“Des Esseintes thought that never before had a water colour attained such magnificent colouring; never before had the poverty of colours been able to force jewelled coruscations from paper, gleams like stained glass windows touched by rays of sunlight, splendours of tissue and flesh so fabulous and dazzling. Lost in contemplation, he sought to discover the origins of this great artist and mystic pagan, this visionary who succeeded in removing himself from the world sufficiently to behold, here in Paris, the splendour of these cruel visions and the enchanting sublimation of past ages.”
Des Esseintes, the anti-hero of Huysman’s decadent novel A rebours, ponders the origins of Gustave Moreau’s startling watercolour (The Apparition) , which shows Salome, as observed by Herod and Herodias, transfixed by the floating head of the decapitated John the Baptist. It’s not surprising that Salome appealed to Huysmans, as she was perhaps the greatest Symbolist obsession of them all. You only have to recall Wilde’s play about her; Wilde was an avid fan of A rebours, too. The author has Des Esseintes intoxicated by the character: using typically rarefied and ornate language, he comments on the cultural, geographical origins of this figure. More importantly, from the art history point of view, through his aesthete protagonist, Huysmans shows us how to look at a work of art. Yet, this seems far from mere connoisseurship, more like using a picture to put one in a state of meditation. It’s almost as if the image has become a mandala, an aid to mental concentration. I’m deliberately invoking mysticism and the occult here because Huysmans was interested in those subjects; and his interests in art would surely have overlapped with the esoteric. Art history could be seen in Des Esseintes’s setting as initiation, the lifting of a veil, remember Watts’s language, mentioned in the previous post?
“Deep in contemplation, he would try to puzzle out the antecedents of his great artist, this mystical pagan, this illuminee who could shut out the modern world so completely as to behold, in the heart of present-day Paris, the awful visions and magical apotheoses of past ages.”
“Des Esseintes found it hard to say who had served as his {Moreau’s] models; here and there, he could detect vague recollections of Mantegna and Jacopo de Barberi; here and there, confused memories of Da Vinci and feverish colouring reminiscent of Delacroix. But on the whole the influence of these masters on his work was imperceptible, the truth being that Gustave Moreau was nobody’s pupil.”
De Esseintes is putting his art knowledge to work here, in order to divine the presence of other masters, mainly renaissance painters, in this image. As he doubtless knew, Symbolism didn’t suddenly appear decked out in all its jewelled finery in the late 19th century, but evolved through study of the renaissance and earlier epochs. I can detect echoes of Mantegna; the stiffly standing soldier reminds me of the contrapposto of some of his figures, maybe in the Triumph of Caesar. I’ll add Bellini to Des Esseintes’s list as he seems to be a vague presence; the golden vault of Herod’s palace reminds me of some of the ceilings in Bellini’s Venetian altarpieces. I’m not so sure about Leonardo, but the slender curves of the salacious Salome suggest Jacopo de Barbari’s mannered nudes; I had the opportunity to study them recently in the Gossaert exhibition in London. Delacroix? The colours are typical of him, and Moreau would have admired him as most of the French symbolists did. The demure, female musician seems to be based on figures in Delacroix’s Algerian watercolours. But I shouldn’t play the sources game. Huysmans was astute enough to realize that Moreau was his own master; he took from others and imprinted his own distinctive style on the tradition. Here’s Moreau’s Self-Portrait- he looks the kind of neurotic genius who’d produce such a disturbing image. No wonder Des Esseintes made his art the centrepiece of his collection.
