Jean Delville was one of the leading figures in Belgian Symbolism and the advocate of the ideas of Sâr Péladan* and the Rosicrucian theories in Brussels. The totality of his work falls under the signs of occultism, idealism and esotericism. His painting The Angel of splendours is allegorical. Set in a hazy atmosphere, the body of a man satiated with pleasure rises from the shackles of terrestrial existence and sin, as symbolised by serpents. He rises towards heaven guided by an angel of light. The figure of the angel is redolent of the Mannerism that flowered in Italy in the early sixteenth century. The erotic ambiguity of the male figure is imbued with the poetics of ecstasy. The aerial fluidity of the lines accompanies the upward movement with a lyricism that harbingers Art Nouveau.

Women play a fundamental role in Belgian Symbolism as they embody all the duality and ambiguity of the world. This inexhaustible theme inspired multiple variations among all the Symbolists. To Fernand Khnopff the female figure is alternatively an angel, muse and friend. But she is also a temptress, a femme fatale and perverse. In Caresses, which is probably Khnopff's most famous work, the artist depicts this mysterious beauty but, alas, she has sold her soul and her master is Satan. The painting operates on this ambiguous situation, which blends temptation and seduction, but submission too: that of the man to the woman. The confrontation between the androgyne and the sphinx, in an imaginary landscape featuring blue columns and cabalistic inscriptions, has prompted many interpretations. Does it symbolise power, domination, seduction? Or is it perhaps the image of Khnopff himself and his mirror image, his sister Marguerite, his inaccessible muse? Maybe it is also the eternal vision of Oedipus and the Sphinx. The painting remains an endless mystery.

Acrasia and Britomart were inspired by two female characters in The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser. Here Fernand Khnopff returns to the magical legends of English literature that had attracted the Pre-Raphaelites, from where he too broadly drew his inspiration. Acrasia incarnates the pleasures of the flesh and Britomart incarnates conjugal faithfulness. In Khnopff's works the Symbolism is given by the clothing: the transparent veil that reveals the offered nudity of one, the surface lustre of the impenetrable armour of the other. The two women both stand out against a green ground and are linked by the identical gesture of the right arm. They even both have red hair. Acrasia has aspects of the fiendish nature of Klimt's women, while Britomart has the melancholic purity of the knights-errant of Burne-Jones.

Although he is considered a Romantic and realist, Félicien Rops is also an important representative of the Belgian Symbolist current. The bourgeois society from where he came misjudged him, whereas the greatest poets of the nineteenth century, for whom he was the illustrator, praised him to the skies. Rops' works that touch on Symbolism are all inspired by literature, as is this drawing. The Supreme Vice was the frontispiece of a novel titled Le vice suprême. Etudes passionnelles de décadence (1884), written by "Sâr Péladan", the spiritual master of the Order of the Rose + Cross. Rops led the life of a libertine, which turned him into a legendary figure. His works demonstrate his taste for fantasy and the supernatural, and his iconographic repertoire is formed primarily of skeletons, devils and death. This drawing is considered by some to be a representation of "Baudelairean Satanism" in plastic terms. Others see it as lust and vanity reunited with death. The two skeletons continue to love one another even after death but their love is now courtly instead of passionate. And therein lies the irony for Rops, who describes it as the "Supreme Vice".

 

*Joséphin Péladan (Lyon 1858 - Paris 1918), spiritual master of the Order of the Rose + Cross, whose salons were leading events in the Paris art scene between 1892 and 1997.