modernity in innovative ways that signal a new approach.
At his graduation in Switzerland from Gymnasium in the fall of 1898,
Klee had decided on a profession:
Although every career was open to me by reason of my graduation

certificate, I decided to study painting and to devote my life to art, despite
the risk of such a career.1
Klee realized he had to go to either France or Germany to pursue this

career, and he chose Germany because he felt more strongly attracted to
that country. He began his studies in the fall of 1898 in Munich with
Heinrich Knirr, an academic painter. A notebook from his studies at
Knirr’s studio reveals a typical academic art education, with numerous
nude and clothed figure studies, as well as landscape sketches.2 Klee wrote
of his independent new life in Munich:
Soon I was considered one of Knirr’s best pupils, and since the free life,
the international comradeships and the unusually good musical
performances appealed to me, I thoroughly enjoyed my life in Munich.3
Paul Klee, the Femme Fatale, and Symbolism 573
After two years at Knirr’s studio, he began his studies under Franz von
Stuck at the Munich Academy in October 1900, but he did not spend long
there, leaving in March 1901. In the fall of 1901, Klee departed with his
artist friend Hermann Haller for Italy and spent six months traveling there.
He returned to Switzerland in May 1902 and basically stayed in Bern (with
occasional trips to Munich, Berlin, and Paris) until 1906. During this time,
Klee completed what are arguably his first mature works, his self-titled
Inventions, a series of etchings. These etchings are central to this paper.
Let us now examine briefly what Klee wrote about his teacher Stuck; he
seems to have had ambiguous feelings. Letters seem to indicate Klee’s high
regard for Stuck, at least before he began studies with him. In October
1898, shortly after he begins studies with Knirr, Klee writes to his mother
that the painters at Knirr’s studio all wanted to study with Stuck, and that
“Das ist der Höhepunkt” [This is the summit.]4 In a letter from March 17,
1900, shortly before he began to study with him, Klee apparently without
irony calls Stuck “diesen gottbegnadeten Künstler” [this divinely-gifted
artist].5
Although Klee’s comments may appear a bit overly enthusiastic in
hindsight, Stuck was perhaps the leading painter in Munich at the turn of
the century. In his diaries, Klee is less enthusiastic. The following entry
was probably written at the end of the year 1900, while Klee was a student
of Stuck:6
To be a student of Stuck sounded good. In reality, however, it was not half

so splendid. Instead of coming to him with a sound mind I brought a
thousand pains and many prejudices. In the realm of color I found it hard
to progress. Since the tone provided by mood predominated strongly in my
mastery of form, I sought to find as much profit as possible here at least.
And, in this respect, a great deal really was to be gained at Stuck's. … Had
this teacher made the nature of painting as clear to me as I was able to do
later, once I had penetrated far deeper, I would not have found myself in
such desperate straits. 7
In an autobiographical statement, Klee expands on Stuck’s teaching:
Stuck was more academic than Knirr; he insisted on greater knowledge of

the human body. That would not have been too bad as far as learning
drawing was concerned, but he was no good as a teacher of painting, for he
never said a thing about color. … I stood it for only a few weeks, because I
was perplexed and could not force myself to paint and yet felt it was not
right to confine myself to drawing in a painting class.8
574 Chapter Thirty
Fig. 30-1. Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Das Schlangenweib (Snake Woman).
Let us now turn to Stuck’s artworks. Central to his artistic output are
classic femme fatale images. The common type depicts an alluring but
clearly dangerous nude woman whose body is coiled by a snake. Around
the turn of the century, right at the time he taught Klee, Stuck created
multiple versions of two similar images that are central to this paper: Das
Schlangenweib (Snake Woman), which is also known as Die Sinnlickheit
(Sensuality) (Fig. 30-1) and Die Sünde (Sin), the painting illustrated here
which dates to 1893 (Fig. 30-2). In addition, Stuck created multiple

versions of a related (reclining) nude woman with snake entitled Das
Laster (Vice).9 The titles of these works signal the interconnection between
sexuality and evil, a fundamental characteristic of the femme fatale. Central
to Stuck’s approach is the association between the woman and the snake.
The woman and snake work together to reinforce each other’s
characteristics. Both look out at the viewer; both are dangerous and
alluring. In Das Schlangenweib (Snake Woman) (Fig. 30-1), the snake
emerges from between the woman’s legs, its body echoing the strong form
of her figure, making her both sexually alluring and dangerous. Die Sünde
(Sin) (Fig. 30-2) is a similar composition, with only the bare torso of the
woman revealed. These works have clear associations with the Temptation
of Adam, which Stuck also depicted in his Versuchung (Temptation) of
1891, a work which also shows a similarly idealized nude female and
coiling snake.10 In this work Stuck depicts a forward facing Eve who
tempts Adam and the viewer with her body. The coiling snake surrounds
the tree of knowledge rather than the idealized nude woman, but the
intermingling of sensual allure and danger is comparable. The overt
sensuality of Eve may be associated with the sensual flesh and body of the
woman/snake pair of the previous works. Stuck created at least three later
versions of the theme.11
Like his teacher, Klee made several works with women associated with
beasts. Shortly before studying with Stuck, when he was a student with
Knirr, Klee created an image of Leda and the Swan in his notebook in
1899.12 The sketch depicts the commonly treated theme at the time of
seduction of Leda by Zeus, who assumes the form of a swan. The sensuous
manner in which Leda’s breasts rub against the swan’s long neck creates an
eroticism that is similar to the depictions by Stuck. The long neck functions
similarly to the form of the snakes in Stuck’s works.
What is crucial, however, are the images that follow, as Klee emerges
as an independent artist after returning to Bern in 1902 from a trip to Italy.
Central to our investigation are two prints, both entitled Weib und Tier
(Woman and Beast), which bear a fascinating relationship to Stuck’s
works. Klee’s works belong to a series of etchings, which Klee called his
Inventions—arguably the artist’s first mature artistic creations. In the two
versions of the print, the basic motif is the same, and the pointing noses of
the beasts is particularly similar. The first version of Weib und Tier
(Woman and Beast) (Fig. 30-3), from 1903, has more explicitly sexual
connotations. A strange dog-like animal sniffs at the genitals of a naked
woman, who looks down at the beast. The angular, grotesque woman is
almost as repellent as the beast. In a letter to his wife Lily, Paul Klee
describes the print:
576 Chapter Thirty
Fig. 30-2. Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Die Sünde (Sin), 1893.
Fig. 30-3. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Erste Fassung, Weib und Tier (First version,
Woman and Beast), 1903.
The beast is the beast in people (in men). It is molesting a woman, for the
time being by indecently sniffing her. Moral for those incapable: The
woman, who ought to be noble but has been brought into effective
relationship with the animal, represents something as completely perverse
as it is true. Aim: purification towards the human.13
Klee also mentions this print in his diaries: “A first version is etched and
printed. A beast, the beast in man, pursues a woman, who is not entirely
insensible to it. The feminine psyche is unveiled a bit.”14 These quotations
are key because they make clear that Klee is using the lascivious animal as
a symbol for man. But unlike the rather elegant swan in his early
sketchbook, the beast here is clearly grotesque. The woman is clearly
complicit in the encounter.
The etching has a meticulously rendered three-dimension modeling of
the female nude body, and thus bears, in this aspect, an association with the
works by Stuck. At the same time, though, the harsh, angular forms of the
body and the caricatured face, contrast utterly with the curving, sensuous
578 Chapter Thirty
forms of Stuck’s works. Indeed, it could be argued that the Klee work is a
kind of parody of the Stuck paintings.
The second version (Fig. 30-4), from the following year, 1904, forms
an interesting contrast with the earlier print. Here the woman is partially
clothed. In contrast to the plainly awkward pose of the woman in the 1903
work, the figure in the latter print appears to be trying for elegance. The
beast has also become more graceful, now resembling a deer. The action is
more refined as well: Instead of sniffing the woman directly, the animal
smells a flower offered to it by the woman. The woman is explicitly the
seductress here and plays just as aggressive a role as the animal. With her
left hand she attracts the beast’s attention by means of the flower, while her
right hand reaches down between her legs. Klee makes the action of this
right arm and hand indeterminate, because their forms are transformed into
a curiously simplified appendage. It is ambiguous whether this strange
extremity is modestly holding up the drapery or is stimulating her own
genitals.
The revealing of the bare breast and belly, along with the half-smile,
connect this work more closely to Stuck’s Die Sünde (Sin) (Fig. 30-2).
Even the strange appendance on Klee’s woman could be compared to the
body of the snake. Of course, unlike the work by Stuck, the beast in Klee’s
work is a deer-like animal symbolic of man, not a snake. In Klee’s work,
we are distanced, because we view the entire interaction between woman
and man within the picture itself. In Stuck’s work the eroticized body is
meant to attract the viewer. She (and the snake) gaze directly at us, and the
viewer is an active participant in the seduction. Stuck’s work depends on
the eroticism of the female body to function, while Klee’s work depends on
a de-eroticization in order to function.15
At the same year as the first version of Woman and Beast, 1903, Klee
created his Jungfrau (träumend) (Virgin [dreaming]) (Fig. 30-5), another
print from his Inventions series. Klee discusses this work in his diary:16
The poetic content resembles, at bottom, that of “Woman and Beast.” The
beasts (the birds) are natural and paired. The lady wants to be something
special through virginity, but doesn’t cut an attractive figure. Critique of
bourgeois society.17
This entry is remarkable, for it sheds light on Klee’s attitude about

virginity, and how he attempts to convey this attitude in a specific image.
Characteristically for this period, Klee approaches the theme of sexuality
from a critical viewpoint. Although his statement reveals an implicit
approval of sexuality, he chooses to treat the theme from the other side, as
a criticism of virginity. Klee’s statement thus has a misogynistic tinge,
which is typical. The woman’s bony features and scowl make her
singularly lacking in allure, although she is nude. Klee’s etching and

Stuck’s Das Laster (Vice) both depict prone figures, but the images
contrast markedly. Klee’s depiction of an angular body that echoes the
barren, gnarled tree contrasts with Stuck’s representation of a voluptuous,
glowing body encircled by a snake. Klee’s image is arguably the other side
of the femme fatale. Instead of the eroticized woman intermingled with the
dangerous snake, the women in Klee’s work has rejected sexuality, and
becomes a femme fatale through her caricatured, unsensuous body, which
has the barrenness of the tree with which the woman is associated.
Klee clearly had a complex relationship with the femme fatale imagery
so central to Symbolist artists. He seems to have been inspired to create his
own examples of the femme fatale, yet his modernist transformation of
form contrasts markedly with the sensual “finish” of Stuck’s works and
signals a new direction in art.
Fig. 30-4. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Weib u. Tier (Woman and Beast), 1904.
580 Chapter Thirty
Fig. 30-5. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Jungfrau (träumend) (Virgin [dreaming]), 1903.
Fig. 30-1. Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Das Schlangenweib (Snake
Woman), Piccadilly Gallery, London, Great Britain. Photo Credit: Erich
Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 30-2. Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Die Sünde (Sin), 1893, Oil on
canvas. 94.5cm x 59.5cm, Inv. 7925, Pinakothek der Modern, Bayerische
Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich, Germany. Photo Credit: Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kuturbesitz/ Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 30-3. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Erste Fassung, Weib und Tier (First
version, Woman and Beast), 1903, Etching, 21.7cm x 28.2cm,
Kunstmuseum Bern, Hermann und Margrit Rupf-Stiftung. © by ARS, New
York.
Fig. 30-4. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Weib u. Tier (Woman and Beast), 1904,
13, Etching, 20cm x 22.8cm, Zentrum Paul Klee Bern. © by ARS, New
York.
Fig. 30-5. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Jungfrau (träumend) (Virgin

[dreaming]), 1903, 2, Etching, 23.6cm X 29.8cm, Zentrum Paul Klee,
Bern. © by ARS, New York.
Notes
1
This quotation is from an autobiographic statement made by Paul Klee in 1939 in
his application for Swiss citizenship, and it is translated in Felix Klee, ed., The
Diaries of Paul Klee (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1964), xix. [Hereafter, Diaries] The Diaries themselves are a fundamental primary
source for Klee’s art student life. See my dissertation for discussion of Klee’s
artistic training, the Invention Series prints, and the connection to Stuck’s works.
The essay is a revision and elaboration of sections of the dissertation: J. Perkins,
“Klee and Eros” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2000), esp. 17-18, 30-36, 51-
54, 157-161.
2
All the pages of this 1899 notebook are reproduced in Paul Klee Catalogue
Raisonné, vol. 1 (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 158-169.
3
This is from another autobiographical statement, translated in Felix Klee, Paul
Klee: His Life and Work in Documents (New York: Braziller, 1962), 5.
4
Felix Klee, ed., Paul Klee: Briefe an die Familie (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 20
[Hereafter, Briefe]. This sentence is a paraphrase of Charles Haxthausen, Paul
Klee: The Formative Years (New York: Garland, 1981), 22.
5
Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press,1991), 335, note 55. The letter is in Briefe, 89.
6
For a comprehensive treatment of Klee's encounter with Stuck, see Horst Ludwig,
Franz von Stuck und seine Schüler (München: Villa Stuck, 1989), 26-41.
7
Diaries, 42, entry 122.
8
Felix Klee, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, 5.
9
The four versions of Die Sinnlickheit (as Snake Woman is titled typically in the
literature) date from ca. 1889 to 1897 (illustrated Heinrich Voss, Franz von Stuck
[Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1973], 98, 110, 133). The seven versions of Die Sünde
(and one head study) date from ca. 1891 to ca. 1910 (illustrated Voss, 110, 116,
182). The three versions of Das Laster date from 1894 to 1897 (illustrated Voss,
120, 121, 136).
10
Illustrated Voss, Franz von Stuck, 108.
11
Later versions of Versuchung (Tempatation) from 1912, 1916 and 1920
(illustrated Voss, Franz von Stuck, 188, 203, 214) are even closer to Die
Sinnlichkeit, because the snake here is also wrapped around Eve as she offers the
apple to Adam.
12
Illustrated in Paul Klee Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, 166, fol. 48.
13
This translation from Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 48.
582 Chapter Thirty
14
Diaries, 143, entry #513.
15
Stuck’s Versuchung (Temptation), which is discussed above also may related
Klee’s work. Stuck depicts the moment when Adam is about to take the apple. As
she touches her breast, Stuck presents her voluptuous body straight on to the
viewer in a sexualized temptation. She turns her gaze towards Adam, but the
serpent’s face meets the viewer’s head-on right above the apple. In an analogous
manner, Klee’s temptress holds out a flower, and the animal’s snout functions just
as the hand of Adam. Instead of the idealized form of the woman in the Stuck, the
viewer is presented in Woman and Beast with a caricatured face and grotesquely
elongated, distorted body.
16
See Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 48-49 for a discussion of
this print. See Paul Klee Catalogue Raisonné, 1:179-180 for an extensive
bibliography on the print.
17
Diaries, 143-144, entry #514.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SENSATION:
THE SYMBOLIST CONTRIBUTION
TO MATISSE’S DECORATIVE AESTHETIC
JOHN KLEIN
The impact of Symbolist theory and the example of Symbolist artists

are so pervasive in the art of the twentieth century that it can be difficult,
and sometimes uninformative, to identify distinct and discrete examples.
As with Romanticism in the late nineteenth century or Surrealism in the
late twentieth, Symbolist ideas of interiority, anti-naturalism, the power of
the imagination, and the deployment of private symbolic languages in the
service of expressing these qualities became so thoroughly naturalized by
the early twentieth century that they are difficult to separate from more
general aspects of modernist subjectivity.
Alfred Barr’s famous diagram of modern art movements, first
published in 1936 and widely reproduced, often takes a beating in recent
reconsiderations of the twentieth century, and for good reason.1 It
obviously oversimplifies a complex situation. The diagram is conceived as
a flow chart of influences; it is technocratic, unambiguous and unidirectional.
The flow of art Barr outlines moves inexorably as if pulled by gravity
toward a state of abstraction. But actually, of course, the first half of the
twentieth century—like any period—is more appropriately conceived as a
network, with reciprocal paths of transmission, not only forward and back
(so to speak), but transverse as well, modified by current events and
thought, as well as feedback loops of reception that frame production and
in turn influence it. The poststructuralist idea of the discursive field has
largely rendered anachronistic this modernist model, strongly Taylorist in
flavor, of artistic development as an efficient mechanical construction of
isms and influences.
There is no place for Symbolism as a whole in Barr’s diagram. And yet
we know better than this. Symbolism is here everywhere and nowhere,
unlocatable and therefore not subject to positioning in relation to other
584 Chapter Thirty-One
tendencies in modern art. Barr did identify discrete elements of Symbolism

and gave them a specific place. Gauguin is labeled a synthetist for his
compositions that treat color as form itself rather than an attribute of form
(but strangely, weakly, Barr limits his impact to his contribution to
Fauvism). The singular Redon, lonely at the margin, has a special role to
play—the journey of his influence has only one stop before a rendezvous
with a final destiny, Surrealism. Otherwise Symbolism is absent—but it
might as well be written in invisible ink, in enormous letters, right in the
heart of the early twentieth century. What I want to insist on is the
necessary implication of Symbolism in this period, rendering an idea of
specific positioning moot. Symbolism does not lend itself to this model of
an object reacting with other objects. Except trivially, it is generally not a
Symbolist style or particular kinds of subjects that artists of subsequent
generations absorb, adopt or modify. It is more a question of mode,
something not in the foreground as a manner of working or an iconography
but embracing the ambiguous, the reflective, the indeterminate.
The French painter Henri Matisse was one of the many early 20th-
century artists whom we know, without the need of Barr’s categories and
vectors, were directly affected by Symbolism. Matisse is often cited in this
context, especially in accounts of his early career.2 Domestic scenes of
readers and patients in their sickbeds, pensive in mood or tinged with
melancholy, were staples of the work of Edvard Munch, Eugène Carrière
and Ferdinand Khnopff, and such sites of interiority and self-absorption
are prominent in Matisse’s painting of the 1890s. But most symbolist
elements in his work are usually traced to the impact of his influential
teacher Gustave Moreau, in whose studio Matisse worked for nearly five
years in the early 1890s. Moreau’s emphasis on brilliant, non-naturalistic
color and on the importance of feeling over perception have long been
understood as mainstays of Matisse’s formation as a modern artist,
culminating in Fauvism, where the Symbolist character of his art is often
thought to be most firmly located. But this account is incomplete and does
not do justice to the pervasiveness of Symbolist theory in another and
more important aspect of Matisse’s work—his efforts to create a modern
form of decoration. One of his abiding ambitions was to work in the high-
minded Beaux-Arts tradition of public mural painting, but to do so in a
private language of form that would act directly on the viewer’s senses,
not didactically on his understanding. This impetus resulted in some of the
most important and ambitious work of his career, including the mural,
Dance, he painted for Albert Barnes in the early 1930s, as well as the
proliferation of large-scale decorative projects late in his life, for which he
adapted a simple technique of cutting colored paper as a design tool. A
The Symbolist Contribution to Matisse’s Decorative Aesthetic 585
viewer’s immersion in the worlds of sensation Matisse created was the key
to his conception of the beneficent effects of art, culminating in the
Dominican Chapel of the Rosary in Vence in the late 1940s.
The pervasiveness of a concept of decoration in Matisse’s work
overall, and its specific expression in late-career environmental work in a
variety of media, is the subject of my book in progress.3 But another path
to the decorative in Matisse’s art is suggested by an excellent recent article
by the Moreau scholar Peter Cooke, whose subject is Moreau as a history
painter. Cooke’s persuasive claim that Moreau’s ambition to reinvent
history painting—in Moreau’s own words, “to create an epic art that is not
academic”—resulted in forms of allegory more than narratives of history
has important implications for Matisse’s practice of monumental and
decorative painting.4 Moreau’s refusal of the convention of a clear,
dramatic narrative is echoed in Matisse’s ambiguous figure compositions
that refer to stories of classical mythology or history but do not tell these
stories. Like Moreau, Matisse attempted in such large multi-figure
compositions to engage and reinvigorate a faded but once noble genre. But
perhaps unlike Moreau, who lavished careful attention on the seductive
truth value of elaborate, detailed rendering of his protagonists and their
settings, Matisse courted bewilderment in compositions of extreme
simplicity and clarity that frustrate any attempt to assign narrative
significance. And here my concern turns back to the concept of the
decorative, because in such paintings as Bathers with a Turtle (1908; Saint
Louis Art Museum), Matisse is aiming for the kind of direct engagement
of the viewer’s senses that bypasses narrative. Matisse’s refusal of history,
and perhaps his active thwarting of even the kind of veiled meaning upon
which allegory depends, is central to his ambition to adapt his expressive
language to the creation of a modern public decoration, at the expense of
the legibility traditionally required of the practice.
We may acknowledge quickly some of the specific transmissions of
Symbolism into Matisse’s early work. A series of monochrome, nearly
abstract landscapes and seascapes Matisse made in Brittany owes its
moody aesthetic to the small landscape studies made by Eugène Carrière,
in whose studio Matisse worked after Moreau’s death in 1895. In the same
crepuscular vein Matisse had painted Moreau’s studio as a close-valued
symphony in grays. And in what is sometimes held to be an enactment of
Moreau’s pronouncement to his student that he would “simplify painting,”
in the 1890s Matisse adopted the Impressionist strategy of utilizing the
aesthetics of the sketch to make finished canvases. These landscape scenes
of Corsica and other sites are also some the earliest examples of Matisse’s
use of spectral color applied nearly arbitrarily and with a violence that
increases the material emphasis, a feature of the rapid sketches Moreau

sometimes made for his large formal compositions.
The extreme case of Moreau’s brilliant color, typically clichéd as
“jewel-like,” has been held to be the apotheosis of his formal influence on
Matisse’s practice as a colorist, when the younger artist made the bright,
pulsating early Fauve canvases that briefly endeared him to the neo-
impressionist painter Signac and also brought him his early public
notoriety. Shortly after this, with the painting Le Bonheur de vivre of
1905-6 (The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania), Matisse
disappointed Signac by spreading his colors over larger surfaces and with
an arbitrariness that depends on the example of Gauguin, whose non-
naturalistic use of large color areas and sinuous linear patterning unite Art
Nouveau vitalist aesthetics with Symbolist spirituality.
Several strands of Symbolism in Matisse’s work are summed up in
prominent elements of Le Bonheur de vivre: vivid, totally artificial and
arbitrary colors; a literary or imagined subject, highly idealized, in a
setting based on the observation of nature; a scenographic quality that
reinforces the artificiality of the action; figures and landscape subjected to
Matisse’s deployment of a compositional arabesque, emphasizing that the
relationship among the thematic elements of the picture is borne not
through dramatic interaction but through the arrangement of the pictorial
forms themselves. But this amazing canvas offers more than a summing
up of diverse plot threads of the Symbolist story. What may be a peak in
one realm signals a new direction in another in this hinge work. Beginning
with Le Bonheur de vivre Matisse embarked on an ambitious program of
large-scale figure paintings that would make clear his desire for a modern
decoration. At the same time, in another register altogether, he began to
work in ceramic and wood to create objects of decorative art. Here too
Gauguin is the important example of an artist who created in a great range
of media, not strictly limited to Beaux-Arts-worthy materials: express
oneself by any means necessary.
This brings us to the theoretical context for Matisse’s practice. Important
convergences between decoration and Symbolism in the period of
Matisse’s formation as an artist give a conceptual underpinning to his
ambition. Both the decorative arts and the art of decorative painting have
at their heart, etymologically and thematically, the idea of décor, of a
unified ensemble. Embodied in the prevailing idea of decoration, however,
is a paradox. Decoration was intended to surround or provide a milieu for
the practice of everyday life, but its ultimate goal was to transcend the
everyday by evoking more essential, even spiritual, qualities in the
inhabitant’s daily activities. And this leads us to another driving idea
within the avant-garde of this period: the Symbolist notion of the

integration of the arts, exemplified at one level by the Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk, the unified or total work of art, but borne at another
level by a newly central status for the decorative arts themselves in avant-
garde practice. The centrality of an idea of the decorative is closely related
to the Symbolist belief that art should engage multiple senses and appeal
to the spectator on an emotional or spiritual, as well as physical, level.
Some comparison of theoretical expressions from apparently opposing
camps—those used to support a formalist lineage and critics who express
Symbolist ideas of synesthesia—will show how implications of
contemporary ideas of the decorative could be held in common by
seemingly divergent sensibilities. We recall Maurice Denis’s famous
dictum from his article “Définition du Néo-traditionnisme” (1890) that
before a painting has a subject, it has a material form consisting of the
arrangement of color and line on the plane surface. (This claim is
strikingly parallel to Moreau’s own, much earlier, apparently formalist,
statement of purpose: “I have given all my cares, all my efforts [to] the
evocation of thought by line, by the arabesque and by plastic means, that
is my goal.”5) For Denis, subject matter is not negligible (and there is
certainly never a danger of this for Moreau), but the work of art’s formal
qualities take precedence in its impact on the observer. Denis went on to
expound on art’s high purpose, expressed in terms of the decorative: “Art
is the sanctification of nature, that mundane nature which is content
merely to be alive. What is great art—the art we call decorative—the art of
the Indians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks, the art of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the decidedly superior works of
Modern Art, but the disguising of vulgar feelings—of natural objects—as
sacred, hermetic and impressive icons?”6 Art, especially decorative art,
claims Denis, improves on nature and has the potential to sanctify the
everyday.
Compare this statement from the major underwriter of a formalist
approach to art in the twentieth century to the words of the Symbolist
critic Albert Aurier, writing indirectly about the art of Gauguin. Aurier
opposed “realistic” to “ideistic” art—his own restatement of the Renaissance
window vs. picture opposition that highlights “the dual nature of art.”
After enumerating the fundamental qualities of ideistic art—that it is
Symbolist, Synthetist, and Subjective—Aurier concludes that this ideal
state of painting will consequently be “Decorative—for decorative
painting in its proper sense, as the Egyptians and, very probably, the
Greeks and the Primitives understood it, is nothing other than a
manifestation of art at once subjective, synthetic, symbolic and ideist.” He
goes on: “Now, we must reflect well upon this: decorative painting is,
strictly speaking, the true art of painting.”7 Both Denis and Aurier claim
the high ground for the decorative, and append similar historical lineages
in support. It may also be noted that for these authors, a concept of the
decorative is not the sole province of the European tradition. In fact, for
these and other theorists, the rise in interest in various non-Western arts
and the elevation of the decorative to a new status went hand in hand.
Similarly, theoretical formulations of art’s independence from any
narrative or didactic function may be seen in another light, supporting a
multi-sensory, integrative aesthetic experience that is also characteristic of
a Symbolist approach. In 1888 Walter Pater made his famous declaration
that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” rejecting
the importance of the subject of a painting in favor of its pure form, like
the arrangement of the notes of a musical composition. Justifying his
theory of the musical condition of ideal painting, Pater extols the way that
music appeals to what he calls the “imaginative reason,” which is a
function of all the senses, not hearing alone. Similarly painting, in Pater’s
ideal, seeks the same multi-sensory reception, exceeding the merely visual
to embrace and stimulate the other senses according to a process in which
the various arts “reciprocally . . . lend each other new forces.”8 Pater’s
apparently strictly formalist aesthetic theory accords very well with the
more recognizably synesthetic approach of Téodor de Wyzewa, one of the
critics most associated with Wagnerian ideas. In an article on painting in
the Revue Wagnérienne, Wyzewa contrasted “emotional painting,” which
touches the entire sensory being, to “descriptive painting” that appeals
strictly to vision.9 But emotional painting, he continues, must have its
origins in the senses, which provide the soul with its original experiences.
In a passage that echoes both Denis and Aurier, Wyzewa elevates
sensation in art to the level of conception and emotion by asserting that
sensation comprises the two other apparently higher functions. This is
because direct sensory experience is more fundamental: “Sensation is the
very first mode: the earliest arts took sensation as their immediate
object.”10 There are two strands to pick out here. Wyzewa makes a
historical claim, an appeal to the earliest arts, as Denis and Aurier had
done in support of an idea of the decorative. The other is that sensation,
the oft-despised province of the decorative, is here understood as the
backbone of a complex theoretical support for art that expresses and
appeals to the deep emotional and imaginative lives of its consumers.
These expressions of a synesthetic, sense-crossing, Wagnerian total art are
deeply embedded in Symbolist theory, but they are also deeply relevant to
decoration and the decorative arts. And it is this multi-sensory quality to
which the transformation of decorative painting and the decorative arts are
closely allied in this period. The decorative arts, and the more encompassing
concept of decoration, may on this view promote the kinds of emotional or
even spiritual states that were conventionally held to be the province of the
less use-oriented art of easel painting.
This achievement of emotional or spiritual elevation through the direct
sensory experience of environmental décor is exactly what Matisse strove
for in creating decorations for several patrons in the years after Fauvism,
beginning with Karl-Ernst Osthaus in Hagen, Germany, where his Bathers
with a Turtle hung near George Minne’s Fountain of Kneeling Youths—
Symbolist sculpture and decorative painting sharing space designed by the
Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde. This painting exemplifies a
shift in priorities for Matisse. Cézanne is often held up as an antecedent to
this mystifying figure group, in light of Matisse’s oft-expressed admiration
for Cézanne and because Matisse owned an example of Cézanne’s bather
pictures.11 Ample reinforcement of the Cézannism of Matisse could be
found recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the blockbuster
exhibition Cézanne and Beyond. But Cézanne is a red herring here, I think.
More pertinent by this time—more suitable to Matisse’s decorative
purposes—are the more enigmatic and decorous groups of female figures
in the Symbolist work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, or in the Tahitian
paintings of Gauguin. These artists shared with Matisse a deep investment
in the traditions of biblical and classical iconography coupled with the
impulse to recast it in light of modern domestic, civic, national and
geopolitical conditions.
This returns us to the question of Matisse, Moreau and allegory. In this
matter the relationship between the two artists is less a question of specific
influence than what I might dare to call artistic epigenetic inheritance, in
which a thoroughly contextualized world-view is passed along but
modified by a new environment. Matisse, too, desired to create (to quote
Moreau again) “an epic art that is not academic.” His imagery, as in
Bathers with a Turtle, can be so inscrutable that John Elderfield has been
led to call this and other ambitious figure paintings by Matisse failed
allegories, or more precisely paintings that acknowledge the impossibility
of allegory in the age of the machine and of psychoanalysis.12 Moreau’s
paintings challenge conventions of representation of familiar mythological
and biblical stories without completely removing identifiable signposts to
those stories; Matisse’s images of similar allegorical subjects threaten to
sever completely the link to a collectively recognized narrative coherence.
Thus in Jason and Medea (1865; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Moreau invoked
a complex psychological relationship between Jason and his protector,
while suppressing most of the canonical (and spectacular) elements of

Jason’s story—no fleece (though there is a ram’s head on a column), no
Argonauts, no dragon (though there is a disembodied tail in the
background while, strangely, Jason treads triumphantly on an eagle), no
revenge murders by the scorned Medea. Moreau has, however, included
enough secondary iconographic details to secure the link to the lurid tale.13
By contrast, in Bathers with a Turtle, by implying a mythic story of
female bathers by the sea, Matisse holds out the promise of the Aphrodite
myth, for example, but with the addition of a single detail withdraws it
completely while sending would-be iconographers in a futile search for the
significance of turtles. The mysterious and ambiguous character of this
impressive painting, its size and ambition clearly marking it for a kind of
public address, indicates Matisse’s desire, as in Le Bonheur de vivre, to
work in the mode of a history painter while denying the cultural source of
collective meaning in favor of a direct appeal to the viewer’s sensibilities.
Several other comparisons of renderings of mythological subjects by
both artists will indicate the residual complexity of Moreau’s treatments,
even when he does not precisely follow the hallmarks of the story, and the
relatively enigmatic and abstracted character of Matisse’s allegorically
flavored but ultimately sui generis compositions. Matisse did not make
many artworks with a mythological theme, so the degree of overlap
between his choices and the subjects of prominent compositions by his
mentor is striking, as if Matisse was deliberately echoing, but also
muffling, Moreau’s already highly stylized soundings of these ancient
stories. In his Jupiter and Europa (1869; Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris),
Moreau at least accounts for Europa’s placidity in the face of ravishment
by showing the moment of transformation from the bull-guise in which
Jupiter (or Zeus) abducted her into the calming face of an apparently
ordinary man before he reveals his true identity and intention. In Matisse’s
painting The Rape of Europa (1927-29; National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra), which was probably a design for a tapestry—a modern
decoration—Europa gives every appearance of enjoying a day at the
beach, with her distinctly unthreatening abductor playing the role of
chaise-longue. Similarly, in many representations by Moreau of the story
of the abduction of Leda by Zeus (or Jupiter in the Roman version) in the
form of a beautiful but insistent swan, apparently significant but
superfluous details of setting and attendant figures surround the central
drama, typical of Moreau’s fussy horror vacui and iconographic
misdirection. For his part, when Matisse fulfilled a commission to design a
decorative interior door for the Paris apartment of an Argentinean
diplomat with the subject of Leda and her bestial coupling (1944-46;
private collection), he stripped the myth down to abstract signs of

femininity, arousal, penetration and fecundity.
Finally, a myth with particular pertinence to the artistic vocation.
Moreau’s god in Apollo and the Nine Muses (1856; private collection) is
an unheroic figure of self-possessed display, but he is strongly marked
iconographically and at least his muses are working hard for him,
summoning sources of inspiration for the narcissistic young deity.
Matisse’s treatment of the theme would be difficult to identify as such
without its title, especially in its intended setting, and in so thoroughly
abstracting his subject he has redirected the myth into both decorative and
personal realms. In his late paper cut-out Apollo (1953; Moderna Museet,
Stockholm), one of four designs he made for a tile mural to be installed in
an open-air living room in Los Angeles, the artist seems, exceptionally, to
one-up his mentor, not to lower the bar of meaning. But this is done in the
service of Matisse’s own ambitions to design and make artworks in an
enormous variety of media, as decorations for both domestic and
institutional settings (as he had just done in his comprehensive designs—
architecture included—for the Vence Chapel). The heraldic symmetry of
Matisse’s triumphant image of the most Greek of the ancient deities
signals the artist’s decorative, non-narrative intention. From his lofty
position Apollo is the source and master of all he surveys. The sun is
visible in radiance above his head like a crown. The sea below directly
evokes the Mediterranean source of these ancient origin stories. In the
pantheon of the gods Apollo also presides over the visual arts:
architecture, represented in Matisse’s composition by the flanking
columns; sculpture in the three yellow relief elements at the bottom center,
sheets of fan-folded paper arrayed on a figure-like silhouette; and painting
in the colored plant forms that spread across most of the surface of the
design. Finally, drawing, represented by the thin lines that emanate from
the figurative form at the bottom, unites the three arts while also resolutely
reinforcing the mural quality of the surface, its overall decorative
cohesiveness—Matisse’s allegory of the total work of art, intended for a
decorative role in as modern a setting as possible in the Hollywood hills.
In keeping with his lifelong desire for a decorative art that would also be
self-expressive, Matisse has transformed the stuff of Symbolist imagery
into an artistic allegory that would preside over an environment of luxury
and fecundity. Perhaps, after all, Matisse was slyly proposing an
Apollonian corrective to an image of southern California as quintessentially
Dionysian.14
Are there genetic inheritors of these Symbolist and allegorical
approaches today? The environment is generally favorable. All the emphasis
on interiority that characterized Symbolism is still with us. What was often
tentative in Symbolist psychologically charged imagery is now more
explicit in the visual arts, especially in film. Decoration is at the moment
out of favor in an age of multi-media installations and the expression of
identity politics but will no doubt come back with new purpose. New
history painting with mythic dimensions is being made in nations and
cultures that have recently come to take prominent positions on the world
stage and need to validate their present with the stories of their past.
Thirty years ago the great art critic Craig Owens identified what he
called the “allegorical impulse” in the kind of art that was coming to be
called postmodern.15 By the term allegorical impulse he signaled a shift in
recent painting and photo-based work from history to discourse, from the
meaningfulness of stories to the arbitrary play of signifiers. In the
provocative paintings of Eric Fischl or the elaborately staged photographs
of Gregory Crewdson, physically or psychologically tense situations—
potential stories—are full of portent but completely empty of specific
significance, deploying the form of allegory but draining it of its purpose
to express underlying or suppressed meaning. Could it be that the
conditions for such postmodern allegorists were set in motion by a
Symbolist painter who denied historical symbols their significance, and
his modernist student who promised sincere personal expression but
delivered enigma?
Notes
1
Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina and Gill Perry, Primitivism, Cubism,
Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1993), 100-02, where Barr’s diagram is reproduced. It first
appeared on the cover of Barr’s exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art.
2
See, for instance, Frank Anderson Trapp, “The Paintings of Henri Matisse:
Origins and Early Development, 1890-1917” (PhD diss., Harvard University,
1951), and Pierre Schneider, Matisse, trans. Michael Taylor and Bridget Strevens
Romer (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), chapter 2: “Moreau’s way: The passage
through feeling.”
3
Matisse’s Late Decorations and the Essential Quality of Art.
4
Peter Cooke, “Gustave Moreau and the Reinvention of History Painting,” Art
Bulletin 90, no. 3 (September 2008): 394-416; quote on 394.
5
Gustave Moreau, Ecrits sur l’art par Gustave Moreau, ed. Peter Cooke
(Fontfroide: Bibliothèque Artistique et Littéraire, 2002), 1:57.
6
Denis, “Definition of Neo-Traditionism,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood,
eds., with Jason Gaiger, Art in Theory, 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 868.
7
Aurier, from “Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin” (1891) in Harrison and
Wood 1998, 1028.
8
Pater, “The School of Giorgione” (1888) in Harrison and Wood 1998, 832-33.
9
Wyzewa, “Wagnerian Art: Painting” (1886) in Harrison and Wood 1998, 1009.
10
Wyzewa in Harrison and Wood 1998, 1006.
11
Lawrence Gowing, Matisse (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979); Elizabeth
Cowling et al., Matisse Picasso (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002).
12
John Elderfield, “Moving Aphrodite: On the Genesis of Bathers with a Turtle by
Henri Matisse,” The Saint Louis Art Museum Bulletin 22, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 20-49.
13
Cooke 2008, 401-2.
14
Portions of this paragraph are adapted from John Klein, “Inventing
Mediterranean Harmony in Matisse’s Paper Cut-Outs,” in Modern Art and the Idea
of the Mediterranean, ed. Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007), 156.
15
Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism”
(parts 1 and 2), October 12 (Spring 1980): 67-86; 13 (Summer 1980): 58-80.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MALLARMÉAN THEMES IN THE WORK
OF ROBERT MOTHERWELL:
A THROW OF THE DICE
WILLIAM M. PERTHES
In 1963, the School of New York artist Robert Motherwell created a suite
of seven lithographs entitled A Throw of the Dice (Fig. 32-1), adapting his
title from Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, “Un coup de dés jamais
n'abolira le hasard.”1 At first glance the relationship between the lithographs
and its title may seem obvious; black marks skitter across a white
background as if tracing the trail of tumbling dice. However, as with much
of Motherwell’s art, the correlation between the work, its title, and its
associated meanings is far more complex. This chapter will explore some
of those relationships towards a more nuanced understanding of this series
of lithographs.
Each work in A Throw of the Dice (Fig. 32-2) shares similar structural
elements which, stated simply, are grounding units anchoring the
composition, above and occasionally through which erupt a combination
of lines, splatters, and drips. These marks give the impression of being
created by a purely undirected gesture, of the brush allowed to act
unguided. At the same time these gestural elements visually imply the
arbitrary tumbling of dice referenced in the work’s title. Furthermore,
blank paper between the drips and splatters suggest the space created as
tumbling dice arc and fall with the grounding unit framing the boundaries
in which these actions take place. Viewers familiar with Mallarmé’s “Un
coup de dés” may further associate the play of these tumbling units, and
the space around and between them, to the unique distribution of words
across the printed page, one of the hallmarks of Mallarmé’s groundbreaking
poem.2 Taken together these features give A Throw of the Dice an almost
mimetic quality directly relating Motherwell’s lithographs with Mallarmé’s
poem in so far as the lithographs at once imply the action of the title—the
Mallarméan Themes in the Work of Robert Motherwell 595
throwing of dice—while at the same time suggesting the visual sensation

of reading “Un coup de dés.”
Fig. 32-1. Robert Motherwell, A Throw of the Dice No. 1,1963.

596 Chapter Thirty-Two
There are of course several important differences between these two

works. First and foremost, Mallarmé’s work is a poem which conveys its
meaning primarily, although not exclusively, through language, while
Motherwell’s is a visual medium utilizing color, black ink on a white
ground, to carry its meaning.3 Motherwell’s images run vertically up and
down the page, his signature orients them, while Mallarmé’s words rise
and descend horizontally across two pages. It is also not incidental that
Motherwell, who read and spoke French, chose the English translation “A
Throw of the Dice” rather than the French “Un coup de dés” when naming
this series; for Motherwell the relationship between a piece of art and its
title were not arbitrary or inconsequential.4 Given his working methods the
naming process can be viewed as an extension of the expressive act; as
such it is reasonable to consider the relationship between the title of a
work and its expressive content.5 These points of divergence begin to
complicate a simple reading of A Throw of the Dice and imply a more
complex relationship between the series of lithographs and Mallarmé’s
poem.
Robert Motherwell had more than a passing familiarity with Symbolism
and Symbolist theory. Indeed throughout his long career these concepts
frequently played a motivating role in both his intellectual and creative
life. Symbolist poetry in particular was a constant source of inspiration.
Motherwell first encountered Symbolist poetry in 1932 as an
undergraduate philosophy major at Stanford University. Reflecting on that
time he later wrote, “I think I read everything I could get my hands on by
Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Gide, but I believe the theoretical ideas
of Baudelaire and his twentieth century heir Paul Valéry affected me most
profoundly.”6 Motherwell wrote his undergraduate thesis on The Journal
of Eugène Delacroix, a work that also had a deep influence on Charles
Baudelaire.7 Indeed, Baudelaire and Mallarmé act as a kind of leitmotif
which runs through many of Motherwell’s early works including his 1944
collage Mallarmé’s Swan and The Voyage from 1949 which takes its title
from Baudelaire’s poem of the same name.8
In selecting a name for his works Motherwell often deliberated so as to
choose a title that would complement and enrich that piece’s expressive
content. Unlike many of his School of New York contemporaries who
resisted or discontinued naming their works, Motherwell considered the
naming process a culmination of the expressive experience. Titles were
most often given after a work’s completion and only following a period of
reflection and deliberation. He endeavored to find just the right
association, one that would support or enhance what he discovered as a
work’s expressive meaning.9
Fig. 32-2. Robert Motherwell, A Throw of the Dice No. 2, 1963.

Fig. 32-3. Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea No. 5,1962.
If we consider the form of A Throw of the Dice we see there is a weight

and solidity to the grounding units that set off the more delicate, dancing
spots, drips, and lines above. The skittering quality of these upper
elements reflects the bouncing of falling dice while the open space
between these drips suggests their flight, the time in which chance occurs.
This open ground relates directly to the importance Mallarmé placed on

the space between and around the words in “Un coup de dés.” In his
Preface published with the poem in 1897 Mallarmé wrote, “The ‘blanks’
indeed take on importance.” He continued,
The paper intervenes each time as an image, of itself, ends or begins once
more, accepting a succession of others, and, since, as ever, it does nothing,
of regular sonorous lines or verse—rather prismatic subdivisions of the
Idea, the instant they appear, and as long as they last, in some precise
intellectual performance, that is in variable positions, nearer to or further
from the implicit guiding thread, because of the verisimilitude the text
imposes.
By adapting Mallarmé’s title, the space in Motherwell’s lithographs

becomes similarly empowered as he suggests a shared intentionality. In
both works the interrelationship of page and mark breaks the typical
duality of positive/negative space. As such this open space is activated,
charged with anticipation and opportunity; anything could happen, chance
is confronted and embraced.
Early in the twentieth century traditional readings of “Un coup de dés”
understood its theme as one of failure: failure of the poem itself, of the
poetic form in general, and in Mallarmé’s attempt to express universal
intentions in his work.10 However, later in the century, a little more than
ten years before the creation of A Throw of the Dice, scholars began to
reconsider Mallarmé’s work. Through a more careful exegesis of the poem
scholars came to understand Mallarmé’s intent as one which embraced the
creative opportunity chance allowed while remaining vigilant to the ever
present danger of failure.11
These are themes Motherwell understood well. The juxtaposition of
control, as seen in the grounding units in A Throw of the Dice, and chance,
the active lines and drips, is a common one in Motherwell’s work. His
comfort with chance grew out of a close association with the Surrealist
artists exiled in New York City in the 1940s, and in particular to his
friendship with the Chilean artist Matta who took the young Motherwell
under his wing.12 It was Matta who introduced Motherwell, and other
School of New York artists including William Baziotes, Gerome
Kamrowski, Lee Krasner, and for a period Jackson Pollock to the
technique of automatism. Motherwell adapted this practice into automatic
drawing, embracing the opportunity of discovery offered by chance. Not
coincidentally, one of the exercises Matta had the young artists practice
was to throw dice on the hour and record their score in an effort to explore
the group’s collective unconscious.13
Motherwell was comfortable with allowing an element of chance to act

as a guide in his work; responding positively to these accidental moments.
He utilized the element of chance in creating early works such as
Mallarmé’s Swan when for instance he poured black, yellow and red paint
onto its surface and allowed the paint to run together. He then seems to
have blotted these poured paint areas, acting back on them, thus creating a
stain of color.14 In these actions we see Motherwell’s combined interest in
chance and control.
Motherwell contemplated using Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés” as a
source as early as 1950.15 Nevertheless more than a decade passed before
he found work suitable for the title. Why the delay, and more importantly,
why this suite of lithographs? If we look deeper into the full body of
Motherwell’s work clues begin to emerge.
As mentioned above, the lithographs were completed in 1963. A year
earlier Motherwell had been consumed with a series of paintings and
works of oil on paper entitled Beside the Sea (Fig. 32-3). These works
share similar structural elements with A Throw of the Dice—grounding
and gestural units—and therefore it is reasonable to consider the relationship
between the two groups of works.
In Beside the Sea (Fig. 32-4), Motherwell drew on a lifelong
connection with the ocean. He grew up in San Francisco and spent most of
his summers as a youth in Westport, Oregon on the coast outside of
Aberdeen where he had been born. After permanently moving to the east
coast as an adult he began spending summers in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, eventually purchasing a home there. Motherwell described
creating the Beside the Sea series this way:
For years my summer studio has been directly on the bay in Provincetown
on Cape Cod. There is a 900-foot tidal flat, and, just as one can play ball
games at low tide, at high tide the sea in high wind breaks against the
bulkhead in violent spray. In the Beside the Sea series, I made the painted
spray with such physical force that the strong rag paper split, and it was
only when I found rag paper laminated with glue in five layers that the
surface could take the full force of my shoulder, arm, hand, and brush
without splitting. One might say that the true way to ‘imitate’ nature is to
employ its own processes.16
In this statement Motherwell describes a creative process that imitates

its subject. The painted “spray” in Beside the Sea was produced in much
the same way as the sea spray Motherwell experienced as tidal cycles and
high winds pushed the sea against the bulkhead just beyond his summer
studio. Motherwell’s intention was to express the violence of a turbulent
sea so that the title, production process, and expressive intent of the works
are inextricably linked. Yet what is expressed here is violence experienced
from the safety of the shore, observed from a position of detachment rather
than the physical turbulence described in Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés.”17
One of the most powerful images in “Un coup de dés” is that of the
shipwreck. The theme is introduced on the second page : “ … EVEN
WHEN CAST IN … EVERLASTING CIRCUMSTANCES … FROM
THE DEPTH OF A SHIPWRECK … ”18 These lines begin midway down
the right-hand side of the page and descend, line by line, to the bottom of
the page, echoing the sinking shipwreck’s descent into the sea. The
metaphor continues on the next page, “… with its gaping trough like the
shell … of a ship … listing to this side or that …” Here Mallarmé’s
placement of the words form the ship’s broken rudder.19 On page four
Mallarmé introduces the ship’s “Master” who has cast himself and his ship
into the sea rather, “. . . than play . . . the game . . . like a hoary maniac . . .
in the name of the waves . . .” Also peppered throughout the poem,
emphasizing the overarching theme of chance is intonations of “AS IF,”
“if,” and “except,” each in turn questioning what came before or what
follows.
Mallarmé’s text frustrates a clear reading of the poem as lines break up
and down across the page as well as across the fold that separates each half
of a complete page. As such the reader is unsure if a line continues
horizontally or vertically on the page. One is left rudderless, grasping at
words and lines. Yet this is in part the poem’s genius. By following
different paths each reading creates the possibility of a different
combination of words and lines and therefore of different meanings. As a
result, while one reading may seem as arbitrary as the next, each has its
own logic, form, and outcome. Read this way a throw of the dice does not
abolish chance but rather only illuminates a new path of opportunity.
Within Mallarmé’s œuvre themes of water, the sea, and of shipwreck
are hardly unique to “Un coup de dés.” Ice slowly immobilizes the swan of
“La vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” (The virginal long-living lovely
day) which seems resigned or indifferent to its fate. While in “L’Azur”
(The Blue) images of an endless expanse of both sea and sky confront the
“impotent poet.” Similarly in “Un coup de dés” the “master” looks to “…
North … A CONSTELLATION … pondering … before finally halting …
at some last point that sanctifies it … Every Thought emits a Dice Throw.”
In “Brise Marine” (Sea Breeze), where, “Birds look/as though they’re
drunk for unknown spray and sky,” Mallarmé wonders if fleeing to the sea
is the “kind of squall-inviting mast/that storm-winds buckle above
shipwrecks cast/away—no mast, no islets flourishing? … .” In [“A la nue
accablante tu…”] [Stilled beneath the oppressive cloud …] Mallarmé

wonders, “O what sepulchral wreck (the spray/knows, but it simply drivels
there)/ultimate jetsam cast away/abolishes the mast stripped bare …”20
Fig. 32-4. Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea No. 22, 1962.
With this in mind, if we consider Motherwell’s A Throw of the Dice in

this larger context, as continuing what began and was extended beyond in
Beside the Sea, the lithograph suite assumes a more complex meaning, one
that expands and extends its Mallarméan themes. Now, coupled with
issues of space, ambiguity, and chance are included associations of
voyage, shipwreck, and the abyss. By assuming this title Motherwell
dislodges artist and viewer alike from the safety of the shore casting them
out onto turbulent waves characterized by Mallarmé as anxious, solitary,
and full of madness. We are forced from the safety of land out onto the
hazards of the open sea. What had been sea spray breaking on a bulkhead
becomes waves crashing against the hull of a listing, sinking ship. Danger
is no longer observed from afar but surrounds and confronts the viewer.
Just as shipwreck imagery reoccurred in Mallarmé’s poetry so the
voyage was a persistent theme in Motherwell’s work. As mentioned
above, he first drew on this theme in 1949’s The Voyage, of which he later
recalled, “The title refers to the sense we had in the 1940s of voyaging on
unknown seas (however conventional the work may seem now) and, of
course, refers to Baudelaire’s famous poem The Voyage, the last line of
which is: ‘Au fond de L’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’”21
Motherwell returned to this subject again in 1961 when he painted The
Voyage Ten Years After, which puts it in direct lineage to the works
discussed above—Beside the Sea from 1962 and A Throw of the Dice from
1963. As is the case with its counterparts this work also couples the
accidental with the deliberate. These persistent themes of voyage, chance,
and danger suggest a continued uncertainty on Motherwell’s part despite
the considerable professional success he had achieved by the mid 1960s,
and reveal an artist constantly struggling to find calm amid turmoil.
Finally, like Mallarmé, Motherwell understood that expressive
elements gain in their significance when put into relationship with other
elements, that when combined they have the potential to create new, and
perhaps unexpected, meanings. This is indeed the idea behind collage, a
medium in which Motherwell worked throughout his career, and perhaps
no American artist used as effectively. In 1946 Motherwell described his
practice of creating a collage this way:
The sensation of physically operating on the world is very strong in the

medium of papier collé or collage, in which various kinds of paper are
pasted to the canvas. One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and
sometimes tears off and begins again. In any case, shaping and arranging
such a relational structure obliterates the need, and often the awareness of
representation. Without reference to likeness, it possesses feeling because
all the decisions in regard to it are ultimately made on the grounds of
feeling.22
Five years later Motherwell spoke of imagining Mallarmé’s process of

creating a poem, a process that sounds quite similar:
Sometimes I have an imaginary picture in my mind of the poet Mallarmé in

his study late at night—changing, blotting, transferring, transforming each
word and its relationship with such care—and I think that the sustained
energy for that travail must have come from the secret knowledge that each
word was a link in the chain that he was forging to bind himself to the
universe; and so with other poets, composers, and painters.23
In each instance Motherwell states the importance he saw in the

interrelationship of the part to the meaning of the whole, whether a poem,
painting, or collage. He placed supreme importance on the
interdependence of each individual part on the other, from which the
work’s ultimate meaning is derived. Viewed in this light, A Throw of the
Dice and Beside the Sea, considered in relationship to each other, can be
regarded as a continuing expressive idea.
By choosing the English “A Throw of the Dice” rather than the French
“Un coup de dés,” Motherwell layered his intentions. On one level a
viewer can understand the lithographs as describing the visual sensation of
dice tumbling across a table as indicated by the work’s title. However, if a
viewer recognizes the implication of Mallarmé’s poem within the work the
lithographs intentions deepen. What was a simple description of chance
becomes more complicated and treacherous. Furthermore, if one knows
not only this Mallarméan inference but also something of Motherwell’s
body of work this understanding expands still more. Through a linkage of
expressive intent works that might at first appear loosely related coalesce
into a more complex whole. In his poems Mallarmé placed words in
relationship to each other so as to direct and suggest new connotations; in
the same way Motherwell’s A Throw of the Dice is not merely an isolated
series of lithographs, but part of a larger project that explores the potential
expressive opportunity of embracing chance, regardless of the potential
dangers lurking in the unknown.
Fig. 32-1. Robert Motherwell, A Throw of the Dice No. 1,1963, lithograph
on white woven Rives BFK paper, 30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm). Art ©
Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Fig. 32-2. Robert Motherwell, A Throw of the Dice No. 2, 1963, lithograph
on white woven Rives BFK paper, 30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm) Art ©
Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Fig. 32-3. Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea No. 5,1962, Oil
onStrathmore paper, sheet: 29 x 23 in.; 73.66 x 58.42 cm Smith College
Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Purchased with the gift of
Bonnie Johnson Sacerdote, class of 1964, and Louisa Stude Sarofim, class
of 1958 and the Dedalus Foundation Art © Dedalus Foundation,

Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Fig. 32-4. Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea No. 22, 1962, Oil on
Strathmore paper, sheet: 29 x 23 in.; 73.66 x 58.42 cm. Private Collection
Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Notes
1
For the complete series see Siri Engberg and Joan Branach, Robert Motherwell:
The Complete Prints 1940-1991: Catalogue Raisonné (Minneapolis: Walker Art
Center, 2003), 68-71.
2
“Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard” was first published in the French
review Cosmopolis in 1897 but received little attention until reprinted by La
Nouvelle Revue Française in 1913. The first serious examination of the work was
Albert Thibaudet’s Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1926). Other
important scholarship include Gardner Davis, Vers une explication rationelle de
Coup de Dés (Paris: Corti, 1953); Jean-Pierre Richards, L’Univers imaginaire de
Mallarmé (Pairs: Editions du Seuil, 1961); Robert G. Cohn, L'Œuvre de Mallarmé:
Un Coup de Dés (Paris: Librairie Les Lettres, 1951) and Mallarmé’s Masterwork:
New Findings (Paris: Mouton, 1966)
3
Given Motherwell’s affinity for black, not only here but throughout his body of
work, most prominently in his largest series of paintings Elegy to the Spanish
Republic, he spoke and wrote often on his use and understanding of black. On this
point he said, “When I use black, I don’t use it the way most people think of it, as
the ultimate tone of darkness, but as much a color as white or vermilion, or lemon
yellow or purple, despite the fact that black is no color, non-being, if you like.
Then what more natural than a passionate interest in juxtaposing black and white,
being and non-being, life and death?” Stephanie Terenzio, ed., The Collected
Writings of Robert Motherwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 219.
4
Motherwell was comfortable enough to use French for other works such as
Histoire d’un Paintre, 1956; Jour La Maison, Nuit La Rue, 1957; and perhaps most
famously in a series of works entitled Je t’aime in which he included the title as
part of the painted composition. Also, unlike several of his School of New York
contemporaries Motherwell continued to name his works rather than simply
number them. Titles and their associated meanings remained important to
Motherwell throughout his career.
5
In 1954 Motherwell presented a lecture at Hunter College in New York entitled
“Symbolism” in which he said, “At least I have never had a thought about painting
while painting, but only afterwards. In this sense one can only think in painting
while holding a brush before a canvas, and this symbolization I trust much more
than the thinking that I do about painting all day long.” The Writings of Robert
Motherwell ed. by Dore Ashton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007),
170.
6
Robert Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years (Ann Arbor: UMI
Press, 1987), 12.
7
Passages from Baudelaire often echo ideas and aesthetic values found in
Delacroix’s Journal, sometimes quoting them nearly verbatim. At the core of their
shared philosophy—stated in Delacroix’s Journal and expressed in Baudelaire’s
most famous and influential poem ‘Correspondences’—is the notion of ‘nature as a
dictionary’, as a ‘forest of symbols’, that when used by the artist, ‘confer upon
them a totally new physiognomy.’ See Henri Dorra, Symbolist Art Theory: A
Critical Anthology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 3.
8
Besides directly referencing Baudelaire and Mallarmé in his writings in the 1940s
and 1950s, Motherwell often prefaced essays and lectures he gave with quotes
from Baudelaire: “Painters’ Objects,” Partisan Review 2, no. 1 (Winter 1944);
“Apropos ‘Traditional’ and ‘Modern’ Methods of Teaching Art” delivered at the
Annual Meeting of the Collage Art Association, 24 January 1952; both published
in Ashton, The Writings of Robert Motherwell, 93 and 163. Also see Antje Quast,
“Mallarmé topoi in the work of Robert Motherwell,” Word & Image 19, no. 4
(2003): 314-26; L. Bailey Van Hook, “Robert Motherwell’s Mallarmé’s Swan,”
Arts Magazine 57, no. 5 (1983): 102-106; William M. Perthes, “Baudelaire,
Mallarmé and the Symbolist Aesthetics of Robert Motherwell,” in Symbolist
Objects: Materiality and Subjectivity at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Claire I.R.
O’Mahony (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2009), 328-360.
9
David Rosand described Motherwell’s naming process this way, “Typically, the
title arose from the artist’s dialogue with his own finished work, from his own
response to his own invention.” David Rosand, ed., Robert Motherwell on Paper:
Drawings Prints Collages (New York: Abrams, 1997), 20.
10
This line of reasoning has its roots in Albert Thibaudet’s Poésies de Stéphane
Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1926).
11
See Robert G. Cohn, L'Œuvre de Mallarmé: Un Coup de Dés (Paris: Librairie
Les Lettres, 1951).
12
For more on the interaction of the Surrealists and artists of the School of New
York see Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York
School (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
13
In the early 1940s Motherwell was one of a group of young American artists,
including Baziotes, Peter Busa, Kamrowski, Krasner, and Pollock, who gravitated
to Roberto Matta the Chilean Surrealist. In an “effort to organize and make more
coherent their expressive urges” Matta introduced the artists to Surrealist activities
such as automatic drawing on themes such as water, the earth, or time. He asked
them to keep a diary of their thoughts in an effort to determine if they shared a
collective unconscious. See Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract
Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society, (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982),
43.
14
Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years, 113.
15
“I will have to make you something wordless, though it may originate in
something verbal, perhaps Un Coup de Dés—but you know how long it takes for a
complete conception to develop, I know you know because you are the only
complete artist this country has, + (and) it fills me with rage to read the triviality
with which your radiant show has been reviewed.” Written by Motherwell in
response to Cornell’s gift of a “marvelous ‘box,” the work A Suivre. (More is to
follow) representing Cornell’s conception of or homage to abstract expressionism.
Robert Motherwell letter to Joseph Cornell, 1950 Feb. 18. 3 p.: handwritten ; 21 x
16 cm. Joseph Cornell papers, 1804-1986 (bulk 1939-1972). Archives of American
Art. Also see Stephanie Terenzio, ed., The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 223.
16
H.H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, Revised (New York: Abrams, 1982), 147.
17
This suggests a relationship closer to the dynamically sublime of Kant’s Critique
of Aesthetic Judgment than the experiential philosophy of American pragmatists
such as William James and John Dewey whom Motherwell studied as an
undergraduate philosophy major at Stanford University, and with whom he felt a
lifelong kinship. For more see Mattison, Robert Motherwell: The Formative Years,
6.
18
As the text of “Un coup de dés” runs across two printed pages which are
intended to be taken together, each double page is identified with a capitalized
“Page.”
19
The words also suggest a wing, a companion image cited throughout the work.
20
English translations from E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, Stéphane Mallarmé:
Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
21
Arnason, Robert Motherwell, revised, 115.
22
Terenzio, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, 37.
23
Terenzio, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, 86.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
WILLIAM FAULKNER
AND THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT:
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! AS A REFLECTION
OF STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ'S
“L'APRÈS-MIDI D'UN FAUNE”
BRENT R. JUDD
In his autobiographical account entitled Night, Elie Wiesel describes

his experience at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Prior to his
deportation from Sighet to Auschwitz, he had enlisted the help of an older
man to guide him through the depths of Jewish mysticism. This man
questioned his prospective charge by asking him why he prayed, but
Wiesel struggled to articulate a reason. Far from being disturbed by this
apparent defect, Wiesel's guide observed that questions are more important
than answers. He assured Wiesel that "every question possessed a power
that was lost in the answer . . . "1
How can a question possess more power than the answer? Our modern
lives are driven by information and its correct recall. For people immersed
in the everyday culture of the early twenty-first century, questions are not
the end target. Yet such a counter-cultural perspective describes the poetic
method of Stéphane Mallarmé. His poetry seeks to create a fiction whose
reality surpasses reality. Each of his poems questions the reality of the one
who reads it. The Mallarmean method opens up a blank space whose gaze
forces one to question the certainty of the moment. Gloria Melgarejo
Granada succinctly states that for Mallarmé, "[l]a vie est une certitude qui
le gêne."2
Such a questioning of certainty also characterizes the method of William
Faulkner. Though an American author of the twentieth century, though a
man who never graduated from high school or college, though one whose
life was circumscribed by the rural South of Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner
William Faulkner and the Symbolist Movement 609
was fundamentally influenced by a movement whose origins lay in another

language on another continent in an earlier era. The historical realities that
affirm the connection between Faulkner and French Symbolism will not be
the topic of this paper. What I would like to address, nonetheless, is how
Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! can be better understood by using
Mallarmé's poetic method, a method that Faulkner had tried to copy in his
own early poetry before tuning to the novel as his principal form of
expression. In particular, Absalom! Absalom! (1936) bears the imprint of
one of Mallarmé's most celebrated works, "L'Après-midi d'un faune"
(1876). Both works fundamentally question the reality of the human
subject and in so questioning force us to confront both the Absolute and
the Void, realities before which only questions are possible. Just as
Wiesel's religious quest was rooted in mysticism, Mallarmé's experience of
the Void in his famed crisis at Tournon in 1864 bears the same distinct
aura of mysticism, though for Mallarmé, religion itself did not shape his
quest.
In demonstrating the similarity between Faulkner's novel and Mallarmé’s
poem, I will begin by addressing Mallarmé's method. Then I will examine
how that method is present in Faulkner's novel of Thomas Sutpen and this
character's quest to realize his "grand design."
***
The central object of the poet is to create one unified effect in an

arrangement of words. For Mallarmé, language creates the desired effect
not only by the meaning that each word signifies, but also by the sound
and shape of the word itself, especially as each word interacts with the
blank space on the page. The poet invokes both words and space in order
to create an experience beyond words, an experience of the Absolute. For
Mallarmé, this Absolute can only be discovered in Beauty, and since pure
beauty is free from the limitations of the material world, its ultimate
encounter is in Death. Yet, in conflating beauty with death, Mallarmé
articulates the central paradox of the poet: the poet must invoke physical
objects and sensations as a means of representing Beauty, a reality that is
forever beyond physical objects and sensations.
Thomas Williams illustrates this point by an analysis of the poem
Hérodiade:
When Hérodiade said that beauty was death, she recognized that to
maintain a perfect vision of beauty involved dying to oneself as an artist,
that the roles of mystic and maker are irreconcilable in any absolute sense.
610 Chapter Thirty-Three
Even in the purest work there must always remain the barest tincture of
failure.3
In longing for something beyond the physical world, Hérodiade expresses

the longing of all poetry. Yet only by escaping the physical world can
perfect beauty be achieved. Such an escape precludes the creation of
poetry.
No wonder Mallarmé could only talk about The Work, his master plan
to write a book about everything. Such a book is the object of the poet, but
it cannot exist in this world. Therefore, Mallarmé's grand work would
forever remain unfinished. In her recent book Fragments et Obstacles:
Mallarmé et le 'génie´du Livre inachevé/Poésie et dédoublement esthétique
(2009), Gloria Melgarejo Granada notes that the state of incompletion is
precisely what drives Mallarmé's creativity. She insists that an unfinished
poem like Hérodiade "est en fait une invitation au lecteur à aller ‘au-delà’
de l'oeuvre inachevée, à tenter d'avoir une vision de ce que serait l'oeuvre,
si elle avait été achevée."4
The poetic method becomes a metaphor for life itself. Our experiences
are limited to the physical world, yet there is that part of us that longs for
more. Faulkner had written about this longing in "The Marble Faun," a
poem sequence describing the desperate desire of a marble faun whose
frozen nature prevents him from experiencing what lies beyond the walls
of the garden in which he finds himself. He laments:
Why am I sad? I?
Why am I not content? The sky
Warms me and yet I cannot break
My marble bonds. That quick keen snake
Is free to come and go, while I
Am prisoner to dream and sigh
For things I know, yet cannot know,
'Twixt sky above and earth below.5
To know of that which we cannot know is indeed the human condition.

The poet can capture the unknowing through words, but the knowing can
only be expressed by the blank spaces between the words.
In "L'Après-midi d'un faune," Mallarmé also writes of the experience
of a faun; however, this one is not a frozen statue. Rather, his faun
attempts the seduction of two nymphs who are sleeping in the hot
afternoon sun of a Sicilian marsh. After having scared off the other
nymphs in the area with the sound of his flute playing, the faun discovers
that there are two nymphs who have remained asleep. He finds them
embracing one another, their hair entangled together as if the two were
attempting to join together as one. The faun carries the two off to a sunlit
rose bed where he attempts to ravish the two, yet he fails to do so before
each escapes.
These are the basic events of the poem, yet these events are not the
primary concern. The primary concern for the faun is trying to decide if
these events really happened or if they were simply the product of a
dream. The poem becomes an exploration of consciousness and reality.
The faun begins by declaring, "These nymphs, I want to perpetuate them. .
. . Did I love a dream?" (lines 1 and 4, my translation).6 The faun wonders
if he has dreamt his erotic encounter or was it in fact reality. In any case,
the faun wants to perpetuate the nymphs into the present. His desire
becomes a key component of the reality he is about to examine.
The faun considers a number of possibilities. Perhaps his encounter
was nothing more than the product of the interaction of a wistful
imagination and the surrounding landscape manifested in a dream:
Did I love a dream?

My doubt, night's ancient hoard, pursues its theme
In branching labyrinths, which, being still
The veritable woods themselves, alas, reveal
My triumph as the ideal fault of roses.7
The faun doubts the reality of his experience. As Bernard Weinberg

observes, this doubt arises not merely from the dreams of the preceding
night, but also from the accumulation of all dreams of the past (suggested
by the phrase "amas de nuit ancienne").8 In fact, the faun in not able to
separate where his imagination stops and reality begins.
Yet for the faun, the distinction between reality and dream evaporates
into nothing. Whether his abduction of the two nymphs actually happened
or not, his dreams will perpetuate his desire until future encounters can
actually realize that desire. Recognizing his failure to seduce the nymphs,
the faun remarks:
Others will lead me on to happiness,

Their tresses knotted round my horns, I guess.9
There will be other future encounters. Other nymphs will carry him off in
the tresses of their hair to enjoy the delights of erotic love. Until then, he
will fall asleep on the sand, hoping to perpetuate the actual dreaming that
sleep produces.
The final effect of the poem is to subvert reality to dream. Weinberg

observes that the faun's meditation:
had as its initial purpose to ascertain whether the afternoon's adventure was
real or not; the conclusion having been reached that it was unreal, the
meditation now goes on to substitute for it an imaginary adventure that will
have some, at least, of the satisfactions of a real one. We shall see, as the
poem draws toward its conclusion, that this is an intermediate stage leading
to the dream of future erotic experiences that will be real.10
The events of the previous day are not given epistemological priority. The
dream compensates for the defect of knowledge, a knowledge that is
always partial and incomplete. The primacy that language usually is given
in our concern for facts is challenged by the interiority of the faun's
meditation. It is not so much that the faun is certain that the events of the
preceding afternoon did not happen; rather, he recognizes that these
events, whatever they were, are past and cannot be wholly recovered
through words, so he turns to the satisfaction of desire by falling asleep on
the sand. His fiction allows the faun to create an alternative reality.
In 1919, Faulkner submitted to the New Republic what would become
his first published work, a poem entitled "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune" [sic].
In Faulkner's version of Mallarmé's faun, the poem's narrator assumes the
mask of Pierrot, a method borrowed from the Symbolist poets in general.
Judith Sensibar notes how profoundly Faulkner had been influenced by
Mallarmé's "depiction of the dynamic and elliptical progression of his
faun's inner consciousness."11 Faulkner's early poetry most often used the
mask of Pierrot to explore reality and consciousness, a method that would
resurface in a new form in his novel Absalom, Absalom!
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! mimics the shifting significations of
language through its intense emphasis on the process of making meaning
rather than on the product produced. Readers are often confused by
Faulkner’s use of language for it defies traditional novels that emphasize
the final product or outcome. There is no such definitive outcome in
Absalom. John T. Matthews observes, “Faulkner’s distinctive modernity
involves an understanding of meaning as the infinite play of signifiers, and
not as the attainment of an absolute signified, the ‘facts’ of the story
itself."12 If language marks loss, then the story of Thomas Sutpen also
marks a loss, a loss which the characters of the novel attempt to fill. The
competing and contradictory claims of each storyteller, whether it be Rosa,
Mr. Compson, Shreve, or Quentin, are an attempt to fill the "hole" in the
"whole." No one completely succeeds in this endeavor because no one can
ever reappropriate the past through language. Did the split between Henry
and his father result from Bon’s status as a bigamist, or is it the result of
Bon’s would-be incestuous marriage to Judith, or is it the result of an
hysteria surrounding miscegenation? All three explanations are proposed,
each one revealing more about the theorist than about the actual theory
proposed.
Robert Dale Parker insists that “[o]ur ignorance and knowledge about
who knows what, and the shifts in our knowledge as we read along, are
themselves the plot of Absalom, Absalom! as much as the speculated
actions of the characters."13 The point is not to know what happened but to
realize that no one person can ever know the whole story. Yet this state of
unknowing does not mean that Faulkner’s epistemology holds out little
hope for truth. The fictions we create are truth insofar as they create
meaning. As Parker declares, “The only authority that cannot be
undermined is that of fiction."14 Both Shreve and Quentin create meaning
“out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking.” Their
speculations produce “people who perhaps had never existed at all
anywhere, . . . shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died
but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve)
shades too) quiet as the visible murmurs of their vaporizing breath."15
They are playing with language, and the results of this play are anything
but trivial [Shreve at one point interrupts Quentin’s narration with the
demand, “Let me play a while now."16] Their stories allow each to become
a participant in the past; each becomes another link in the chain of
meaning that will extend beyond each to encompass the future.
Faulkner's unique use of language in Absalom, Absalom! is also clearly
exemplified by Rosa Coldfield's diatribe in chapter five. Parker describes
the unique voice Rosa generates as “incantatory, orotund and oratorical,”
having a “stump speaker’s repetitive pattern."17 Rosa Coldfield is a
woman who is living in the past. She has isolated herself from everyone
for forty-three years. Her intense invective against the “man-horse-demon”
Thomas Sutpen leaves a blistering residue on the reader’s consciousness.
Not only do Rosa's words create her own universe, but they also reveal
a universe that is frozen at one point in time. Quentin had reflected earlier
that maybe things do not just happen once, and he had imagined people as
a series of interconnected pools of water. Rosa sees the world in a similar
way. She has come to the conclusion that “living is one constant and
perpetual instant."18 Chapter five is some thirty-three pages long, yet
Faulkner so powerfully contrasts movement with stillness that the reader
too wakes up from a dream thinking that more should have happened in a
chapter of such length.19 The basic event narrated is Rosa’s entry into
Sutpen’s house immediately after Henry shoots Bon. So much reflection is
mixed into this one moment that it is as if that moment has been attenuated
to its utmost possible depth.
The stark juxtaposition of acting and stillness is what most accomplishes
this effect of frozen time. Rosa describes her encounter with Clytie in such
stark relief: “We just stood there—I motionless in the attitude and action of
running, she rigid in that furious immobility."20 Again, Rosa later testifies
that she had “stopped in running’s midstride again though my body, blind
unsentient barrow of deluded clay and breath, still advanced."21 Faulkner
deliberately pairs the antithetical verbs “to stop” and “to run,” and then he
intentionally separates “my body” and “still advanced” with a long
appositive expression, rendering a further jolt and obstruction to the flow
of the sentence. He next masterfully places “still” before “advanced.”
Obviously the literal meaning is that her body continued to advance.
However, the alternative sense of "motionless" comes forward.
Rosa is both aware and unaware of the peculiar world that she has
created. She at times acknowledges it to be a dream world, but it is a
dream world whose reality transcends dreams. In her entry into Sutpen’s
house on the day of Bon’s murder, Rosa “found only that dream-state in
which you run without moving from a terror in which you can not
believe."22 Yet she questions the unreality of the dream:
But is that true wisdom which can comprehend that there is a might-have-
been which is more true than truth, from which the dreamer, waking, says
not ‘Did I but dream?’but rather says, indicts high heaven’s very self with:
‘Why did I wake since waking I shall never sleep again?’23
Rosa is frozen in the “might-have-been which is more true than truth.” As

she earlier said, she did not arrive at the house too late, but rather too soon.
I argue that this quote expresses the plan of the entire novel. In the absence
of language that can replicate the reality, there is only the absence that
indicates the possibility of might-have-been. Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin,
and Shreve are all trying to discover that might-have-been through the
gaps in Sutpen’s story.
Mallarmé’s "L’Après-midi d’un faune" begins with the faun wanting to
preserve the nymphs he has experienced during the preceding day [“Ces
nymphes, je les veux perpétuer”]. Whereas Rosa Coldfield's reflections are
set in italics, the faun's narration of the events is set in Roman type in
order to be in contrast with the faun's inner reflections that also appear in
italics. The faun likewise tries to recapture events through language. But
the faun must ask himself if it was all a dream [“Aimai-je un rêve?”].
Through interior dialogue, the faun must question what is truth and in the
end prefers the truth of might-have-been over the facts of that afternoon.
Faulkner’s characters must ask the same basic questions regarding the
Sutpen story. They all want to perpetuate the story through their telling as
the faun wants to perpetuate the nymphs. Faulkner’s characters also want
to sort out the various possibilities that conform to their personal
experience. Rosa ponders on the predicament of the dreamer who must ask
“Why did I wake since waking I shall never sleep again?” The faun may be
said to have asked the same question since he prefers sleep to reality,
wishing to see the shades of the nymphs in his dream [“Couple, adieu; je
vais voir l’ombre que tu devins.”].
Accordingly, Absalom, Absalom! follows the basic design of Mallarmé’s
"L'Après-midi d'un faune." Just as Mallarmé's poem is an exploration of
inner consciousness through the uncovering of multiple perspectives, so
too does Absalom attempt to uncover multiple layers of reality as the past
interacts with the present. Like the poem, Faulkner's novel presents effects
before causes. Like the poem, it reveals that history is more than just a
collection of facts. History is born in the interaction of the past upon the
present as it moves toward the future. And like the poem, Faulkner reveals
that there is a way to remedy the horror of experience devoid of meaning.
The remedy is the art of reflection and the sublimation of loss with poetic
insight.
Both Mallarmé's poem and Faulkner's novel also demonstrate the
impossibility of ever totally recovering the past. In the telling of the story,
an absence is marked through language. Language is a departure that
marks its own destination in absence. The end of both Faulkner's novel
and Mallarmé's poem is in its beginning. The answer to the question
"What happened?" can only be answered in one's awareness of the events,
in one's own consciousness.
Acknowledgments
This paper is based on my master's thesis in comparative literature that
was completed in October of 2007 at the University of Illinois at
Springfield. I wish to express my special gratitude to Rosina Neginsky,
who served as my thesis advisor for this project.
Notes
1
Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 5.
2
Gloria Melgarejo Granada, Fragments et Obstacles: Mallarmé et le "genie" du
livre inachevé/Poésie et dédoublement esthétique, Currents in Comparative
Romance Languages and Literatures Series (New York: Peter Lang Publishing,
Inc, 2009), 13.
3
Thomas A. Williams, Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism (Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 1970), 71.
4
Granada, Fragments et Obstacles, 5.
5
William Faulkner, The Marble Faun and A Green Bough, First Random House
Edition (New York: Random House, 1960), 12.
6
"Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer. . . . Aimai-je un rêve?" (lines 1 and 4)
7
Henry Weinfield, Introduction, Commentary, and English Translation, Stéphane
Mallarmé: Collected Poems (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1996), 38.
Aimai-je un rêve?
Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, s'achève
En maint rameau subtil, qui, demeuré les vrais
Bois mêmes, prouve, hélas! Que bien seul je m'offrais
Pour triomphe la faute idéale de roses. (lines 3-7)
8
Bernard Weinberg, The Limits of Symbolism: Studies of Five Modern French
Poets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 139.
9
Weinfield, Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems, 41.
Tant pis! Ver le bonheur d'autres m'entraîneront
Par leur tresse nouée aux cornes de mon front. (lines 93-94)
10
Weinberg, The Limits of Symbolism, 154.
11
Judith L. Sensibar. The Origins of Faulkner's Art (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1984), 71.
12
John T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner's Language (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1982), 119.
13
Robert Dale Parker, Absalom, Absalom!: The Questioning of Fictions, Twayne's
Masterwork Studies No. 76 (Boston: Twayne Publishers--G.K. Hall & Co, 1991),
96.
14
Ibid., 61.
15
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage International, 1990),
243.
16
Ibid., 224.
17
Parker, Absalom, Absalom!: The Questioning of Fictions, 21.
18
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 114.
19
Parker, Absalom, Absalom!: The Questioning of Fictions, 68.
20
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 112.
21
Ibid., 114.
22
Ibid., 113.
23
Ibid., 115.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE MUSIC OF POETRY
AS SYMBOLIC TESTAMENT
ETHAN LEWIS
This essay will contend that the music of poetry is intrinsically symbolic.
To such preternatural associations with that term (as, for instance, Yeats’
“a symbol entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine
Essence”1) we shall attend. Indeed, a more precise comprehension of that
mystic ambiguity may be garnered by applying a “mundane” definition—
symbol as that which it literally is and suggestive of more—to poetic
music.
The same relevance we can discern through ostensibly opposed
formulations, viz. a.) If the music inheres in the sense, still it transcends
that sense (“Words are the only melodeon;” “Every poem is a poem within
a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words”[Stevens])2; b)
If it be distinguished from sense—as a metrical pattern or freer series of
cadenced, modulated tones—music yet contributes to meaning (“The
auditory imagination . . . works through meanings, or not without
meanings” [Eliot]3; “A sentence is a sound in itself on which sounds called
other words may be strung” [Frost])4. Either construal evinces the
coalescence of music and semantics. Stevens (broaching Mallarme) goes
so far as to identify the music with the story such that “it becomes the
story.” No sooner states he so than he refines, and to some degree retracts.
“When it is over, we are aware that we have had an experience very much
like the story just as if we had participated in what took place.”5
My piece proceeds through close analyses of a troika of Stevens poems
in conjunction with three dicta from his poetics. Though aware of the
eclecticism begged by this approach, I do think that the author of “The
Connoisseur of Chaos” would concur with it, and the exact yet abstract
character of Symbolism indeed encourages it.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,

618 Chapter Thirty-Four
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,

A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.6
And Stevens, as Hugh Kenner remarks, epitomizes the Symbolist legacy

to American literature.7
From The Necessary Angel, we read “that, above everything else,
poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are in poetry,
sounds.”8 That is not to say, that is precisely saying other than, that mere
sounds make words:
If it was only the dark voice of the sea

That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone.9
“But [words are] more than that.” Recurring to his essay (aptly monikered
“The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”), Stevens practically pleads
for “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings
which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having
no illusions.” That passion is poeticized in the lyric piece we’re sampling,
which veritably demonstrates its stated aspiration for semantic tone-shapes
that can even compass shades, salt, smell:
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. (ll. 51-55)
But we have jumped ahead of ourselves to cite “The Idea of Order at Key
West.” That work constitutes prosodic meditation, the most elevated genre
in Stevens’ harmonic array. A meditation ought to be distinguished from
the musical lyric, wherein words, though not entirely “mere” sounds, are
sounds “above everything else.” As in
The Pleasures of Merely Circulating
The garden flew round with the angel,

The angel flew round with the clouds,
The Music of Poetry as Symbolic Testament 619
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
Is there any secret of skulls,

The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?
Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby

Might well have been German or Spanish,
Yet that things go round and again go round
Has rather a classical sound.10
This fillip aims to enchant in the most fundamental cognate sense. (Just)
chanting the stanzas won’t suffice, and is actually discouraged by the
trisyllabic metrical matrix at its core. Trochees prompt chants (“Tiger,
tiger, burning bright, In the Forest of the Night.”) Because the surplus
syllables ending lines 1, 9 are rounded off by the subsequent foot in the
following lines, thereby lengthening the anapestic chain; due too, to the
prevailing open vOWel sOUnds, we “go round and again go round” in
recitation of a verbal, or virtual, chantant (Fr., singsong).
Grant the primary “Pleasure” of the audile motion, meaningfully
sinister undertones are lodged within, tucked specifically in the second
stanza:
Is there any secret in skulls,

The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the creatures in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?
The clogging iambs and guttural tones reinforce the semantic import.
“Words are [also] thoughts,” our own and others’—even “the thoughts of
men and women ignorant of what it is they are thinking.” However
relatively mindless of the dis-ease, it lingers in “The Pleasures.”11
Still, these subterranean “Rumb[lings]” are muted, sealed even. How
different the effect would prove (as my student, Elaiya Rucker, remarked)
were the order of stanzas two and three inverted. “A poem may consist of
several poetries,” thoughtfully jots Stevens in his remarkably suggestive,
epigraphic Adagia. “Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the
idea within the poem of words.”12 What lies “within the poem of words”
entitled “Pleasures of Merely Circulating” appears the kernel of some dark
“idea”—akin to what Frost intimates at the close of one sonnet: “What but
design of darkness to appall?” Though the couplet completes with a
belittling: “If design govern in a thing so small.”13 And so here in Stevens,

“the poem of the idea within the poem of words” is suborned by another
figure, this one musical.
Yet, as much in the nature of words as sound, inheres—what might we
call it, a verbal instinct?—to say something. If not instinct, might one
attribute it to force of habit? “[Words] are so used to being discursive that
it is almost impossible to stop them discoursing,” observes Sir Frank
Kermode in his classic examination of Symbolist and Imagist poetics
rooted in the notion of the Romantic Image.14 In “Pleasures” and like bon
mots, Stevens contrives, almost of necessity for its acceptance (a la
Carroll, Lear, and Seuss, whom Stevens in this playful vogue resembles),
what “oddly enough, makes sense, or so makes it that the words make
sense.” To this keen formulation, Hugh Kenner appends Mallarme’s
“laisser l’initiative aux mots.”15 Yet were Stevens simply tooting a vocal
horn or strumming upon a blue guitar of words, he could exemplify but
part of the explanatory power of terming poetic music fundamentally
symbolic. Kenner subsequently underscores Stevens’ faith, in the absence
of other faith, that every poem “is precisely about the creation of the
concepts it creates, and about a man’s need for such a creation of
concepts.”16 Such a piece as “Anecdote of a Jar” heightens the coalescence
of the poem of the idea with the poem of words:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
This verse utilizes like prosodic means of music making as those displayed
in “Pleasures,” even the same aural paronomasia on the “ou/ow” phoneme.
A lilting iamb dominates the meter to much the same effect as the
prominent anapest in the prior piece—i.e., in conjunction with the phoneme
and the imagery, to yield a sense of rounding about. But there means
something more here—something intimated in lines 10-11, which though
cumbering the movement as had the other lyric’s second stanza (here, by
virtue of the consecutive hard end stops), rejects summary dismissal:
It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.
Now, from within, “the poem of the idea” governs “the poem of the
words” rather than being repressed. As with so many Stevens poems, like
“The Idea of Order at Key West,” we might paraphrase that this “Anecdote”
concerns the human need to arrange one’s surroundings by imposition of
an imaginative act. “The plainness of plain things is savagery,” Stevens
reflects in his essentially celebratory “Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
(iv). Celebratory, for even ordinariness provides safe haven if strongly
imagined. To the Stevensian south of Connecticut, in virtual “Tennessee,”
the jar itself appears “plain”: “gray and bare,” though also “tall” and
“round.” “[W]hether the poet is for Nature or for Art,” Kermode avers, “is
irrelevant, because the point of the jar’s difference—it’s being ajar from
its surroundings—“and the manner of its difference are what matters”17.
At this point, I risk too radical a deviation from my subject matter,
hence am obligated to inform you (and thus prevent myself from
discoursing) on Stevens’ equal attractions, some times at various junctures
in his life, others instantaneously—Stevens’ passions for gaudiness and
plainness, respectively: both of which (possibly, especially the latter)
requiring imagination as disciplined as free. This (quite important) topic
necessitates analysis of such disparate texts as “The Comedian as the
Letter C” and “The Snow Man”; the paradoxically titled “Of Mere
Being”18 and the oh-so aptly nominated “Angel Among Paysans.” That
study would likewise assess the greater number of rhetorical pyrotechnic
pieces composed early on, vis-à-vis the stripped abstractions taking up
most of Stevens’ late creative energies.
Rather than veer off thus, I wish simply to underscore the
correspondence within the difference noted by Kermode—what might be
termed “Anecdote”’s harmony of ajarness. Correspondence, of course,
constitutes a major staple in the Symbolist lexicon. I am suggesting in
poems such as “Anecdote” a dual-music: a morphological equivalence of
sound scheme and sense. Though the idea exerts authority over the
prosody, we do the poem injustice to premise the content over the form.
Retreating, for the moment, to the faulty terminology this equivalence
would transcend, we could say that the nominal meaning serves as a
“meter” for the verbal music in exact proportion to the meter/meaning
relationship usually construed. “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,”
conversely, had completely inverted Emerson’s conventional formula: in
that piece (truly a piece in the musical sense of the term), it was not the
“argument that ma[d]e [the] poem”; but rather, a euphony “so passionate
and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of
its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”19 The precision of this
correspondence can in fact yield a less than satisfying reading, when,
“distracted by the double sense,” one tunes out either to focus on the other.
Hence, for Peter Viereck, in his review for Contemporary Poetry [1948],
as for Nicholas Teeter, a star student in my class, “Anecdote” is vacuous:
“the point is reached where we have almost endless polish and no jar”20;
whereas Howard Baker (favorably) and Yvor Winters (damningly) view
the jar as a pillar of Stevens’ thought, yet hardly hear the poem.
“Distracted by the double sense”—the phrase belongs to Stevens,
from his essay (in Angel) examining “Effects of Analogy” in an eclectic
array of works, commencing with Bunyan:
But of such an indisputable masterpiece [as Pilgrim’s Progress] it must be

true that one reader, oblivious of the other meaning, reads it for the story
and another reader, oblivious of the story, reads it for the other meaning;
and that each finds in perfection what he wants. But . . .
Stevens posits “a third reader,
one for whom the story and the other meaning should come together like
two aspects that combine to produce a third or, if they do not combine,
inter-act, so that one influences the other and produces an effect similar in
kind to the prismatic formations that occur about us in nature, as in the
case of reflections and refractions.21
This auditor straddles the threshold between differences that yet relate and
differences that yet cross over into a virtual or actual unity. Though both
types of disparateness accord with a doctrine of correspondence, the
second type, consisting of a state of two-and-one, proves more profoundly
Symbolic.
In “Effects of Analogy,” Stevens intimates that this cross-over occurs
with regard to the music of poetry, for a species of modern poetry—
namely, the aforementioned meditation. That is Stevens’ term. Eliot calls
some of his works in this form, outright, a “Love Song (for J. Alfred
Prufrock)”, “Preludes,” and a “Rhapsody (on a Windy Night).” Stevens
instances lines from this latter (ll. 56-68) as “a specimen of what is meant
by music today.” The passage “contains rhymes at irregular intervals and
it is intensely cadenced.” Yet just “yesterday, or the day before,” from “the
time [that] the use of the word…in relation to poetry has come down to us,
music . . . meant metrical poetry with regular rhyme schemes repeated

stanza after stanza. All of the stanzas were alike in form. As a result of this,
what with the repetitions of the beats of the lines, and the constant and
recurring harmonious sounds, there actually was a music. . . . Yet the
passage from Eliot was musical. It is simply that there has been a change in
the nature of what we mean by music. It is like the change from Haydn to
a voice intoning.
What follows functions, remarkably, as both description and control for a

comparative experiment. The meditative music of poetry
is like the voice of an actor reciting or declaiming or of some other figure

concealed, so that we cannot identify him, who speaks with a measured
voice which is often disturbed by his feeling for what he says. There is no
accompaniment. If occasionally the poet touches the triangle or one of the
cymbals, he does it only because he feels like doing it. Instead of a
musician we have an orator whose speech sometimes resembles music. We
have an eloquence and it is that eloquence that we call music every day,
without having much cause to think about it.22
This paraphrase is not “that eloquence that we call music” today. However
fluent, it lacks a sufficiently “intense cadence,” or a sound scheme
interpolating “rhymes at irregular intervals.” More essentially, this voice,
though “measured,” is not “disturbed by feeling for what is said”—nor, as
the voice of criticism, ought it be so. Conversely, that eloquence this
eloquence describes is performed in
Of Modern Poetry
The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then…
—stripped of the requisite metrical scaffolding and patterned rhyme—
Then the theatre was changed

To something else.
Eliot among others, observes that any locution proves subject to scansion,
and that “no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.”23 “We
may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should
lurk behind the arras in even the ‘freest’ verse; to advance menacingly as
we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. [For] freedom is only truly freedom

when it appears against the backdrop of some artificial limitation.”24 And
so above, as often in Stevens, though hardly exclusively for one who “of
repetition is most master”25, behind the “arras” curtaining this “changed
theatre” “Of Modern Poetry” “lurks” a flexible, albeit defined, largely
pentameter sequence of lines tending toward iambics.26 Effectively, a
blank verse line such as that patterning the speech of an actor, “an
insatiable actor,” for the modern poem must continually “construct a new
stage” from the sounds of words.
It has to be on that stage

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear,
The analogy to the drama at all times pertains; still, its effect is of analogy,
for the speaker-audience, at once performing and presiding “In the
delicatest ear of the mind,” “listens, not to the play,” for none is staged;
“listens,” rather,
to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.
Or have we in fact a production staged within the lyric: a performance in

that mode to which Stevens alludes (in “The Snow Man”) as “The nothing
that is [there].” Not a play per se. Exit the actor; manet the musician/orator
playing an “emotional recital.” Hence, Stevens identifying of “the story”
conveyed with the music, which
becomes the story and the speed with which we are following it. When it is
over, we are aware that we have had an experience very much like the
story just as if we had participated in what took place. It is exactly as if we
had listened with complete sympathy to an emotional recital. The music
was a communication of emotion.27
The genesis of this investigation commenced in a poetry class when we

were aiming at what is truly meant by “the music of poetry.” Is the term
merely analogous? One does not after all (or rarely any longer) sing a
poem; and even the tonal component of a song can be distinguished from
the euphony of the articulated sounds, i.e. words. Perhaps the difference
may be pared down to distinguishing articulation from expression, and
discerning articulation in expression; for the OED defines music as “That

one of the fine arts which is concerned with the combination of sounds
with a view to beauty of form and expression of emotion.”
For all our talking around and about the matter, our semantic quibbling
accommodates kinds of poetic music. We have, first, the metrical and
attendant prosodic forms once, as Wallace Stevens notes, definitive of this
music. That is to say, the sound pattern we term rhythm combined with an
echoing of pitches produced through the instrumentality of words. Again,
though, that timbre differs from what one predicates by blowing air
“as through an instrument”28 or drawing a bow upon strings.
Plausibly, we must simply acknowledge thus, and construe “music”
according to how that signifier applies to the verbal medium. Yet when
among the finest text-books isolates “the musical element of poetry” as
“non-verbal”29, we bristle. As Stevens says, words are fundamentally
sounds; but so, too, are notes. And when we reach this degree of
dissection, we merely repeat the curious turn into a relevant reflection,
though not that musing we here pursue. For now the burden of proof has
shifted from explaining word-sounds’ resemblance to note-sounds, to
discriminating these types of sounds.
As for delineating musics of poetry, on one poet I shall continue to
rely, for to me he mans the vanguard most proximate to the conditions of
genuine music; Wallace Stevens, who literally means what he says, that
“words are the . . . melodeon.”
Literally? Well, more than merely metaphorically—hence, in the
essential sense, symbolically. We can best (perhaps only) vault above the
aporia of poetic music through Symbolist theory. Doing so, too, owns the
reflexive advantage of, through music, better comprehending Symbolism.
To such preternatural associations with that term (as, for instance, Yeats’
“a symbol entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine
Essence”) we can now return—and with more rigor to that mystic
ambiguity—after remarking the most fundamental definition, which I posit
thus: a symbol is that which it actually presents, even as it also means
more. I give my wife a rose—a real rose I give to someone comparable to
a rose though from that flower separate, which predicates comparison in
the first place. Hence, the rose means also, all the while retaining its
essential floralness—means also: why, so many things weakly paraphrasable
(for a symbol, like a poem, transcends paraphrase) as I love you; you are
beautiful; you share with it that knack for “entangl[ing], in complex
colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence,” etc. Let us, though,
return from the abstract and aetherial to the mundane, and more general: a
symbol is what it actually presents, even as it also means more.
From this simple formulation follows a bizarre paradox, which in the

semantics of Symbolism suffers a fate like unto that of “music” in poetics.
I.e., the paradox is accommodated, spoken about, or more precisely,
around. I refer to the hendiadycal “one-and-two,” the arcane identity of the
symbol concomitant with its nominal identity.
How else it may genuinely be said that the music becomes the story is
expressed by Yeats: “It is right, . . . That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song.” Grant that one plausible
interpretation in “After Long Silence”30;—such instances of music as the
lyric topic, in ways surpassing (albeit related to) an ode celebrating song,
resemble Stevens’ morphological equivalencies of music with narration.
By their distinctive overreachings, poetries of music underscore the
dialectic of identity (at once, one and two) that permeates Symbolism.
Notes
1
W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: MacMillan, 1961), 148.
2
Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of
America, 1997) 909, 912.
3
T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism ([1933]; rpt. Cambridge:
Harvard, 1961) 111.
4
Letter to John T. Bartlett [1922]; rpt. in Elaine Barry, Robert Frost on Writing
(New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1973), 63.
5
“Effects of Analogy,” The Necessary Angel: Essays in Reality and the
Imagination [1951], in Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 720.
6
Ibid., 195.
7
See Kenner’s extensive treatment, in conjunction and contrast with Williams, in
“Something to Say,” A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New
York: Knopf, 1975) 50-90.
8
Stevens, CPP, 663
9
“The Idea of Order at Key West,” ll. 21-28. We note the Wordsworthian irony (as
in “The Tables Turned”) of excoriating the nonsensicality of sole sound, in words
shaping that sound.
10
Stevens, CPP, 120.
11
Collate the middle stanza and the sober observations in “The Noble Rider” with
these musings from Stevens’ friend (and antagonist):
Inside the bus one sees

His thoughts sitting and standing. His
thoughts alight and scatter—
Who are these people (how complex
the mathematic) among whom I see myself
in the regularly ordered plateglass of
his thoughts, . . .
They walk incommunicado, the

equation is beyond solution. (W.C. Williams, Paterson I (9-10))]
12
Stevens, CPP, 912.
13
Frost, “Design,” The Poetry of Robert Frost.
14
Kermode, Romantic Image (New York: Macmillan, 1957) 136.
15
A Homemade World, 51-2.
16
Quoted in A Homemade World, 53; emphasis mine; q.v. Stevens’ impassioned
apologia cited above: “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and
feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having
no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling
them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable
vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them.”
17
Romantic Image, 48.
18
To the lyric nothing “mere” pertains save in how C.S. Lewis writes of Mere
Christianity. “Being” in the abstract is what it is via elaborately rigorous
embodiment:
The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
19
Cf. Emerson, “The Poet” [1844]. In fairness to the great man, the passage in its
entirety more closely equates “the meter” with “the meter-making argument,”
particularly through the ambiguity of its imagery; still, a gradation is conferred.
“[W]e do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in
meter, but of the true poet. . . . For it is not meters, but a meter-making argument
that makes a poem— . . . The thought and the form are equal in the order of time,
but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new
thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with
him, and all men will be richer in his fortune.” Emerson’s Essays (New York:
Harper & Row, 1951), 266-67.
20
Reprinted in Wallace Stevens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Charles Doyle (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 307. Baker’s and Winter’s respective comments
appear on pages 127, 228-29 of this volume.
21
Stevens, CPP, 708.
22
Ibid., 719-20.
23
“The Music of Poetry,” in T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Faber
and Faber, 1957), 37.
24
“Reflections on Vers Libre,” in Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings
([1965] rpt. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991) 187.
25
Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” iii.9, CPP, 350.
26
See Dennis Taylor, “The Apparitional Meters of Wallace Stevens,” Wallace
Stevens Journal 15.2 (Fall 1991): 209-28.
27
Stevens, CPP, 720.
28
Even Wordsworth’s boy of Winander thus approximates not music per se, rather
“mimic hootings to the silent owls” (l.9).
29
Elements of Literature, eds. Robert Scholes et al., 4th ed. (Oxford, 1991), 551.
30
Subject to one’s grammatical predilections, the poem may extol that “Bodily
decrepitude is wisdom.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
SPEED AND SLOWNESS BETWEEN

“DECADENCE” AND FUTURISM
ALAIN FAUDEMAY
Apart from modern centuries, located beyond time, Maeterlinck’s

dramas disdain the rush of the secular world; they often impose a
spiritualizing slowness:
It seems when one of them gets up, walks or makes a gesture, that his
movements are grave, slow, rare and, so to say, spiritualized by distance,
light and the uncertain veil of the windows . . .1
Then, as the bell keeps its peace, there’s a silence, in the middle of which
three slow knocks are heard at intervals at the gate of the convent.2
Intermissions, moments of meditation or contemplation, suspend

action: hence, the points of suspension, frequently used by Maeterlinck,
contrasting with the expectation, which they insidiously sharpen. Slowness
means slowing down, on the border of motionlessness, as speech wavers
on the border of silence, and silence refers to a perhaps inaccessible
interiority (like the afterlife), which is celebrated by being identified with
the soul: "We would say they listen to their souls."3
Have a care! Have a care! We need to whisper . . . We need to stop

worrying her . . . The human soul is very silent . . . The human soul enjoys
departing by herself . . ."4
In that whole reply uttered by the old Arkel at the end of Pelléas and
Mélisande, many sibilant and liquid sounds propagate a central silence,
which is the brimful silence of spirituality, of what is called the soul;
Maeterlinck is perhaps shown that path by the author of Sagesse
(Wisdom), Verlaine, who, then converted, invites his soul to keep slow:
630 Chapter Thirty-Five
"The false fine days shone all day, poor soul,/ . . . Fade away and depart,
slow and joining your hands."5 And the musician Ernest Chausson, who
composes melodies inspired by Verlaine and Maeterlinck, writes in 1897 a
Quatuor in A major, whose "Very slow movement" is later praised by
Charles Du Bos for its "recollected delectation."6
Hazier and more diffuse than the soul in its religiosity, the “inward
life” (vie intérieure) also suffuses many decadent or symbolist poems. It
often implies an enclosure that protects against the outside world, like the
enclosure of convents. “Interior,” by Samain, praises
The cell with warm walls, the hearth with subtle leisure,
Where is elaborated, like the rarest elixir,
The refined essence of the inward life.7
José Hennebicq, a friend of the Belgian painter Jean Delville, publishes in

1898 a treatise About the Inward Life where he says of Villiers-de-l’Isle-
Adam: “the real world is the one which he created within himself, so that
he could live here his inward life.”8 At the beginning of the twentieth
century, Catulle Mendès, in an anthology, points out Léon Dierx’s
“atmosphere, which in a felicitous way, displays his inward life.”9 In
Dierx, the “inward life” is not only allusively and negatively expressed by
the closed lips, the title of a poetical volume and the paradoxical silence in
the poetry of that time, but also by the closed eyes, or at least the eyes
which are inwardly open or outwardly closed, as later in Verlaine: “Close
your eyes, poor soul, and come back home at once.”10 Or in Rodenbach:
“And each of them goes there, with joined hands and closed eyes.”11
Closed eyes charm painters, in spite of their illustrating an art of sight:
they make visible those who do not see or rather those who see what we
unrightly do not see as well as them, as they have the privilege to be
confined within their "inward vision". In the same year, 1890, Jean
Delville draws Parsifal ("his eyes are closed," notices a critic12) and
Odilon Redon paints The Closed Eyes ("The organs of sight are kept
closed and turned towards the inside," comments another critic13). The
painting, entitled Listening to Schumann, by Knopff, in the Brussels
Museum of Arts,14 shows a female face hidden by a hand: did the listener
close her eyes? We must not more than her switch from the Invisible,
which is, in that case, music. "Only for a few years music has been heard
that way—not with pleasure: with meditation," observes Verhaeren,15
giving heed to that cult for art, which substituted for religiosity.
The high spirituality for which Symbolist or decadent poetry keeps
longing is obtained only by renouncing—renouncing all "temptations" (to
use Verlaine’s word) issued from wordliness and modernity. Snow, swans
Speed and Slowness Between “Decadence” and Futurism 631
and lilies discolour silhouettes and landscapes, surreptitiously extort them

to the terrestrial sensuousness.
That whiteness is slowness, religious and funereal:
The snow is falling like long shafts of lint

.....................................
Such is the softness of that monotonous dusk
Where a slow landscape is pampering itself. (Verlaine)16
Morning music which is falling from the tower,

Which is falling from Not Long Since, invisible lilies,
Petals, so slows, so cold, so pale. (Rodenbach)17
Slowly, softly, lest it should break,

To seize a soul, to listen to its most secret sins
.....................................
And in that soul, swollen by a vast sigh
To leave while departing something like the recollection
Of a tall long, long-feathered snowy swan.
(Samain in 1900, the year of his death).18
An orgy of whiteness equally stirs up, during those years, painting; the
white colour is paradoxical, nearly a non-colour,which so many reflections
of all colours can delicately tint. Whistler’s Symphonies in White present
by turns an 1862 "white girl" who holds a flower in her hand and treads on
a bear skin and a young girl, clad in a long white dress, whose meditative
profile is reflected in a mirror.19 Like Whistler’s Symphony in White No. 1
with its bear skin, Winter in Versailles, a painting by Lévy-Dhurmer,20
submits the beastly flesh to the triumph of the Ideal, as three she-sphinxes,
half woman and half beast, are not only frozen in stone but also being
buried by a persistent snow, which keeps on falling.
Renouncing sensoriality coincides with renouncing "modernity," as the
latter guiltily stimulates materialistic consumption; it is more than
suggested by the choice of Bruges or Venice in Rodenbach, 21 Henri de
Régnier22 and D’Annunzio,23 or of Toledo, in Pio Baroja24 and Barrès,25 or
of Mélisande’s untemporal kingdom in Maeterlinck. This renouncement
inspires a feeling of loss and mourning, but the half agreed to, half
dreamed of mourning which is proper to melancholy: that word occurs
again and again in D’Annunzio;26 Goethe27 and Senancour28 had already
mentioned "the delight of melancholy." For sensoriality here only expires
while sensuously relishing that death, which becomes a slow, slackening
up death during a period when two lingering diseases predominate:
phthisis and syphilis. Hence what D’Annunzio calls, after Chateaubriand,29
"enchantment," in Italian incanto or, still better, since it is a longer word,

incantamento: "Throughout silence the music spreads/ across the large
palace a slow enchantment" (un lento incantamento).30
Alexander Blok, introducing a "crepuscular" poetess of the Russian
decadence, Zinaida Hippius, Merejkovski’s wife, tightens up the converging
motives of that reverie:
Transfiguration is performed in the depths of the mirror, in the dusky

shades of a bedroom, in the soft fall of snowflakes. There is no fantastic
felicity in those misty reveries where the scent of autumn, of an everlasting
farewell, float . . . Slowly, with a moveless or hazy look, women are
passing by, slim, long and flexible . . . brides bound with the world by the
links of an ancient, immaculate, transparent, bloodless love, which is
rooted beyond the grave . . . 31
Blok first mentions “the depths of the mirror.” Let’s remember the mirrors
in Whistler’s painting, in Rodenbach’s poetry, with each time a white
female figure appearing or disappearing. Only the French language,
differently from the English, Italian, or Russian languages, miraculously
unites in a single word the mirror and the coldness. This word is the word
glace, which alternately designates according to the different facets of its
polysemy the solid state of water; then quieter and colder than still water,
in English ice; and the reflective surface of the looking-glass, which gives
me or gives me back an image of my ego, in English mirror. The
narcissistic pleasure, not devoid of reflective "melancholy," which the self-
lover relishes, perhaps compensates in a way for the affective frustration
of solitude. Already Mallarmé marvellously explores the polysemy of la
glace (ice and mirror), as Herodiade thus expresses herself in front of the
mirror: "Mirror! O cold water by tedium in thy frame frozen."32
Rodenbach still outbids this present absence or this enjoyable coldness,
in doubling verses that suggest reflective melancholy and at the same time
embody a sensorial pleasure:
Mirrors are the melancholy custodians

Of the faces and things which have looked at themselves there
.....................................
The evening becomes a sickness in them;
.....................................
The increasing evil of the shadowy enlarging halo
Which slowly strips and cancels the mirrors.33
May those who yearn for spirituality sink in such a way into a
narcissistic solitude? The naturalist writers, mostly atheists or agnostics, in
any case distrustful towards any kind of idealism, have reluctantly

accepted what they considered a drift or as a sham.
Such seems to both brothers Goncourt Madame Gervaisais’ mysticism,
secretly related to the "dematerialization of the physical being"34 which
strikes the tubercular lady: "the disease, the slow disease, which nearly
softly extinguished Madame Gervaisais’s life;"35 while renouncing
sensoriality, she still sensuously relishes that renouncement, the religious
longing complies with the relished death, and the two brothers’ delicate
irony invents the oxymoron "spiritual sensations."36 More brutal, Zola
elicits the passage from dematerialization to spiritualization and explains it
as the transition between two different kinds of illness, when he too
ironically praises the two brothers for having "studied with infinite skill
the slow gradations of religious contamination."37
The two brothers may have proposed a kind of parody of the still
inchoate "decadent" spirit of the art created in that time in France; like
many a decadent artist, Madame Gervaisais is also a kind of symbolist,
persuaded, like many contemporaries, by Plato’s idealism, whence she will
more easily resume the long lost catholicism of her previous education:
She had recognized in the books of philosophy her own undefinable desire
to rise, according to Plato’s phrase, from the unsteady scenery of life, from
the ceaselessly changing nature, to the Unchangeable, to the immutable,
absolute, remaining truth, the Ideas.38
The ascendancy of Plato’s idealism over a part of Baudelaire’s work, as

well as over Mallarmé or, later, Stefan George,39 is a well-known fact.
One generation separates George’s beginnings from Mallarmé’s, and
one generation also separates Mirbeau’s virulent critiques in 1895 from
those, more subdued, that were emitted by the Goncourt brothers in 1869.
Mirbeau assaults one of the first illustrations of European decadence, pre-
Raphaelism, then around 50 years old, by some of its aspects an ancestor
of Art Nouveau; at the time of that controversy, Rossetti was dead:
on a small table, long-stemmed narcissi were dying like souls in a narrow

vase, whose opening mimicked the calyx of a lily, strangely green and
perverse.40
It is supposed to be the true face of mysticism, which Mirbeau, as a

confident atheist, more directly blamed a few months earlier. Mirbeau’s
hostility against "decadence" clearly results from the "modernism" of that
naturalist writer. To mystical, endless languor he would oppose the
apology of sensations, technical progress, philosophical materialism. He
claims that "modernity" with a provoking humour: "And to go more

quickly, you’ll take the new tram in the Champs-Elysées?—At these
words the true Parisian, although gouty, jumps on the sidewalk."41 In
1900, Mirbeau buys his first car; in 1907, he publishes The 628-E8,42 a
narration of a car trip over which Marinetti later rejoices.
In 1908, Jules Romains’s Unanimous Life matches the raptures of
speed and the cult of "modernity" with critical remarks against religious
behaviour, which may also imply a censure of decadent aesthetics;43
Romains’s poetical volume makes room for a polyphony of contradictory
points of view, but it takes place in a particularly polemic context, after
Jules Ferry’s laws on secularism, in the 1880s, and the separation between
Church and State in 1905; the word dechristianisation has been present in
the French language since the end of the nineteenth century.44
Only a few years separate Mirbeau’s car narration and Romains’
poems and the Futurist statements. Boccioni, for instance, claims a
"violent desire of getting out of oneself,"45 and to reach that aim, he relies
on the disgust that is prompted in him by the decadent narcissistic
introversion: "It’s an expansion in infinite speed, our speed, instead of a
static concentration of the Self."46 But this statement by Boccioni is dated
1914, and the First World War soon manifests the limits of so-called
"progress."
The Symbolist writers and, more generally, the decadent "aesthetics"
where they take place, only assume their meaning through a long
discussion on "modernity," between the first adhesion to technical
novelties in 1840-50, in Turner47 and Maxime Du Camp,48 and the second
modernist wave illustrated around 1910-20 by the Italian and Russian
futurists and by Cendrars and Morand in France. Distrustful of the first
"modernism" and the new social and cultural order related to it, at the time
of steam, trains and urbanization, the decadent aesthetics contributed to
feed the futurist reaction, at the time of the cinema, the cars and the planes.
However, it was not the end of slowness, or of the nostalgia for
slowness, in Western civilizations, which became more and more
dedicated, fortunately and unfortunately, to the commands of speed.
Notes
1
Maurice Maeterlinck, Intérieur (initial didascalia), in Théâtre, Bruxelles, 1901-
1902 (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1979), 2:175. "Il semble que lorsque l’un d’eux
se lève, marche ou fait un geste, ses mouvements soient graves, lents, rares et
comme spiritualisés par la distance, la lumière et le voile indécis des fenêtres."
2
Maeterlinck, Sœur Béatrice, act 3, in Théâtre, 2:206. "Ensuite, la cloche s’étant
tue, un silence, au milieu duquel trois coups lents et espacés sont frappés à la porte
du couvent."
3
Maeterlinck, Intérieur, in Théâtre, 2: 190."On dirait qu’elles écoutent leurs
âmes."
4
Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande, act 5, scene 2 (dernières scène), Théâtre,
3:112. "Attention . . . Attention . . . Il faut parler à voix basse . . . Il ne faut pas
l’inquiéter . . . L’âme humaine est très silencieuse . . . L’âme humaine aime à s’en
aller seule . . . "
5
Paul Verlain, "Les faux beaux jours …," Sagesse, first part, 6, in Œuvres
poétiques complètes, ed. Jacques Borel (Paris : Pléiade, 1962), 248. "Les faux
beaux jours ont lui tout le jour, ma pauvre âme, [ … ], O pâlis, et va-t-en, lente et
joignant les mains."
6
Charles Du Bos, "Chausson," Approximations (Paris: Fayard, 1965), 657. "la
délectation recueillie du Très Lent."
7
Albert Samain, “Intérieur” in "Le Chariot d’Or," Mercure de France, 191
(October 1894), 128. "La cellule aux murs chauds, l’âtre au subtil loisir,/ Où
s’élabore, ainsi qu’un très rare élixir,/ L’essence fine de la vie intérieure."
8
José Hennebicq, De la vie intérieure (Paris: Chamuel, 1898), quoted by Sébastien
Clerbois in an exhibition catalogue of the Rath Museum in Geneva. "Le monde
réel est celui qu’il s’est créé en lui-même, afin d’y vivre une vie intérieure." The
fourth part of Hennebicq’s book is dedicated to Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. In the
first part, on the "interior life," which refers to Plotin (22) and to the mystical
writers, Brugge, Rodenbach’s town, is praised (61-64).
9
Catulle Mendès, in l’Anthologie des poètes contemporains: 1866-1929, ed. G.
Walch, (Paris: Delagrave, 1937) 1:168. "l’atmosphère où respire heureusement sa
vie intérieure."
10
Verlaine, "Les faux beaux jours …," Sagesse, first part, 6. “Ferme les yeux,
pauvre âme, et rentre sur-le-champ.”
11
Georges Rodenbach, Béguinage flamand, part 2, in La Jeunesse blanche (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1923) in Oeuvres, 2:72. “Et chacune s’y rend, mains jointes,
les yeux clos.”
12
Jean Delville, in Richard Wagner, 125. Commented on by S. Clerbois. "Ses yeux
sont fermés."
13
Odilon Redon, in Mélancolie: Génie et folie en Occident, commented by Sophie
Collombat (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 470. (Grand Palais, exhibition in Paris). "Les
organes de la vue demeurent ici fermés et tournés vers ‘l’intérieur.’"
14
This painting by Fernand Khnopff is reproduced in Mélancolie, 271.
15
Emile Verhaeren, Fernand Khnopff (1887), in Sensations d’art (Paris: Ed.
Séguier, 1989), 230. "Ce n’est que depuis peu d’années que la musique s’écoute
ainsi—non avec plaisir: avec méditation."
16
Verlaine, "Le son dur cor s’afflige vers les bois …," ver. 10 and 13-14, Sagesse,
III, IX, 282." La neige tombe à longs traits de charpie/ . . . Tant il fait doux par ce
soir monotone/ Où se dorlote un paysage lent."
17
Rodenbach, "En province, dans la langueur matutinale . . . " in Le Règne du
Silence, "Du Silence," XXIV (Paris: éd. Charpentier, 1891), 228-229. "Musique du
matin qui tombe de la tour,/ . . . Qui tombe de Naguère en invisibles lis,/ En pétales
si lents, si froids et si pâlis."
18
Samain, "Lentement, doucement …," dans Les Roses dans la coupe, in Le
Chariot d’or, 43-44.
Lentement, doucement, de peur quelle se brise,
Prendre une âme, écouter ses plus secrets aveux
......................................
Et, dans l’âme que gonfle un immense soupir
Laisser, en s’en allant, comme le souvenir
D’un grand cygne de neige aux longues, longues plumes.
19
Symphony in White no 2 and Symphony in White no 1, reproduced in Robin
Spencer, James McNeill Whistler (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 36 and 29.
20
This painting by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer is reproduced in Le Symbolisme dans les
collections du Petit Palais (Paris: Musées, 1988), 149.
21
Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (Paris: Flammarion, 1910). See particularly the last
sentence: "avec la cadence des dernières cloches, lasses, lentes, petites vieilles
exténuées."
22
Henri de Régnier, Esquisses vénitiennes (1906) and Contes vénitiens (1927); he
notes, in September 1899, in L’altana ou la vie vénitienne: "La conformation
même de la ville impose à tout une sage lenteur" (Paris: Bartillat, 2009), 44.
23
Gabriele D’Annunzio, "L’Impero del Silenzio," Il Fuoco (Milano: Treves,
1911), 2:231.
24
Pio Baroja, Camino de perfeccion, chap. 20-31 (Madrid: Caro Raggio, 1993).
The "misticidad" of the town is now asserted (chap. 25, 159; chap. 30, 188), now
denied (chap. 22, 143).
25
Maurice Barrès, Greco ou le secret de Tolède (Paris: R. Laffont, collection
"Bouquins," 1994); see for instance the last paragraph in "Romans et Voyages,"
550.
26
D’Annunzio, Il Fuoco, see 230 and 550.
27
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wonne der Wehmut, Cycle of Lili Schoenemann
(83), in Poésies (Paris: Aubier bilingue, 1979), 1:342. (See also the French
translation by R. Ayrault).
28
Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Obermann (Paris: Gallimard, coll. "Folio," 1984),
letter 24, 139. Senancour writes, "cette volupté de la mélancolie, ce charme plein
de secrets, qui le fait vivre de ses douleurs et s’aimer encore dans le sentiment de
sa ruine." Quoted in Vincent Pomarède, “Le paysage comme état d’âme,”
Mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 323.
29
François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Paris: Pléiade, 1991).
See for instance the "enchanteresse" in the chapter entitled "Incantation," book 3,
chap. 13, 1:97-98.
30
Gabriele d’Annunzio, Psiche giacente, in Poema paradisiaco, "Versi d’amore"
(Torino: Einaudi, 1995), 488. "Nel silenzio la musica diffonde / pel gran palagio un
lento incantamento."
31
Alexandre Blok, Marasme, published in no. 11-12 of La Toison d’or in 1906.
Also found in Œuvres en prose (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1974), 31.
32
Mallarmé, Hérodiade, II, "Scène," in Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Mondor and G.
Jean-Aubry (Paris: Pléiade, 1945), 45. "Eau froide par l’ennui dans [son] cadre
gelée."
33
Rodenbach, "Les glaces sont les mélancoliques gardiennes …", Les malades aux
fenêtres, in Les Vies encloses (Charpentier, 1896), 99.
Les glaces sont les mélancoliques gardiennes
Des visages et des choses qui s’y sont vus.
C’est une maladie en elles que le soir;
..................................
C’est le mal d’un canal où s’effacent des cygnes
Que l’ombre identifie avec elle sur l’eau.
Mal grandissant de l’ombre élargie en halo
Qui lentement dénude, annihile les glaces.
34
Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Madame Gervaisais (Paris: Coll. Folio, 1982),
chap. 153, 241. "la dématérialisation de l’être physique."
35
Ibid., chap. 56, 176. "La maladie, la lente maladie qui éteignait presque
doucement la vie de Madame Gervaisais."
36
Ibid., chap. 11, 94. "sensations spirituelles."
37
Émile Zola, "Edmond et Jules de Goncourt," in Les Romanciers naturalistes,
(Charpentier, 1881), 220-230. (Quoted by Marc Fumaroli in the volume "Folio" of
Madame Gervaisais, 229). "étudié avec un art infini les lentes gradations de la
contagion religieuse."
38
Goncourt, Madame Gervaisais, chap. 11, 94.
elle y avait reconnu [dans les livres de philosophie] son désir non défini de
s’élever, selon la parole de Platon, de la scène instable de la vie, de la
nature continuellement changeante, à ce qui ne change pas, aux vérités
immuables, absolues, demeurantes, aux Idées.
39
For Baudelaire, see for instance our study on Le Flacon, in "Colloquium
Helveticum," 27 (1998): 178 - 9. About George’s platonism limit, see for instance
Claude David, Stefan George, Sein dichterisches Werk (German translation),
(Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1967), 324-5 (chap. IX, IV).
40
Octave Mirbeau, “Intimités pré-Raphaelites,” Le Journal (June 9, 1895) in
Combats esthétiques (Paris: Séguier, 1993) 2:103. "sur une petite table, mouraient,
comme des âmes, dans un vase étroit, dont l’orifice s’ouvrait en calice de lys,
étrangement verts et pervers."
41
Ibid., 2:175. From “Choses parisiennes,” Le Journal (April 18, 1897). "—Et
pour aller plus vite . . . , vous prendrez le nouveau tramway des Champs-Elysées ?
A ce mot, le vrai Parisien, bien que goutteux, bondit sur le trottoir."
42
Mirbeau, La 628-E8, preface Pierre Michel (Paris: Editions du Boucher, Société
Octave Mirbeau, 2003). See, in particular, 157-159.
43
"La vapeur frénétique agite les chaudières,” Jules Romains, “Nous” in La vie
unanime, part 2, III (Paris: Coll. Poésie / Gallimard, 1983, 1977), 201.
Nous allons vers demain et nous quittons hier
Comme un train qui s’ébranle et qui sort de la gare.
........................................
Les hommes avant nous ont pleuré trop longtemps.
Leurs âmes retenaient l’obscurité des temples;
Le parfum de l’encens les faisait défaillir;
Ils aimaient s’attarder à trop de crépuscules.
44
"Déchristianisation" has been in use since 1876, as attested to in F. Dupanloup,
Trésor de la langue française (Paris, 1978), 6:827.
45
Boccioni, "Dinamismo plastico," in Pittura e scultura futuriste (Milano:
Abscondita, 2006), 99. "desiderio violento di uscire da noi stessi."
46
Ibid., 100. "E un espansione nell’ infinita velocità, la nostra, invece di un
concentramento statico dell’Io."
47
For notes on Turner’s Train, Steam, Speed (Tate Gallery) see Andrew Wilton,
Turner and His Time (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 210 – 211.
48
For a discussion of Maxime du Camp’s belief in "progress," see Les Chants
modernes (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1860) 59 (locomotive) and 175 (vapor).
Fig. 3-5. Armand Point, The Eternal Chimera, 1895.
Fig. 4-1. Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera (Spring), 1477.

Fig. 4-2. Sandro Botticelli, Smeralda Bandinelli, 1471.
Fig. 4-3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Donna Della Finestra, 1879.
Fig. 4-4. Sandro Botticelli, “Mystic Nativity,” 1500.
Fig. 11-1. Edward Burne-Jones, Prioress’s Tale, c. 1865-98.
Fig. 11-2. Edward Burne-Jones, Le Chant d’Amour, 1868-77.
Fig. 11-3. Edward Burne-Jones, Cupid and Psyche, c. 1865.
Fig. 13-1. Odilon Redon. L’Apparition. 1883.
Fig. 13-3. Gustave Moreau. Salome Dancing before Herod. 1876.
Fig. 13-22 . Jeanne Jacquemin. La Douloureuse et glorieuse couronne (The Crown
of Thorns).
Fig. 14-1. Gustave Moreau, Jupiter et Sémélé,.
Fig. 15-1. Paul Gauguin, In the Waves, 1889.
Fig. 15-4. Paul Gauguin, Soyez mystérieuses (Be Mysterious), 1890.
Fig. 15-5. Paul Gauguin, Fatata te miti (By the Sea), 1892.
Fig. 15-8. Aristide Maillol, The Wave, 1898.
Fig. 15-9. Maurice Denis, Polyphemus, 1907.
Fig. 21-1. Paul Ranson, La Farce du pâté et de la tarte, 1892.
Fig. 22-1. Nikolaos Gysis, The Worship of Angels, 1898.
Fig. 22-8. Constantinos Parthénis, Annunciation, 1910-1911.
Fig. 24-1. Giovanni Segantini, The Angel of Life, 1894.
Fig. 24-6. Giovanni Segantini, The Punishment of Lust I, 1891.
Fig. 24-9. Giovanni Segantini, Evil Mothers I, 1894.

Plate 26-1. Giulio Aristide Sartorio, The wise and foolish Virgins, 1890-91.
Plate 26-2. Mario de Maria, The Fondaco of Turkishs in Venice, 1909.
Fig. 32-4. Robert Motherwell, Beside the Sea No. 22, 1962.
CONTRIBUTORS
Maria Aivalioti, Ph.D. Candidate, University Paris X-Nanterre, France
Hüseyin Altındis, Lecturer, Selçuk Üniversitesi, Turkey
Claire Barbillon, Associate Professor of Art History, University of

Nanterre; Director of Studies at Ecole du Louvre, France
Leah C. Boston, Ph.D. and Independent Scholar, Chicago, IL, USA
Liana De Girolami Cheney, Professor, UMASS Lowell, USA
Deborah Cibelli, Professor, Nicholls State University, USA
Alina Clej, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, USA
Brendan Cole, Professor, Eton College, England
Leslie Curtis, Associate Professor, John Carroll University, USA
Clément Dessy, Ph.D. Candidate, F.R.S.- FNRS (Fonds National de la

Recherche Scientifique) - Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Mireille Dottin-Orsini, Professor, Université de Toulouse-le Mirail,

France
Alain Faudemay, Professor, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
Julia Friedman, Assistant Professor, Waseda University (SILS), Japan
Liesbeth Maria Grotenhuis, Teacher and Curator, Minerva School of

Arts and Design and Gasunie Art Collection, The Netherlands
Kathryn Moore Heleniak, Professor, Fordham University, USA

640 Contributors
Joelle Joffe, Psychoanalist and Lecturer, Hopital de Montesou; Université

Paris VIII Saint Denis, France
Warren Johnson, Associate Professor, Arkansas State University, USA
Brent Judd, Instructor, Sacred Heart-Griffin High School; University of

Illinois at Springfield, USA
John Klein, Associate Professor, Washington University in St. Louis,

USA
Davide Lacagnina, Assistant Professor, Università degli studi di Siena,

Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Storico Artistici, Italy
Geneviève Lacambre, Honorary General Curator of the Patrimony,

former Director of the Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, France
Ethan Lewis, Professor, University of Illinois at Springfield, USA
Andrew Marvick, Associate Professor, Southern Utah University, USA
Anna Mazzanti, Asistant Professor, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
Jana Náprstková-Dratvová, Ph.D. Candidate, Charles Univeristy of

Prague and Université Charles de Gaulle Lille 3, France
Rosina Neginsky, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at

Springfield, USA
Christos Nikou, Detached from the secondary education at the University

of Athens and Ph.D. Candidate, Paris-Sorbonne, France
Jonathan Perkins, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at

Springfield, USA
William M. Perthes, Lecturer and Assistant Director of Education, The

Violette de Mazia Foundation, USA
Erika Schneider, Assistant Professor, Framingham State College, USA

Cassandra Sciortino, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Santa

Barbara, USA
Larry Shiner, Emeritus Professor, University of Illinois at Springfield,

USA
Olga Skonechnaia, Researcher, Institute of World Literature, Moscou,

Russia
Patrick Thériault, Lecturer, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada
Mary Traester, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Southern California, USA

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Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences

Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences

This book first published 2010

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2010 by Rosina Neginsky and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2392-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2392-0

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi

Part I: Origins of the Symbolist Movement

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 33

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 58

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 94

Part II: Symbolist Movement

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 116

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 129

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 147

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 159

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 169

Chapter Ten.............................................................................................. 178

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 189

Chapter Twelve........................................................................................ 203

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 209

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 251

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 272

Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 291

Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 309

Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 328

Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 336

Chapter Twenty........................................................................................ 360

Chapter Twenty One ................................................................................ 367

Chapter Twenty Two................................................................................ 383

Chapter Twenty Three ............................................................................. 409

Chapter Twenty Four ............................................................................... 426

Chapter Twenty Five................................................................................ 455

Chapter Twenty Six ................................................................................. 481

Chapter Twenty Seven ............................................................................. 531

Chapter Twenty Eight .............................................................................. 548

Chapter Twenty Nine............................................................................... 556

Part III: Consequences of the Symbolist Movement

Chapter Thirty.......................................................................................... 572

Chapter Thirty One .................................................................................. 583

Chapter Thirty Two.................................................................................. 594

Chapter Thirty Three ............................................................................... 608

Chapter Thirty Four ................................................................................. 617

Chapter Thirty Five ................................................................................. 629

Fig. 13-23. Jeanne Jacquemin. Saint-Georges. 1898. Color Lithograph. Appeared

Without symbolism there can be no literature;

Symbolism began with the first words uttered

—Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in

Symbolism is everything that reflects the essential as a sign of the

Probably the key word that describes the Symbolist movement is

Romanticism played an important role in the development of Symbolist

our ordinary existence, driven by will, is subject to an endless dialectic of

Schopenhauer significantly influenced J-K Huysmans’ novel, A rebours

It stresses the artist’s attraction to the strange as an element of the artist’s

Baudelaire was very much under the spell of an American writer,

Imagination is not a fantasy; it is not a sensitivity either, though it would

Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondences” confirms and establishes in a

That feeling of exile introduces us already to Baudelaire’s symbolism, to

If the word associated with Baudelaire and early evolution of the

Paintings from artists such as Francisco Goya, William Blake, and

… at its best an individual’s response to society’s demand for conformity

actions, and opinions.21