cle of
the Roses, Lucretia and Tarquin, Pasiphae, the Triumph of Alexander,
Salome, Dante and Virgil, Bathsheba, Jason and the Golden Fleece. All
literatures were ransacked for themes. This painter suffered from the
nostalgia of the ideal. When a subject coincided with his technical
expression the result approximates perfection. Consider the Salome, so
marvellously paraphrased in prose by Huysmans. The aquarelle in the
Luxembourg is more plastic, more jewelled than the oil; Moreau often
failed in the working-out of his ideas. Yet, never in art has a
hallucination been thus set before us with such uncompromising
reality. The sombre, luxurious _decor_, the voluptuous silhouette of
the dancing girl, the hieratic pose of the Tetrarch, even the aureoled
head of John, are forgotten in the contemplation of Salome, who is
become cataleptic at sight of the apparition. Arrested her attitude
her flesh crisps with fear. Her face is contracted into a mask of
death. The lascivious dance seems suspended in midair. To have painted
so impossible a picture bears witness to the extraordinary quality of
Moreau's complex art. Nor is the Salome his masterpiece. In the realm
of the decorator he must be placed high. His genius is Byzantine.
Jupiter and Semele, with its colossal and acrian architectures, its
gigantic figure of the god, from whose august head emanate spokes of
light, is Byzantine of a wild luxuriousness in pattern and fancy.
Moreau excels in representing cataracts of nude women, ivory-toned of
flesh, exquisite in proportion, set off by radiant jewels and
wonder-breeding brocades. His skies are in violent ignition, or else
as soft as Lydian airs. What could be more grandiose than the Triumph
of Alexander (No. 70 in the catalogue)? Not John Martin or Piranesi
excelled the Frenchman in bizarre architectural backgrounds. And the
Chimeras, what a Baudelairian imagination! Baudelaire of the bitter
heart! All luxury, all sin, all that is the shame and the glory of
mankind is here, as in a tapestry dulled by the smoke of dreams; but
as in his most sanguinary combats not a sound, not a motion comes from
this canvas. When the slaves, lovely females, are thrown to the fish
to fatten them for some Roman patrician's banquet, we admire the
beauty of colour, the clear static style, the solidity of the
architecture, but we are unmoved. If there is such a thing as
disinterested art it is the claustral art of Moreau--which can be both
perverse an