'L’Ecole de Platon' – Delville’s Initiatory sermon on Love, Beauty and Androgyny

ii f r o n t m at t e r

Jean DelvilleArt between Nature and the Absolute

By

Brendan Cole

BC

Text Box

THIS IS AN EXTRACT OF

BC

Text Box

PLEASE OBSERVE THE COPYRIGHT IF USE IS MADE OF THIS TEXT

To my parents, Cecilia and Barry

Jean Delville: Art between Nature and the AbsoluteBy Brendan Cole

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars PublishingLady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Brendan Cole

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): 1-4438-7047-1ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7047-4

List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

PART I – History

Chapter One. Delville’s early years and the avant-garde . . . . . . .19Early life and artistic training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19Delville, the Academy and the Avant garde . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25The fin-de-siècle avant-gardes: Les XX and L’Art Moderne . . . . .30Delville and Avant-garde Journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35The Avant-garde, Belgian society and political change during the fin de siècle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36The Avant-garde and Symbolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38Delville’s polemical advance: ‘this beautiful gesture of the swan’ . .40The Salons d’Art Idéaliste: ‘the cult of pure Beauty’ . . . . . . . . .49Marketing modernity: Idealist art versus avant-garde commodity? . .52

Chapter Two. L’Essor, Pour l’Art and the Prix de Rome . . . . . .59L’Essor, 1887-91 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59Pour l’Art: 1892, 1894 and 1895 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80Delville’s defence of Péladan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85Pour l’Art 1894 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90Pour L’Art 1895 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .94La Coopérative artistique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .98Prix de Rome (1895) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99

Contents

Fig. 1. (opposite title page) Jean Delville in his studio in front of Prométhée, after 1907, photograph. Private collection.Fig. 2. (opposite) Self-portrait, 1896, oil on canvas, 47 x 33 cm. Private collection.

viii C O N T E N T S J E A N D E Lv I L L E : A R T B E T w E E N N AT U R E A N D T H E A B S O L U T E ix

Chapter Three. The Salons D’Art Idéaliste . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115Salon d’Art Idéaliste 1896 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115Salon d’Art Idéaliste 1897 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122Salon d’Art Idéaliste 1898 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134Delville’s Esthétique Idéaliste and Péladan’s ‘École d’art Idéaliste’ . 138

PART II – Theory

Chapter Four. ‘L’Indéfinissable Frisson de L’Infini’ – Delville’s Occult Aesthetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

Occultism’s ‘glimpse of the Unknown’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154‘The Spiritualisation of Art’ – Art in search of the Ideal . . . . . . 157‘Les Trois Mondes de la Magie’ – foundation principles of Ideal Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162Idealist art as an expression of Equilibrium . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164The Absolute – the Occult source of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . 166Unity, God and the expression of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168Art as a expression of Divine Harmony, Symmetry and Number . . 170Nature and Matter – The Idea, Correspondences and the Symbol . 170 The Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Correspondences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 The Symbol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179The Spiritual role of the Artist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187L’Esthétique Idéaliste, Classicism and Occultism – The Great Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191L’Esthétique Idéaliste and Nineteenth century Occult Aesthetics . 200

PART III – Practice

Chapter Five. To Hell and Back – the Initiate’s way in Delville’s Art . 207The Initiate and ‘the Great Magical Agent’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 Les Trésors de Sathan: ‘the ravages of carnal love’ . . . . . . . . 215 The Decadents and the Devil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238L’Idole de la Perversité: The ‘bride of the devil’ . . . . . . . . . . 245 An initiatory figure … . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 The serpents of Light . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

Tristan et Yseult: ‘the marriage of sibling souls with the soul of the world’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Love and Death in the fin de siècle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 The Soul and Death: ‘le papillon de Psyché’ . . . . . . . . . . 276L’Ange des Splendeurs: ‘Man emanates from God and returns to God’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 Spiritual Evolution and Reincarnation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291L’Amour des âmes: Love – the way to the Absolute . . . . . . . . 293 The Nude: Expression of the Metaphysical . . . . . . . . . . . 300 Unity through spiritual love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

Chapter Six. L’Ecole de Platon – Delville’s Occult sermon on Love, Beauty and Androgyny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

Plato’s Akademos, the Androgyne and Spiritual Beauty . . . . . . 314The Hermetic myth of Original Unity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325Péladan and the Androgyne: ‘the dogma of Art’ . . . . . . . . . . 328The Androgyne and the theory of Equilibrium; the ‘Threefold Law’ . 334Delville’s Platonic sermon concerning ‘Equilibrium in the Universal Order’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339L’Ecole de Platon and the fin de siècle cult of Ideal Beauty . . . . 344Ideal or Spiritual Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347Responses to L’Ecole de Platon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495

306 C H A P T E R S I x

Chapter Six

L’Ecole de Platon – Delville’s Occult sermon on Love, Beauty

and Androgyny

Maître, quand tu viendras parmi les hommes fous et qui ne savent point que l’heure est accomplie, dis-leur, dans ta suprême et divine folie, que le vrai Dieu d’Amour est au dedans de nous.

Quand tu seras parmi les peuples en délire pour leur montrer le sens mystique du savoir, fais en sorte qu’enfin, ô Maître, ils puissent voir, dans ce monde obscurci ta vérité reluire.

Mais lorsque, tout à coup, ils entendront le son de ta voix au dessus des voix pleines de haine, que ta divinité se fasse plus humaine, et que ton chant divin soit la simple chanson.

Car les mots par lesquels tu feras la lumière ne peuvent révéler l’Arcane et l’Essentiel, puisque, selon la loi, les grands Sages du ciel, jamais ne sont compris par les fous de la terre!798

Delville, ‘Le Grand Initié’, Les Splendeurs Méconnues

Fig. 62. (opposite) L’Ecole de Platon (detail), 1898.

Fig. 63. L’Ecole de Platon, 1898, oil on canvas, 206 x 605 cm. Paris: Musée d’Orsay, RMN-Grand-Palais, inv. RF1979-34.

L’ E C O L E D E P L AT O N : D E Lv I L L E ’ S O C C U LT S E R M O N 311310 C H A P T E R S I x

DELvILLE’S L’ECoLE dE PLAToN (fig. 63) could be regarded as one of the great artistic successes of the late nineteenth century. This virtu-

osic creation is outstanding in contemporary fin-de-siècle painting, partic-ularly for its accomplished technique, its imaginative force, its impressive scale as well as for its authoritative visual expression of a complex aesthet-ic agenda. In its bravura fusion of intellect and imagination it articulates comprehensively Delville’s Esthétique Idéaliste. The work is executed on a grand scale (260 x 605 cm), which is unique in relation to the usual-ly intimate easel paintings of his non-realist contemporaries. There is no doubt that Delville adopted this huge format as a deliberate reference to the large-scale Academic history paintings, reserved for subjects expressing the most elevated aesthetic principles in the classical tradition, which he sought to renew. However, Delville, the philosopher-artist, perfectly aware of this tradition from his academic training, uses the convention forcibly to create what is very much a doctrinal statement of his own high-minded aesthetic. This serene evocation of classical antiquity, now hanging in the Musée d’Orsay, was completed while Delville was in Italy after winning, controversially, the Belgian Prix de Rome in 1895. we have already seen that he admired intensely the art of the classical tradition, and he was now finally able to study original works from Greece as well as Renaissance Italy. when the Ecole was exhibited in 1898, at Delville’s final Salon d’Art Idéaliste, it was universally hailed as a masterpiece and generated enormous excitement amongst his contemporaries. Historically this work is therefore significant for marking a definitive and positive breakthrough in Delville’s

Fig. 64. Study for L’Ecole de Platon, 1898, drawing on paper, 60 x 108 cm. Private collection.

artistic career. Even his most astringent critics, writing in L’Art Moderne, changed their hostile attitude towards his work and praised his achievement, declaring that Delville had created, ‘A superb work of art’ and that it was ‘beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!’799 The generally ecstatic reception that this painting enjoyed fulfilled Delville’s longstanding craving for artistic recog-nition and vindicated, or so it seemed to him, his relentless and vociferous efforts to promote an aesthetic that ran counter to contemporary avant-garde trends in Belgium. One could go even so far as to say that without this paint-ing, Delville’s reputation might very well have remained on the cultural fringe of fin-de-siècle art.

The focus of the Ecole is the bearded figure of Plato at the centre surrounded by twelve nude men. Plato is seated on a marble bench beneath a tree brimming with clusters of wisteria-like blue flowers. This central figure is a Christ-like creation, with a calm and gentle face, loosely flowing locks of shoulder-length russet hair and clothed in radiant white robes covering a blue undergarment. His head is tilted down to his right, while his right hand points in an upwards gesture in opposition to the downward gesture of the open-palmed left hand. This gesture is reminiscent of representations of medieval and Renaissance depictions of Christ of the Apocalypse.800 Delville’s figure of Plato clearly calls to mind the Apocalyptic Christ in Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement (1432-5, in the Museo di San Marco, Florence), which he might well have seen during his stay in Italy, although the details of the drapery and the hand gestures are not identical. His philosopher is visually much more closely related to Lucas van Leyden’s The Last

Fig. 65. Study for L’Ecole de Platon, 1898, oil on canvas, 51.5 x 91 cm. Private collection.Fig. 66. (overleaf) Study for L’Ecole de Platon, 1898, pencil on paper. Private collection.


Judgement (1526, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden), and he would no doubt have been intimately aware of many Northern prototypes of the apocalyptic Christ such as this. van Leyden’s Christ points in opposite directions and his right hand, pointing upwards towards the lily, is clearly a verdict in favour of the innocent, while the left downward-pointing hand on the side of the sword is a judgement against the guilty. Delville therefore makes the obvious suggestion, in the representation of this figure, surrounded as he is by twelve student-disciples, that Plato is a prefiguration of Christ. This idea is not one for which he can claim much originality as it is clearly a reference to contemporary hermetic thought, especially that of Edouard Schuré; who, as we have seen, regarded Plato and Christ as sharing the same lineage as one of the ‘Great Initiates’.801

However, apart from this visual similarity, I believe that one would actually be hard pressed to carry the Christ analogy any further in this painting, and in truth it leads to a dead end. I think the true significance lies elsewhere. As with all of Delville’s paintings one ought as ever to search amongst the esoteric sources which inform much of his work and I believe that there is a case to be made that gesture in this figure of Plato is based on a popular illustration created by Eliphas Lévi and published in his dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, namely the ‘Bouc du Sabbat’. I also believe that one can use this illustration as a source to understand the sermon delivered by Delville’s Platonic-Christ-Initiate in this painting. In order to understand the significance of this image, one ought first to turn study the significance of the other iconographical aspects of this work.

Plato’s Akademos, the Androgyne and Spiritual Beauty The figure of Plato (fig. 67) and his twelve students is set in an oneiric Elysian landscape of serene and idyllic beauty. It is Spring; trees are in blossom and the lawn in the foreground is strewn with flowers. The tree-filled park in the background leads to a calm azure ocean with mountains in the distance. The tiny sails of three ships can be seen on the water and three white peacocks complete the scene. Delville’s setting is a sympathetic evocation of the Akademos, Plato’s philosophical school, which was originally a public park or garden in the suburbs of Athens, in an area was sacred to Athena and planted with olive and plane trees. A sacred grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, stood on the site of the Academy. Delville includes two olive trees in blossom behind the bench that separates the foreground

Fig. 67. (opposite) L’Ecole de Platon, (detail) 1898.


and background while, in the distance, one can clearly identify cypress trees and what could pass for plane trees on the right. The entire work is executed in clear greens, violets and blues, a scheme favoured by non-realist artists, who regarded blues and violets as representing the spiritual order in nature, much as Kandinsky and Marc would a decade later. Delville’s use of colour is seminal as it gives the work an entirely ‘modern’ feel and displaces it, crucially, from his academic roots. This effect is achieved particularly in the lack of tertiary browns and blacks in the shadows, or any use of chiaroscuro to model form – adopting, instead, an overtly ‘avant-garde’ palette derived from Impressionist and Post-impressionist practice.802 Furthermore, the light falling on the two groups of male disciples is serene and evenly distributed, light on the figures on the left falls from the right and vice versa, suggesting that the source of this light is Plato himself. Following Schuré, Delville is perhaps suggesting here, in a literal sense, that this Plato-Christ is the source and embodiment of the ‘word of Light’, an essential characteristic of the Initiate.803

while the formal representation of Plato is fairly conventional, by academic standards, the conception of the remaining figures is not (figs 68-71). They are arranged in two groups of six on either side of Plato. Most are nude, except for three youths on the left and one in the foreground on the right, who are partly covered in drapery. These young men strike a variety of poses, upright, seated or supine, clearly derivative of Classical prototypes. They all face Plato, attentively absorbed in his teaching. what is striking about these figures is the representation of their anatomy. Their bodies are sinewy, lithe and long-limbed. They are clearly not standard academic nudes and Delville draws deliberate attention to their youthful, ephebic physiques and sexual ambiguity, or androgyny. The stances of the two epicene standing figures on the left are overtly effeminate, their bodies are curvaceous and soft, almost limp (reminiscent of the statue of Apollo in Raphael’s School of Athens). The youth to the left of Plato appears even to have little breasts. For the most part, their hair is long and wavy and several wear garlands of flowers which enhance their effeminacy. To modern eyes, these sensual, effeminate and sexually equivocal young men are startling. To add to this there is also a great deal of physical contact between several couples in this painting. The two youths seated on the right have their arms around one another and are holding hands; the standing figure on the left leans into the blonde youth with his arm over his shoulder while the yellow-draped ephebe in the foreground



rests on the muscular rose-garlanded youth whose open palm gesture echoes that of Plato. How is one meant to interpret the gestures of affection amongst these figures? This suggestion of love and their air of sexual ambiguity is surely deliberate, but for what purpose? And how, moreover, is one meant to read their nudity? In a literal sense, their conspicuous lack of clothing could be understood to be a reference to the athletic activities, undertaken in the nude, of the young men in the gymnasia surrounding the Academy; but they surely represent more than that. If so, then one is immediately led to wonder what Delville’s motivations were for creating this work and for choosing this subject in particular? One has to ask oneself, in other words, whether this painting is merely a visual description of Plato’s Academy, or whether it refers more specifically, through these figures, to the actual doctrines taught by Plato himself; or indeed to Delville’s own mystico-Platonic Idealism. In other words, to what extent is it possible to interpret this image, and its association between love, beauty and androgyny, in terms of Delville’s Idealist and spiritual aesthetic?

That this work is unlike anything created before by Delville, in terms of its subject matter, scale and style, leads one to assume that he had a more thorough purpose in its making. The Platonic theme is obviously intelligible in relation to his Idealism and celebration of the Classical ideal in art, and is certainly a literal reference to both – but his treatment of the theme is too original merely to be taken for a purely narrative historical painting in the Academic sense. The most obvious clue to understanding this work is the representation of the twelve androgynous males. Although these figures invite a gendered reading of this work, their true significance should be interpreted in the context of the aesthetics of fin-de-siècle esoteric culture, of which Delville was, as seen in the previous chapter, a significant proponent. An historically contextualised reading of this motif would lead one to understand the androgyny and nudity of the twelve figures as expressions of spiritual Beauty (in the Idealist sense) as well as a visual expression of primordial harmony and unity – key notions implicit in non-realist aesthetics in general and, of course, in Delville’s Theosophically inspired writings in particular. An interpretation from this perspective should, I believe, provide a meaningful conceptual framework to enable an historically informed interpretation of the intellectual and iconographic programme of Delville’s painting. It is worth noting that androgyny is an important subject in fin-de-siècle scholarship where it is viewed most commonly in terms of its link to homoerotic subcultures of the period (especially regarding contemporary



literature studies concerning Pater, Swinburne and wilde as well as the art of the pre-Raphaelites including Burne-Jones and Simeon Solomon). However, there is no evidence to suggest that either Péladan or Delville were involved in these subcultures or that these subcultures in any way informed the thought and practice of artists associated with the hermetic alliance cultivated by Péladan or Delville. There is, in other words, no verification to suggest that they were at all propagating a homoerotic subtext in their work (Delville was not, by any definition, homosexual). It would be, therefore, fruitless to develop an interpretation along those lines.804

The theme of the androgyne is one of the central motifs in late-nineteenth-century Symbolist literature and art. During the fin de siècle, the androgyne was constructed as either feminised male or masculinised female; both were on the whole conceptually analogous. The symbol was used to denote a variety of ideas and can be understood from two distinct perspectives; firstly, it can be interpreted as a symbol of the desire for social or political unity in eras experiencing cultural schism or turmoil; and secondly, in the context of the hermetic tradition it is interpreted as a symbol of primordial totality, spiritual wholeness and the union of opposites, experienced as a subjective, or inward, state of unity. Conceptually, the symbol acts as a universal image denoting synthesis. In the social sphere, the myth of the androgyne was invoked in the nineteenth century as an ideal condition of societal unity in response to the polarisation resulting from economic forces; a symbol of wholeness, in other words, in a world divided and fragmented by the forces of industrial and bourgeois capitalism. Dijkstra has noted that the desire for synthesis, or the union of opposites, is expressed in a moral balance between the ‘active, aggressive, amoral, male principle, and the yielding, moral, female principle – the union in other words, of the aggressive master and his passive slave … between active, socially constructive “reason” and passive (because socially unproductive) “passion”.’805 In other words, the androgyne becomes a symbol of the artist’s reaction against ‘the society of exchange values and polar oppositions which the bourgeoisie had fostered.’806 Busst’s definitive work on the topic surveys the writings of nineteenth-century social idealists and hermetic authors, including Fabre d’Olivet, Pierre Leroux, Charles Fourier and Pierre-Simon Ballanche, who viewed the androgyne as an utopian goal of social progress. The myth of original unity formed the basis of many social and political philosophies of the early nineteenth century in France and elsewhere, which predicated the goal of universal history on the conception of the collective androgynous

Fig. 70. (opposite) L’Ecole de Platon, (detail) 1898.


man.807 Ballanche, for example, sees in the notion of the androgyne the symbol of progress towards equality in societies that experience in their histories a period of division or schism – between classes or between the sexes. The androgyne is a symbol of the evolved state of society where class distinctions cease to exist and where equality exists between men and women. Indeed, for Ballanche it becomes a symbol of the emancipation of women.808 Busst concludes his survey by observing that:

this image symbolized confidence in the future, if discontent with the present, and continuous progress towards ideal, absolute perfection. It symbolized above all human solidarity, the brotherhood of man, the unity and continuity of generations and civilizations; and consequently charity, the sense of social justice, sympathy for the downtrodden, for all those who are oppressed, whether women or men. It represented too the original and fundamental goodness and purity of mankind, … it nevertheless constantly represented man’s arrival in some sort of Paradise, sometimes even the Paradise of universal industrialization or absolute social equality. At the same time, it was the symbol of human dignity, and of the immense significance of any and every human life.809

There is a lot of the social optimism of this perspective in the writings of Delville, as seen in an earlier chapter, but his conception of the androgyne is predicated rather more on a view of the symbol as a subjective condition resulting, in terms of a Theosophical perspective, from the spiritual evolution of the individual.

The image of the androgyne in Delville’s painting should be viewed, firstly, in the context of its manifestation in the art and literature of his non-realist contemporaries. The earliest manifestation of the theme is in Henri de Latouche’s Fragoletta (1829), but the most influential work on the subject was undoubtedly Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835-6).810 Gautier’s work deals with a figure that appears sometimes male, sometimes female, and is, furthermore, loved by both man and woman. Gautier’s androgyne believes itself to belong to a third sex: ‘In truth, neither one nor the other sex is mine … I am of a third sex which has no name yet: above or below, more defective or superior: I have the body and the soul of a woman, the spirit and the strength of a man.’811 The subject of androgyny also occurs originally in the works of Swinburne, notably his Lesbia Brandon, (1864), as well as in the novels of Balzac, including his La Fille aux yeux d’or, and his influential Séraphîta-Séraphîtus. During the



Symbolist period, the theme of the androgyne was explored in, for instance, Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884), but most extensively in the works of Péladan such as L’Androgyne (1891) and La Gynandre (1891).

In the visual arts, the image of the androgyne as masculinised female, on the one hand, was extensively explored in the work of Delville’s contemporary Fernand Khnopff. Typically, Khnopff’s androgynous female is recognisable by the representation of a ‘boyish’ figure usually with short-cropped hair, pronounced jaw line and clothed in garments that conceal any obvious definition of breasts, feminine body contour or any other telling gender traits. Khnopff’s representation of this androgynous type is perhaps best illustrated in works such as du Silence (1890) and Une Ville Morte (1889), where the strong masculine features in the face of the figure and the tightly plaited hair result in a striking rendering of an androgynous female figure. This is also evident in the figure in the middle panel of his triptych titled L’Isolement (1890-2) as well as the standing figure in the work Un Ange (1889). On the other hand, the depiction of the androgyne as feminised male is best exemplified in the work of Gustave Moreau. The influence of Moreau’s paintings for many anti-realist artists and writers cannot be overstated. His paintings were popularised in Symbolist circles by Joris Karl Huysmans, particularly for the celebration of Moreau’s work in his novel A Rebours. In a particularly famous passage from this work, he drew attention to the androgynous figure in Moreau’s The Apparition:

Her [Salome’s] eyes fixed in the concentrated gaze of a sleepwalker, she neither sees the Tetrarch, who sits on there quivering, nor her mother, the ferocious Herodias, who watches every movement, nor the hermaphrodite or eunuch who stands in hand at the foot of the throne, a terrifying creature, veiled as far as the eyes and with its sexless dugs hanging like gourds under its orange striped tunic.812

Moreau’s conception of the male figure as androgynous young men or adolescents of a particular formal type, with long fair hair, delicate facial features, slender physique and elongated limbs made his work especially attractive to the artists of the Symbolist epoch.813 In his private notes to the painting of the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, Moreau stresses that the poet must be represented as ‘young, feminine only in his facial features and of an antique beauty’.814 In the same picture, the lyre-bearer is conceived in similar terms, ‘This figure must be completely draped and very feminine. It is almost a woman, who alone amidst this eager host can understand the self-sacrifice and suffering of the poet.’815 Similar figures are encountered in such works as The Persian Poet, (1886) and The dead Poet Borne by a Centaur

(c.1890). The latter is a compelling expression of the form of androgynous male which would become popular in England and France during the end of the nineteenth century, displaying pale skin, soft curvaceous feminine body, wide hips, and slender limbs as well as delicate facial features.816 In terms of their visual conceptualisation, Delville’s androgynous creations share an undeniable formal kinship with Moreau’s figures.

The Hermetic myth of original UnityAlthough Delville was no doubt aware of these visual prototypes, the intellectual inspiration for his idea of the androgyne derives from several sources. As a symbol of the original metaphysical unity to which mankind constantly strives to recover, he would have turned to the hermetic tradition and the writings of his fellow Theosophists, including Papus, whose work on the Kabbalah and on alchemy – both concerned with the notion of original unity – would have been particularly influential. As a physical expression of the beauty of the original unity in the transcendental realm, which is characteristic of the neo-Platonic and Idealist tradition (namely, Plato’s Absolute Beauty and the All-One of Plotinus) he would have turned to Péladan, whose writings are replete with references to the androgyne as a physical symbol of the transcendental Beauty of the Ideal.

The notion of original wholeness, and of the original union of male and female, personified in the androgyne, is a universal myth in the esoteric tradition. In the Corpus Hermeticum, the original source of Gnostic and Alchemical thought (and widely referred to by fin-de-siècle Theosophists), the original Being is described as androgynous, ‘God-the-Mind, being male and female both, as Light and Life subsisting, brought forth another Mind to give things form’. Further, in the Poimandres, the original beings are described as androgynous before being split into male and female, they are then attracted to each other through desire, leading ultimately to death: ‘Increase in increasing, and multiply in multitude, ye creatures and creations all … man that has Mind in him, let him learn to know that he himself is deathless, and that the cause of death is love, though Love is all. … he who through a love that leads astray, expends his love upon his body – he stays in Darkness wandering, and suffering through his senses things of Death.’817

The myth of the original man as androgyne was later developed by the mystic Jacob Boehme, whose writings, heavily influenced by the Corpus Hermeticum, the Kabbalah and alchemy, had widespread influence on Symbolist theory.818 Following the Gnostic tradition of the Anthropos – the first man – Boehme conceives of Adam, created in God’s image in his


state before the Fall, as androgynous: ‘Adam was a man and also a woman, and yet none of them [distinct], but a virgin, full of chastity, modesty and purity, viz. the image of God. He had both the tinctures of the fire and light in him; in the conjunction of which the own love, viz. the virginal centre,

Fig. 72. The alchemical androgyne, or Rebis, illustrated in Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae.

stood, viz. the fair Paradisical [sic] rose-garden of delight, wherein he loved himself.’819

Following the ideas of the influential occultist Fabre d’Olivet, who was no doubt influenced by Boehme, Péladan outlined the Kabbalistic interpretation of Adam’s original androgyny in his Amphithéâtre des Sciences Mortes. Comment on devient Fée:

Adam was created man-woman, Adam-Eve, he-she, him-you, androgyne. Hence in the beginning Eve was in Adam, and you in him, and she in he, gynandre. Adam-Eve was like a double almond. when the angels of creation ask Adam to designate animality, that is to say, to assign the line of living things, Adam-Eve cannot find an intermediary between nature and himself. A transitory degree between the conscious and the unconscious was missing. Adam-Eve, suppressing his natural impulse, was looking in vain for it outside of himself. The angels, having noticed that he could not reach self-consciousness because of his unitary state, decided to de-construct the primal androgyne and to divide Eve from Adam. They suspended Adam-Eve’s sensitivity and during this suspension of sensible life, they broke the androgynous unity, separating Eve from Adam, the woman from the man, she from he, you from him, that is to say the humid from the dry, the volatile from the set, the passive from the active; and Eve became a person, an individual, and there were two similar beings and there were two corresponding sexes.820

The image of the androgyne is present in alchemical literature in the form of the philosopher’s stone or the Rebis and is frequently illustrated in alchemical texts in the image of a being, half male and half female. As has already been discussed, a notable example of this is the alchemical androgyne, or Rebis, illustrated in Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (fig. 72); its appearance in de Guaita’s Au seuil du Mystère would have made an important contribution to the understanding of the (alchemical) androgyne during the period.821 De Guaita’s book is, moreover, a lucid synopsis of the hermetic tradition and discusses seminal contributions to occult thought, including the Corpus Hermeticum, Plato and neo-Platonism, the work of Boehme, the Kabbalah as well as a comprehensive survey of the alchemical tradition. As we shall see, Khunrath’s emblem of the androgyne is referred to indirectly in Delville’s image of Plato.

In 1888, De Guaita co-founded, with Péladan, the ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose+Croix; Papus was included amongst the founding members of this revived Rosicrucian order and was later associated with Delville in creating the hermetic-Theosophical (and still rather obscure) group in Brussels known as Kumris, the Belgian branch of Papus’s Groupe Indépendant d’Études Ésotériques.822 Papus had already outlined the basic tenets of alchemy in


Chapter 4 of his Traité élémentaire de science occulte.823 From this it is clear that he understood the principle of spiritual transformation encoded in the imagery of alchemy, the goal of which is the formation of the Rebis, the symbol of the union of opposites, which he states, rather pertinently in his commentary on Khunrath’s alchemical androgyne: ‘The mysterious figure of the Hermetic Androgyne (Sun and Moon) … is the alchemical expression of the COLOUR wHITE of the painting, the result of the union of the two principles, positive and negative.’ 824

Péladan and the Androgyne: ‘the dogma of Art’Apart from the alchemical and hermetic sources for the symbolism of the androgyne, one has to turn to the writings of Péladan for an understanding of its aesthetic attributes, associated with the notions of Beauty and its expression of the Ideal. The motif appears in almost all the novels in Péladan’s vast, La décadence Latine as well as in his theoretical writings, including his Amphithéâtre des sciences mortes: Comment on devient fée. Erotique (1893) and later works such as de l’Androgyne (1910) and La Science de l’amour (1911). In Péladan’s novel Curieuse, the second in the décadence Latine Éthopée, the artist-mage character, Nebo, paraphrases the myth of the androgyne from Plato’s Symposium: ‘In the beginning there were three genders: the masculine borne of the sun, the feminine from the earth, and the androgyne from the moon which partakes of both. As these androgynes were complete beings, the gods came to fear them for they were closed to love which occupied the lives of the first two genders and thus attempted, to occupy themselves, to climb the heavens and supplant the immortals there.’ 825

In Péladan’s novels, the character of the androgyne is either the adolescent ephebe such as Samas in L’Androgyne (1891, volume vIII of the Éthopée) or feminine such as the princess Paule Riazan who figures in Curieuse (1885, volume II), L’Initiation Sentimentale (1886, volume III) and A Cœur Perdu (1887, volume Iv). In Curieuse, Nebo is instantly attracted to the androgynous beauty of the princess Riazan: ‘As the princess’s beauty is half a young man’s, half a young woman’s, the same dual nature must be within her soul; I saluted the complete being in her, owner of a double charm, feminine and virile, and thus expressed how puerile courting can be, since the androgyne is self-sufficient and does not love.’826 The self-sufficiency of



the androgyne referred to here is an important characteristic of the symbol. This is also expressed at times in terms of its virginity. In L’Androgyne, Péladan states, ‘The androgyne only exists in the virginal state: at the first affirmation of sex it resolves itself into either male or female.’827 Both these qualities refer to the idea of the original unviolated state of wholeness peculiar to the notion of androgyny as the personification of unity and oneness. This is also expressed in, for example, Plato’s story of the Original Beings related in the Symposium and in Plotinus’s discourses on the original metaphysical condition termed the All-One in the Enneads, which will be further discussed below. Delville’s close association with Péladan has already been examined elsewhere in this book. Their professional association was strongest during the early 1890s, when Delville was involved in Péladan’s Salons de la Rose+Croix and publically championed Péladan’s ideas. Péladan provides a good starting-point to an understanding of Delville’s L’Ecole de Platon. One can go as far as to say that Delville’s androgynous figures are an overt articulation of Péladan’s aesthetic of the androgyne, which is an intrinsic part of his Idealist-Rosicrucian philosophy. One of the key concepts of Péladan’s theory of the androgyne is that it is a symbol of Absolute or spiritual Beauty, that is, beauty conceived of as a physical manifestation of the transcendental Idea. This Idealist conception of the notion of Beauty, as already discussed in the previous chapter, is an essential part of Delville’s aesthetic and is therefore of particular interest to the interpretation of his L’Ecole de Platon.

Péladan’s aesthetic theories, upon which his conception of the androgyne is constructed, are firmly rooted in the late nineteenth-century Idealism derived from Schopenhauer, Hegel and the neo-platonic tradition. Like many of his contemporaries in conservative anti-realist circles who drew inspiration from this tradition, Péladan believed that art was capable of acting as a mirror to the Ideal in physical form and, furthermore, that it could redeem society from the intransigent fixation on materialism and the corruption of the physical world. Péladan’s notion that ‘the Ideal is not a particular idea; the Ideal is any sublimed idea having reached its supreme degree of harmony, intensity, subtlety’ is echoed in much of the writings in the Idealist tradition.828 Similarly, he believed that the object of artistic activity should be the expression of the Idea in painting and poetry. In other words the artist has the special task of perceiving the Idea and finding its appropriate physical embodiment in artistic forms, ‘Be faithful to the Ideal, O poet! Love only the ideas … you are more than a man, your loves must not be earthly like ours. Go and be good and chaste, sing and walk.’829 Péladan

sought to reform art and denounced realist trends inspired by Positivism. He also supported the renovation of a theocratic aesthetic founded on mystical Idealism. Péladan declared: ‘To breathe the theocratic essence into contemporary art and most of all into aesthetic culture, this is our new way … to subordinate the arts to art, that is to say, to enter into the tradition of considering the Ideal as the unique aim of the architectonic, the pictorial or the sculptural endeavour.’830 The perfect symbol of the idea in physical form (Ideal Beauty) was the androgyne.

The ideal expression of the androgyne for Péladan is the sexually undifferentiated ephebic youth that embodies masculine and feminine qualities simultaneously. In its synthesis of Idea and form, it serves the important function of expressing Péladan’s new aesthetic ideal and he refers to the symbol as the ‘absolue de la forme’ [the absolute of form].831 for Péladan, the androgyne was the goal, of this new artistic tendency, it would be, he declared, ‘le dogme plastique’ [the dogma of art].832

As a hybrid symbol that is borne out of the blending of both male and female qualities it personifies the notion of synthesis and is a powerful expression of unity; this, as already seen in the first chapter, is one of the key ideas governing anti-realist aesthetics of the time and was adopted by followers of Péladan, including Delville and his contemporary Khnopff, ‘However, the point of unity is a point of verity and calls for our synthetic efforts, and in its artistic realisation there is no synthesis but the androgyne.’833 The symbol of the androgyne, for Péladan, is the personification of the archetypal realm of the Ideal itself: ‘The androgyne takes us beyond time and space, beyond passions, into the realm of Archetype, the highest our minds may reach.’834 This idea is expressed in a literary form in his Curieuse, where the protagonist Nebo salutes the androgyne-princess Riazan as the consort of the Ideal through whom the Absolute can be attained:

I have met the soul awaiting me … it belongs to me as Eve belonged to the serpent; only a divine seducer … Thus this tender heart will be left with nothing but my heart, this dis-orbited thought will not be able to leave the orbit of mine; and Beatrix, the lady of the neo-platonists, a sister through the concealment of her sex, a man through the development of conception, a woman by her tenderness, will exist for the first time! … Of the creature that hides the Absolute from us, I make a mirror through which it will reverberate. 835

In other words, for Péladan, the androgyne exists at the liminal zone between the physical and the metaphysical orders of reality and allows one a glimpse into the transcendental realm. In his ‘Hymne à l’Androgyne’ he writes, ‘You


are the supreme point where our material eye can conceive spirit: you are the visibility where the celestial Norm can manifest itself in prayer’.836

Delville was no doubt inspired by Péladan’s formulation of the androgyne. They were both, moreover, inspired by the androgynous motif in Classical art which, for Péladan anyhow, was the purest expression of the notion of unity and synthesis in physical form: ‘Androgyny, as artistic synthesis, was to achieve its perfect form with the Greeks, the most synthetic people ever to exist. From the Apollo of Piombino’s to the Apollo of Pompey; from Praxiteles’ Hermes to Centocelle’s Eros and the Narcissus of Naples, art follows the combination of sexualities to attain expressive unity.’ 837 In one of Delville’s letters from Italy, published in La Ligue Artistique while he was on his Italian sojourn, Delville discusses the works of art from antiquity that impressed him most. In a startling passage he celebrates the Youth of Subiaco. It is significant that he does not refer to his own work directly here, but one can infer that he had already conceived the idea for his Ecole and that the beauty of this figure was certainly an inspiration for his androgynous figures in his painting:

The Youth of Subiaco is of imperishable beauty, that is to say, one which the artist who was fortunate enough to be able to contemplate at length this marble figure, which is reality in all of its ideality, can never forget. It is one of these unforgettable ones; it shines in one’s imagination like a luminous shape, with this magical power inherent to perfect things, to sacred things.

I imagine the young disciples with which Plato used to surround himself, under the porticoes of the gardens of Akademos, as beautiful like this adolescent body, spiritualised like this marble by artistic and moral harmony. The pen remains powerless trying to describe such vivid splendour, but the ideal emotions it provokes are fecund for the artist.838

The sculpture of ancient Greece was not the only source of inspiration for Delville and Péladan in their quest to find models for art that concerned itself with the notion of Ideal Beauty expressed through the androgynous youth; they were also inspired by the art of the Renaissance. Péladan frequently celebrated Leonardo’s Gioconda and St John the Baptist as paragons of androgynous pulchritude and saw in Leonardo’s creations, moreover, the realisation of the androgyne as the ideal symbol of art and the perfect union of contraries personified by the sexes.839 Delville and his contemporaries, notably José Hennebicq, were equally enthusiastic about the work of Leonardo in this regard. Delville’s androgynous figures in his L’Ecole de Platon have much in common with the youthful beauty of Leonardo’s androgynous figures

– especially his epicene, effeminate and sexually ambivalent St John the Baptist. This inner spiritual beauty, resulting from the synthesis of opposites (of the spiritual and the physical), was noted by Hennebicq: ‘This is what Da vinci accomplished, for he not only invented serene, graceful and subtle Beauty but also captured the interior being of these immortal creatures. He was the divine Poet of spiritual Beauty as transposed into the world of shapes in the features of a Mona Lisa or a Saint John.’840

As noted earlier, one of the central intellectual sources for the myth of the androgyne in Péladan’s writing and Delville’s Ecole is Plato’s Symposium.841 It is Plato who introduces the basic, three-fold scheme that is characteristic of all subsequent philosophical systems in which the androgyne appears. This describes firstly a condition of original unity and wholeness, followed by an event that results in a separation of opposites with an ensuing state of duality and, finally, a phase in which an attempt is made to achieve a state of original unity again through the synthesis of polarities, usually represented symbolically through the reconciliation of sexual opposites, male and female. Thus, according to Plato, ‘the Hermaphrodite was a distinct sex in form as well as in name, with characteristics of both male and female’.842 Plato describes these original beings as spherical in shape, ‘the human being was a rounded whole, with double back and flanks forming a complete circle’.843 The circle, it may be briefly noted, is an important motif in images of the late nineteenth century connected to the theme of androgyny, with its implications of perfection and original unity and occurs in this sense in many of the paintings of Delville’s contemporary Khnopff.

According to Plato the androgyne constituted a third sex, apart from the male and the female and is seen by him to be a synthesis of the two sexes: originally, according to Plato, the male sprang from the sun and the female from the earth. The androgyne, on the other hand, came from the moon, ‘which partakes of the nature of both sun and earth’844 clearly implying that the androgyne is a synthesis of opposites. Plato’s myth describes the state of duality which resulted from the splitting of the original beings into two, referring to the splitting of the state of original unity into duality. The desire for these separated beings to return to their original state of wholeness is then vividly described: ‘Man’s body, having been thus cut in two, each half yearned for the half from which they had been severed. when they met they threw their arms around one another and embraced in their longing to grow together again.’845 The ideas of synthesis, unity and Ideal Beauty, which are expressed through the symbol of the Péladan’s androgyne, constitute the basic intellectual framework for Delville’s L’Ecole de Platon. These concepts are fundamental tenets of his Esthétique Idéaliste and it seems


reasonable to suggest that this painting can be seen as a form of visual credo of his Idealism in art.

The Androgyne and the theory of Equilibrium; the ‘Threefold Law’As we have seen, the essential aim of Delville’ aesthetic is the expression of Ideal or spiritual Beauty, which is seen to reflect the harmony, unity and perfection of the Absolute (or God) in physical form (the work of art).846 Delville’s aesthetic subscribes to the idealist notion of beauty which is seen as the expression of the Idea (or ‘Truth’) in form.847 Beauty, as the Idea incarnate, has mystical connotations in as much as it is seen to convey something of the essence of the Absolute into the material world.848 whether an object is beautiful therefore depends on whether or not it incarnates the Idea, and, in the Idealist sense, it has no beauty in itself. For Delville, Idealist Art is that which reflects in its physical aesthetic the transcendental realm of the divine world; beauty in a work of art is the expression of the presence of the divine in physical form.849 Moreover, Beauty, in Delville’s aesthetic, is aligned with the notions of Harmony and Unity. This is a central theme to non-realist aesthetics and is embodied in the image of the androgyne – the personification of Ideal Beauty. Delville clearly situates his view in a spiritual or metaphysical context by asserting a correspondence between the idea of God and the notions of Harmony/Unity.850 Echoing Pythagoras, Harmony in works of art, for Delville, is achieved through the principles of symmetry and number. we recall that for Delville, symmetry is understood to be a natural law occurring throughout the universe that imparts beauty to natural forms. Moreover, in his thinking, a close relationship exists between form and number.851 He asserts unequivocally the identity between number, form and the Idea and hence of Beauty.852

Number, in Delville’s view, is expressed in art through rhythm. Rhythm is, in other words, the fundamental expression of Beauty in form. The arrangement of the figures in symmetrical groups about the figure of Plato is an obvious feature of this work echoing Delville’s view on number, rhythm and symmetry. These ideas are reflected further, it might be argued, in the geometry which underlies the composition of the work, which is based on the division of the vertical into four. The figures are placed in a rectangle of which the verticals are a quarter of height distant from the outer frame. Diagonals leading from the corners, and from the quartered segments, of the outer frame and inner rectangle define the actual position of the figures and the placing of, for example, Plato’s hands. The quarter unit of the vertical divides the horizontal into approximately nine units. This proportion of 4:9

is unusual, but not uncommon in Renaissance proportional canons and also refers, most likely, to one of the proportions described in Plato’s Timaeus concerning the division of the world soul.853 The most striking use of this proportion in Classical art is found in the Parthenon in Athens. The height to width, width to length and diameter of the columns to the space between the columns of this building are all resolved according to this proportion, 4:9. But Delville might have been thinking directly of Botticelli’s Primavera which is constructed using the exact same ratio of height to width, 4:9. The practise of dividing the surface of the painting into defined rations was widespread during the Renaissance and was advocated by Alberti himself in his book on Architecture (De re Aedificatoria, 1485, Book Ix, Chapter v). Alberti advocated the proportion 4:9 as ideal in architectural spaces and referred to it as the double Sesquialtera (or double diapente).854 It is not unreasonable to assume that Delville would have known about this practise in Renaissance painting and would most probably have encountered Alberti’s ideas during his training in the Academy.

Delville’s notion of Ideal Beauty in art, it will be remembered, is expressed in a three-fold division of Beauty, namely, beauty of thought (la Beauté spirituelle), style (la Beauté plastique) and execution (la Beauté technique). For Delville, the true work of Idealist art should strive always for equilibrium between idea, form and execution. Each corresponds, in Delville’s view to the three orders of reality or existence, namely, spirit, soul and body, or to put it differently, between inspiration,855 emotion and sensation.856 Delville summarises his aesthetic position in the following passage:

The work of Idealist Art is therefore that which will harmonise in itself the three great words of Life: the Natural, the Human and the Divine. To attain this degree of aesthetic balance, - which, I am happy to concede, is not within the reach of just anyone! - one must find within the work the purest idea on an intellectual level, the most beautiful form within the artistic realm, and the most perfect technique in terms of execution. without an idea, a work misses its intellectual mission, without art, it misses its natural mission and, without technique, it misses its goal of perfection. … The veritable character of the work of Idealist Art can be identified from the balance reigning over its accomplishment, meaning that it does not let the essential terms of idea, art or technique prevail one over the other, but more likely according to relations proportional to their respective powers.857

This threefold expression of Beauty was connected consciously by Delville to the Theosophical principle of the threefold constitution of man – as body


(senses), soul (feeling) and mind (thought and spirituality) – as well as to the threefold constitution of the universe (Natural, human and divine).858 and as we have seen, this three-fold expression of Beauty was the foundation of Delville’s Esthétique Idéaliste which he proposed as the essential formula of the new artistic era in the immanence of which he passionately believed.859 The significance of the number three is reflected in the three white peacocks in the landscape as well as in the three tiny boats on the sea in the distance. It is also more strongly suggested in the composition of the work; the groups of figures are contained in two equilateral triangles as is the figure of Plato in the triangle formed between them.

The number three – and its geometric corollary, the triangle – is ubiquitous in Delville’s work and relates directly to the Theosophical cosmology in which the nature of man and the universe is organised in principles of three. Indeed it is Delville’s original intellectual contribution to have formulated an authentic Theosophical aesthetic based on this esoteric principle.

Schuré gives a very clear outline of the Triad or the Threefold law (Loi du Ternaire) in his section on Pythagoras in Les Grandes Initiés. Here man is seen to be composed of three elements – distinct, yet blended into one another – a tri-unity, consisting of body, soul and spirit. Similarly the universe is divided into three spheres: the natural world, the human world and the divine world. Man, as microcosm recapitulates the universe, or macrocosm, and an understanding of one can be derived from the other through the analogic relationship, or correspondence, between them:

The Triad or the threefold law, therefore is the essential law of things and the actual key of life. For this law is found at all stages of the ladder of life, from the constitution of the organic cell through the physiological constitution of the animal body, the functioning of the blood system and the cerebro-spinal system, to the hyperphysical constitution of man, universe and God. Thus, as if by enchantment it opens the internal structure of the universe to the astonished mind; it reveals the infinite correspondences of the macrocosm and microcosm. It acts like a light which would pass into things in order to make them transparent, and to illuminate the small and large worlds like so many magic lanterns.860

Papus develops this idea further in the second chapter of his Traité élémentaire de science occulte (1888) and suggests that this threefold principle applies equally to an active process, or progression (from unity, to duality to ternary) upon which the structure of evolution can be mapped. The process outlined by Papus regarding the hermetic trinity can, I believe, be understood to be an intellectual variant on the theme of the androgyne. In

his work, Papus, who was indebted to the influential French occultist Fabre d’Olivet’s Les Vers dorés de Pythagore (1813), repeats the understanding that the three-fold constitution of man, or microcosm, recapitulates (according to the principle of universal analogy) the three-fold constitution of the Universe, or macrocosm. However, he develops this by suggesting that the third principle, the ternary, is the result of a dialectical process. In other words, the ternary represents the synthesis resulting from the mutual action of two opposing principles, conceived of as active and passive. The process implies that the active principle acts on a passive principle leading to the synthesis of these two, which results in a third, or equilibrating, ternary: for example Attraction (active) acts on Repulsion (passive) resulting in Equilibrium (neutral ternary).861 Like Schuré, Papus refers to this threefold schema (active-passive-ternary) as the Loi du Ternaire. Furthermore, these terms can be reduced to simple numbers, which allows one to develop relationships between any term analogically through their corresponding number:

You can replace the word ACTIvE by whichever word you like … according to the analogical method, the number 1 represents all the ideas governed by this principle, the Active, that is the Man, the Divine Father, the Light, the Heat, and so on …, depending on whether one considers it within one or other of the three worlds … It is the same for the words : PASSIvE which you may replace by 2 and NEUTRAL by 3.

You can see that the calculations applied to figures can be applied mathematically to ideas in Antique Science. This is what renders these methods so general and therefore so different from modern methods.862

Papus’s Loi du Ternaire echoes Hegel’s dialectic consisting of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, an idea he develops in his later writings.863 As such, it is a reconciliatory principle, and this ‘law’ could be applied analogically, I would like to suggest, to the concept of androgyny, where the androgyne stands for the dialectical synthesis (or ternary) of the opposing principles of male (active) and female (passive) – which follows very closely Plato’s concept of the symbol discussed above. This relationship is also evident in alchemical literature, where the hermetic, or mercurial androgyne (the Rebis) of the alchemists is the ternary of the union of the opposing principles of sulphur (Sun, gold, active) and salt (Moon, silver, passive).864 Following the analogic relationship of numbers asserted by Papus, the androgyne, as the equilibrating ternary principle, one could argue is reducible to the number three. In other words, one could therefore extract from this number


a numeric symbol for the principle of equilibrium embodied in the symbol of the androgyne. In this sense the recurrence of the number three in Delville’s painting takes on a rather more textured significance as a referent to the theme of androgyny. This ‘analogic’ interpretation of the symbolism of this number can, moreover, be expressed geometrically in the form of the triangle. Papus develops the Lois du Ternaire from abstract number to geometric form through the triangle. For him the triangle is created out of two opposing lines that are united by a third, ‘and thereby reducing them to Unity in forming the first closed [geometric] figure’.865 This threefold unity of the triangle is a concise geometric expression, in other words, of the tri-unity of the androgyne (as the third factor that results in unity through the reconciliation of opposites). This correlation between the number three, the triangle and the androgyne is particularly apposite in relation to a hermetic understanding of Delville’s Ecole. The Idea, he writes, is expressed in physical form through geometric figures:

Personally, I am one of those who admit the metaphysical existence of the Abstract in the conception of the Cosmos. In philosophical terms, I am what one calls a convinced spiritualist, without forgetting, however, the existing links between the spiritual world and the material world. I know that it is possible to render some abstract ideas comprehensible through geometric drawings, be it only to try and establish the connection from the known to the unknown. I know that the circle, the square, the triangle, a point, are patterns which relate to the constructive bases of the Cosmos, and that its principles can be found in the living architecture of the human form.866

I emphasised at the start of this chapter that one of the conspicuous features of the L’Ecole de Platon is its overt emphasis on the naked human form. Delville draws attention to the nudity of the twelve androgynous figures by placing them next to the sumptuously clothed figure of Plato. whether this suggests some sort of erotic subtext is arguable up to a point, but that would be a fairly limited argument. However, interpreting this aspect of his work in the context of his metaphysical aesthetic would surely lead to a much more fertile result. In Delville’s work, the human form, the nude, is the quintessence of spiritual expression. The nude, we recall from an earlier discussion represents universal truths relating to the life of the spirit. Beauty in the human figure is an echo of universal beauty of the transcendental realm of the Idea and therefore brings about reconciliation between these two realms – where the human form acts as a symbol of the correspondence between macrocosm (the Divine) and microcosm (the human). The echoes of classical aesthetics are deliberately articulated in the

figures of the Ecole – many of which are reminiscent of antique statuary and Renaissance frescoes. we are reminded of the fact that he took recourse to the art of Classical Greece as well as the art of Renaissance painters – especially Phidias, Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo – as paradigms of the beautiful naked human from that embodies the spiritual Ideal.867 The symbolic nature of the human form in Delville’s art, and this work in particular, is entirely in keeping with the dominant theme of ideal Beauty that underlies his Ecole.

delville’s Platonic sermon concerning ‘Equilibrium in the Universal order’It remains to return to the image of Plato in this work, which can now be better understood in the context of the preceding discussion. we mentioned in the introduction that Delville was making an obvious reference to Schuré’s Grandes Initiés in casting his Plato as a bearded Christ-like figure. The parallels with imagery of the Apocalyptic Christ in Christian iconography is also apparent in this work. But it is clear that none of associations with Christ really fits an interpretation of this image in relation to the esoteric iconography of the rest of the painting. In keeping with this interpretation of the work, it would be profitable therefore to search amongst the occult texts influential to Delville for possible clues to the significance of this figure.

One immediate source that has striking parallels with Delville’s work – not only in terms of its visual similarity, but because of its symbolic significance – is the image of the ‘Bouc du Sabbat’, or Goat of Mendes, illustrated as a frontispiece to the second volume of Eliphas Lévi’s dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (fig. 74). The image was hugely popular during the period and widely reproduced in later esoteric literature as in, for example, de Guaita’s Temple de Satan and elsewhere.868 I believe that this image provides the key to an understanding of Delville’s Plato-Christ or Magus-Initiate figure.

we have already seen that Lévi’s writings were immensely influential to Delville, and it is therefore not a surprise that Lévi’s illustrations, in especially his dogme, would find its way into Delville’s art. The iconography of Lévi’s enigmatic image is closely allied to that of Delville’s painting: both express in symbolic terms the notions of equilibrium, balance and harmony – themes which, as we have seen, are fundamental to Delville’s esoteric aesthetic. Lévi’s cryptic ideogram represents a hybrid winged creature with a head of a goat-like animal and a human body. In that regard it shares a


common ancestry in the hybrid human-animal hermetic sphinxes so popular during the fin de siècle. Lévi’s creature sits cross-legged on a globe and its arms point in opposite directions – the feminine right arm and hand, with the enigmatic term ‘solve’ written on the forearm, points upwards towards a white crescent moon, while the masculine left arm and hand, with the word ‘coagula’ inscribed on the forearm, points down towards a black crescent moon. The creature has breasts on an otherwise male torso, in other words it is androgynous. There is a pentagram on the forehead and a flaming torch

Fig. 74. ‘Bouc du Sabbat’, or Goat of Mendes, frontispiece to the second volume of Eliphas Lévi’s dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.

on top of the head between two large horns as well as a disc in its lap and a caduceus emerging from its loins.

The most obvious parallel between Lévi’s figure and Delville’s Plato is in the gesture of the two hands and arms pointing in opposite directions, and their fingers are almost identical as well. The signs and symbols connected with Lévi’s figure express the ideas of equilibrium, the union of opposites (of macrocosm and microcosm), as well as the eternal androgyne, all of which parallel the iconography of Delville’s painting. Lévi provides an explanation of this figure (in terms almost as cryptic as the figure itself) referring to it as a pantheistic and magical figure ‘de l’absolu’ [of the Absolute]. The flame placed between its two horns represents ‘l’intelligence équilibrante du ternaire’ [the balancing intelligence of the Ternary] while the sign made by the hands is ‘le signe de l’ésotérisme en haut et en bas’ [the sign of esoterism above and below]. The crescent moons to which they point are a reminder to initiates of ‘les rapports du bien et du mal, de la miséricorde et de la justice’ [the relations between Good and Evil, Mercy and Justice]. Of the pentacle on the forehead Lévi writes that it is, ‘The sign of the microcosm or pentagram, point upwards, the symbol of human intelligence which, thus positioned below the torch, makes of its flame an image of divine revelation.’869 Almost all of the symbols here point to the notion of opposites and their reconciliation – the return to harmony and equilibrium that is the predisposition of the Magus or initiate. The breasts on the male torso refer to the union of the opposing sexes; the caduceus in the lap is an ancient emblem of the union of opposites neatly articulated through the two interlaced serpents on either side of the wand, which, given its position emerging from the creature’s groin, can be read as a metonym for the generative phallus that opposes the nutritive breasts directly above it. The two opposing moons stand, in Lévi’s terms, in the same sense as the lily and sword discussed earlier in van Leyden’s Apocalyptic Christ referring to mercy and justice, while the flaming torch above its head, the equilibrating intelligence of the ternary, is a cryptic, but obvious, reference to the Astral Light, which is traditionally seen to be a symbol of balance and harmony and the union of opposites.870

Finally, the most conspicuous symbol of antinomies is the hand gesture signifying ‘above’ and ‘below’. This has a special resonance in esoteric literature and is, in fact, immediately recognised in its derivation from the hermetic aphorisms of the Emerald Table (or Tabula Smaragdina), once ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus. This influential text was widely known amongst occultists of the period including, not surprisingly, Lévi himself. It was published in full with a commentary by de Guaita in his


La Clef de la Magie Noire and also by Papus in his Traité Elémentaire de Science occulte.871 Lévi’s explanation of the gesture of the hands as the ‘signe de l’ésotérisme en haut et en bas’ refers to the analogic relationship between macrocosm – ‘above’ – and microcosm – ‘below’– to which his androgynous creature points, and is aphoristically expressed in the line from the Emerald Table, ‘Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius’ (that which is below is as that which is above, and that which is above is as that which is below).872 The analogic equivalence between the two orders of reality expressed here is the paradigmatic statement of the Law of Correspondences, adopted during the time, and implies a unity of creation and suggests, further, that knowledge of the macrocosm can be derived from knowledge of the microcosm, that is, from man himself. It therefore hints at the divine potential in the nature of man. This was discussed throughout Delville’s dialogue entre Nous where he constantly reinforced the unity of creation and the analogic relationship between man (nature) and the universe (the divine, or Absolute): ‘Man is a Universe in miniature and the Universe is a Human magnified, that is to say, that the principles and laws that direct one correspond to the principles and laws that direct the other; meaning that their constitution is analogical.’873 Delville further outlines the analogic relation between microcosmic Man and the macrocosmic Universe, which he sees as corresponding on seven levels; this he formulates as the ‘Loi Analogique des Septénaires’:

MAN UNIvERSE1. The Body 1. Earth or Matter2. The Life Principle 2. Life-giving Universal Spirit3. The Astral Body 3. Astral or Cosmic Atmosphere4. The Animal Soul or will 4. Cosmic will5. The Human Soul or Intellect 5. Astral Light6. The Spiritual Soul 6. Universal Intellect7. The Divine Spirit 7. Latent Spirit874

The task of the initiate is to bring these two into a state of harmony, or equilibrium, and this is the foundation task of esoteric discipline, or La Magie; Delville quotes directly from the Emerald Table in his exposition of this esoteric notion:

Magic is the Science of Equilibrium. Its great initiatory principles are based on eternal mathematics: weight, numbers, measures, … and it defines thus the great formula of balanced Forces: harmony results from opposites; numbers are the analogical ladder whose proportion is measure and the generation of

numbers is identical to the filiation of ideas and the production of Forms that it teaches. As above, so below, and as below, so above, completing the marvel of that which is unique. 875

Bringing these forces into equilibrium constitutes the power of the Magus or initiate; thus for Delville, ‘The initiate alone knows its mysteries and, for him alone, the word Absolute is the revealing synthesis of all the principles reigning over the Three worlds.’876 This notion of Equilibrium, moreover, was repeatedly emphasised by Lévi, who saw harmony of opposites as the fundamental goal of esoteric activity: ‘Magic, as the science of the Universal Equilibrium – based on the absolute principle of truth-reality-reason of existence – accounts for all the antinomies, and reconciles all the realities opposed to each other through the founding principle of all syntheses: Harmony results from the analogy of opposites.’ 877

The terms ‘solve’ (separation, dissolution) and ‘coagula’ (coagulate, or re-integration) inscribed on the arms of Lévi’s Goat of Mendes are derived from alchemy and refer to the process of dissolution and reconstitution that defines the alchemical process of transformation, leading towards the purification and spiritualisation of the soul as well as the reconciliation of opposites, symbolically represented in the figure of the androgyne (or the alchemical rebis). Lévi quotes from the Emerald Table and then explains that, ‘To separate the subtle from the dense, in the first action, which is entirely interior, is to liberate one’s soul from all prejudice and all vice … One manages by this means to turn into spiritual gold even the least precious things, even the filth of the earth.’878 Lévi bases this detail, as he does his entire concept of his Goat of Mendes, on the emblem of the androgyne in Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae which brings the occult references contained in the figure of Delville’s Plato full circle.879

Interpreted in these terms, one could therefore understand the static gesture of Delville’s initiate Plato-Christ as a representation of a cogent, if mute, lesson that he is teaching to the androgynous neophyte disciples depicted here; a lesson that lies at the heart of the esoteric doctrine concerning Equilibrium, or the harmony between the lower and the higher orders of existence and their reconciliation, in other words a lesson concerning the ‘grand Equilibre dans l’Ordre Universel’: between microcosm and macrocosm, between man and the universe, between the visible and the invisible, between good and evil, between matter and spirit, between Nature and the Absolute.880


L’Ecole de Platon and the fin de siècle cult of Ideal BeautyDelville’s aesthetic is steeped in the fin-de-siècle anti-naturalist cult of Ideal Beauty, which, as we have seen, is derived from the writings of Plato, Plotinus and Hegel. The notion of Ideal Beauty is based on the idea that beauty stems from the realm of the ‘Ideal’ which contains the essential elements of creation and life, the ‘Eternal Ideas’ in the Platonic sense.

Schopenhauer outlined the basis of this aesthetic and supported the idea that the suffering experienced in the world could be overcome through the apprehension of an object of beauty:

… in the beautiful we always perceive the essential and original forms of animate and inanimate nature and thus Plato’s Ideas thereof, and that this per-ception has as its condition their essential correlative, the will-free subject of knowing, in other words, a pure intelligence without aims and intentions. On the occurrence of an aesthetic apprehension, the will thereby vanishes entirely from consciousness. But it alone is the source of all our sorrows and suffer-ings. This is the origin of that satisfaction and pleasure which accompany the apprehension of the beautiful. It therefore rests on the removal of the entire possibility of suffering.881

Thus, aesthetic pleasure is achieved through the extinction of the desires stemming from the personal will. And the disappearance of this willing from consciousness is accompanied by the disappearance of pain and suffering.882 In this condition, the ‘will-free subject of knowing’ is able to perceive and share in the essence of an object, in other words, the Platonic Idea it embodies.883 Knowledge must therefore be active without intention and so must be will-less. ‘For only in the state of pure knowing’, Schopenhauer indicates, ‘where a man’s will and its aims together with its individuality are entirely removed from him, can that purely objective intuitive perception arise wherein the (Platonic) Ideas of things are apprehended’.884 This intuitive form of knowledge, Schopenhauer believes, is the real material and kernel, or ‘the soul as it were’, of a true work of art.885 The contemplation of a work of art affords an escape from the intolerable aspects of the material world. More specifically, it is the realisation of the element of beauty in that object which, through the Platonic Idea it embodies, facilitates the transcendence of material reality. Schopenhauer’s aesthetic expresses an idea basic to all idealist theories of beauty, namely that: ‘when we say a thing is beautiful … we mean that we recognise in the object, not the particular thing, but the Idea’.886 Ernst Caro, whose writings on Schopenhauer were instrumental in making accessible his philosophy

to the Symbolists, expressed succinctly this component of Schopenhauer’s thinking and indicated, furthermore, the aspect of transcendentalism implicit in his aesthetic:

The object no longer exists, it is the idea that exists, the eternal form; and the subject likewise has been raised to a higher plane, has liberated himself: he is free from time, free from will, free from striving, free from desire, free from pain: he participates in the absolute, in the eternity of the idea, he is dead to himself, he no longer exists other than in the ideal. This being so, of what importance are the conditions and forms of his transitory individuality? …there is only pure intuition, a free vision of the ideal, a momentary participation in Plato’s idea, in Kant’s numen, once one has attained this forgetfulness of one’s transitory life, of the role one plays in it and of the everyday torment thus momentarily suspended.887

It was the image of the androgyne in Symbolist art and literature which served as a vehicle to express this notion of Ideal Beauty. The attempt to transcend the world of material reality, implicit in the cult of Ideal love and Beauty, constituted an intellectual effort to elevate oneself from the particular to the general and from the concrete to the abstract. This would be achieved through the contemplation of the Beautiful, which in itself constituted an attempt to draw the eternal from the transitory and hence to participate in immortality. The attempt in Symbolist thought generally to disincarnate – to escape the limitations of the body (matter and the material realm generally) – resembles a wish to die in so far as death can be perceived as the deliverance of the soul from the prison of the body.888

Moreover, the significance of the notion of Ideal Beauty in the Idealist tradition lies in the fact that it is the expression and manifestation of the primal source of existence. This idea, evident in Delville’s writings, is clearly expressed in the writings of Plato and especially of Plotinus. The early philosophy of Plotinus prefigures that of Schopenhauer in so far as he posits an Ideal realm which is regarded as true Reality. Plotinus expands the Idealist discourse on reality to include the notion of the ‘All-one’, that is, an abstract state of original unity towards which the individual soul is destined to return and which is seen, furthermore, as the highest condition of the Ideal realm. The All-One, moreover, has various synonyms such as the All Good and Absolute Beauty. It constitutes the first hypostasis in the differentiation of the All Being, the construct for ultimate reality. The second hypostasis is the Intellect, or Nous (Mind) wherein is contained the Platonic Ideas that constitute the intelligible world. The third hypostasis is the world Soul, or All Soul, which animates nature and mediates between the material


realm and the realm of eternal Ideas. The three hypostases are in fact three aspects of a single transcendental being from which all reality proceeds by emanation and to which all reality aspires to return. The equation of the original source and the notion of Unity lies, as already indicated, at the heart of Delville’s aesthetic.

It was within the framework of the above threefold constitution of reality that Plotinus constructed his metaphysics of beauty. Plotinus poses the question: ‘what is it that attracts the eyes of those to whom a beautiful object is present, and calls them, lures them, towards it, and fills them with joy at the sight?’889 An object, he claims, is made beautiful by ‘communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine’.890 In other words, the beauty of an object is derived from the Ideal-Form it embodies, an idea which would later be central to Schopenhauer’s aesthetic. This beauty is ultimately the reflection of the ‘Beyond-Beauty’, the ‘Authentic-Beauty’, as he terms it, or the One. This, according to Plotinus, is the principle that ultimately bestows beauty on all material things and he states, moreover, that: ‘Undoubtedly this Principle exists, it is something that is perceived at first glance, something which the Soul names as from an ancient knowledge, and recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it.’891 Plotinus believes, in other words, that a correspondence therefore exists between the object of beauty and the transcendent, archetypal principle it embodies. The attraction to the beauty of an object is therefore, in reality, the attraction to that transcendental beauty: ‘Our interpretation is that our Soul – by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the Noble Existents in the hierarchy of Being – when it sees everything that is kin or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of its affinity.’892

A notion of the Absolute beauty can be grasped, moreover, since it is communicated from its primal state through the various orders of reality, through the three hypostases, to the sensual world. what is perceived as beautiful in the sensual world is only thus in so far as it is a reflection of the Absolute Beauty which is communicated through it, an idea directly reflected in Delville’s writings and his three-fold expression of Beauty discussed earlier. Plotinus writes:

And this beauty, which is also the Good, must be posed as the First: directly deriving from this first is the Intellectual-Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty; Through the Intellectual-Principle, Soul is Beautiful. The beauty in things of a lower order - actions and pursuits for instance -

comes by operation of the shaping soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense. For the soul, as divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fullness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.893

Finally, art is thus seen as the embodiment of the Ideal-Beauty, or the One: ‘Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the Idea, or Reason-Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any confines of the external.’894 The view that art was the means through which one could gain access to the realm of the Ideal was fundamental to Symbolist aesthetics. In the words of the Symbolist author and critic, Emile verhaeren, ‘the effect of art, of our art is an influence of a vague attraction towards a melancholy, grave ideal’.895 In symbolist metaphysics, this was the function of the androgyne, which acted as guide or psychopomp between the realm of the ‘real’ and the Ideal.

Ideal or Spiritual LoveIn the Idealist tradition, the mechanism of the translation from one reality to another, from the material to the spiritual, is achieved through the principle of (Ideal) Love, which had been emphasised in the philosophy of Plato. Plato posited a principle of Absolute reality, equivalent to Plotinus’ ‘One’ and Schopenhauer’s ‘world of Representation’. Plato also suggested that the purpose of existence is the search for and attainment of this Ideal condition. Moreover, he expresses the notion that this is possible by means of a gradual ascent through an ascending hierarchy of stages. The fundamental character of this Ideal realm is based on the principle of beauty. The ascent through various levels of experience constitutes an increasing awareness of the character of the idea of Ideal Beauty, which manifests itself in various degrees at each level. Thus, the aspirant begins through the contemplation of physical beauty of which it should eventually be realised that:

Physical beauty in any person is akin to physical beauty in any other, and that if he is to make beauty of outward form the object of his quest, it is a great folly not to acknowledge that the beauty in all bodies is one and the same.896

In realising this, the aspirant passes on to the love of beauty of the soul which is to be regarded as more valuable than the beauty of the body, then,


to love of beauty as it exists in activities and institutions – and then to morals and the sciences and knowledge generally. The final stage is the love and union with the Absolute (or Divine) Beauty – the ideal state of original wholeness and perfection.

Plato defines the qualities of this condition:

This beauty is first of all eternal, it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes, next, it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear to him like the beauty of a face or hands or anything corporeal or like the beauty of a science, or like the beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it a living thing on the earth or in the sky or anything else whatever; he will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal, and all other beautiful things partaking of it, yet in such a manner that while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change.897

For Plato, Love is the driving impulse that draws one to the state of Ideal Beauty and original unity. The theme of love as the medium through which this return to original unity is achieved is stressed in Plato’s account of the androgyne as it is in all subsequent thinking on the subject; it is a central notion in Symbolist aesthetics where it is regarded as the energy and the mechanism whereby one is drawn towards the Ideal through the recognition of the Idea hidden in forms. Plato suggests that love is the medium through which the return to original wholeness is accomplished: ‘It is from this distant epoch, then, that we may date the innate love which human beings feel for one another, the love which restores us to our ancient state by attempting to weld two beings into one and to heal the wounds which humanity suffered.’898 This idea is echoed in Plotinus, who asserted that ‘the emotional state for which we make this ‘Love’ responsible rises in souls aspiring to be knit in the closest union with some beautiful object’.899 Furthermore he believed, ‘It is sound … to find the primal source of Love in a tendency of the soul towards pure beauty’.900 The teleological climax of this longing and desire constitutes a form of ‘spiritual procreation’. In this regard, Plato writes:

There are some whose creative desire is of the soul, and who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny which it is the nature of the soul to create and bring to birth. If you ask what that progeny is it is wisdom and virtue in general; of this all poets and such craftsmen as have found out some new thing may be said to be begetters.901

There is little doubt that these ideas on transcendental beauty and metaphysical love would have been a part of Delville’s intellectual purpose of his L’Ecole de Platon. One has surely to recognise that the gestures of affection amongst several youths in Delville’s Ecole are an expression of an aspect of Platonic love which is intimately connected with the theme of Ideal Beauty and is expressed through the symbol of the androgyne. we have already seen how this idea forms an essential part of Delville’s thinking in his dialogue entre Nous. Péladan, too, had advocated the virtue of Ideal love and beauty as an aesthetic imperative:

It is fated and legitimate that our desire awakens to beautiful shapes: it is necessary for it to be subordinated to beautiful feelings: better still for it to be under the supreme charm of beautiful ideas. But, aesthetically, in order to illustrate an idea, one has to sentimentalise it through expression; and the beauty of mystical ideas is expressed through the beauty of forms … However, to descend to the current understanding of the word, perversity would consist of appealing to one’s instinctivity, to animal emotions; but in this sense a patriotic painting operates in the same way as a lascivious one; both target the beastly side of their audience. 902

Moreover, Péladan believed, as did Plato and Plotinus, that physical beauty and love are reflections of Divine love and beauty and hence our attraction to the physical is actually the attraction to the Divine hidden in the physical (as in a work of art): ‘The only poetic form comprehensible to all is love; and in love, they sense above all concupiscence. Before the work of art, they behave as though faced with reality: there is no use in vilifying the nudity because it constitutes the link which permits the common man to guess at the existence of beauty.903

For Péladan, it is through love that spiritual transformation is possible and through which a state of original wholeness and unity is achieved: ‘we give the name of love to the desire to return to the androgynous state … Love, after this life, will restore us to our [original] state, will cure our infirmities and provide us with unadulterated happiness.’904 In his view, moreover, love is seen as the force of the self that propels it towards unity and completion. Péladan states that ‘Love is merely the effort of the Self to achieve its own completion and its own confirmation’.905 He celebrates the androgyne as the absolute personification of ideal love. In his ‘Hymne à l’Androgyne’ he praises the androgyne as the, ‘absolu de l’amour’ [absolute of love].906 for Péladan, the sexual union symbolised by the androgyne, is the basis for the synthesis of opposites resulting in the unitary and transcendent condition of original wholeness.907


The idea of spiritual ‘desire’ associated with the androgyne, which promises the fulfilment of the yearning to return to the condition of original unity and wholeness, is forcibly expressed by the Princess d’Este, the central character of in Péladan’s influential novel Le Vice Suprême:

Oh, to be two! Two hearts and the same heartbeat, two spirits and the same thought, two bodies and the same thrill … These two hearts melted in one adoration, these two spirits united in one admiration, these two bodies entwined in one delectation … Two! The voice and the echo. Two! The twin existence! One being added to one’s being; in oneself, two, satisfaction alongside desire: the dream of the androgyne realised according to the laws, a return to Creation.908

In other words, the desire for the androgyne can be understood to be not of a physical or sexual nature, but as the metaphoric expression of a metaphysical desire; for the unity of the Ideal as well as for transcendence from the material order of reality; of eroticism and the instincts – against which the ideal of the androgyne stands.909 Amongst Delville’s contemporaries, this theme of spiritual love was the focus of a lecture given by Michaël during the second Salon d’Art Idéaliste, during the previous year, titled Les Ailes de Psyché.910 Michaël’s expression on the theme is essentially Platonic. This is especially notable in the passage where he writes:

If your affections lean towards your senses, they shall be infected by the character of material love and your life will sink deeper into the darkness.

If your affections, on the contrary, rise towards the region of your ideas, spiritual love shall gradually grow within you and you shall inherit the Kingdom of Light.

Your heart shall no longer be tied to one individual in particular, but you shall love MAN, male and female, that is the living image of God, the sublime and eternal synthesis of all the possibilities of life and thought.

Then your soul shall feel strength, and renewed vigour within the wings given it by nature, but which inertia had numbed, and soaring confidently into the Azure, it shall rise irresistibly, without fear, without pause, without turmoil, towards the infinite Beatitudes of Eternal life.911

The essence of this aesthetic of spiritual beauty was recognised, moreover, in a perspicuous article by José Hennebicq, written during the exhibition of Delville’s L’Ecole de Platon during the third Salon d’Art Idéaliste. After

citing passages from Plato and Plotinus, quoted variously above, on the nature of Ideal beauty Hennebicq emphasised an essential axiom of l’Esthétique Idéaliste discernible in the work of both these writers as well as in Delville’s art, namely, that interior or spiritual beauty is superior to external or physical beauty. For Delville the expression of this internal or spiritual beauty constitutes the basis of Idealist art. Hennebicq noted further that:

Outside, or more accurately, above humanity bound to the weaknesses of the flesh, to the whims of Fortune, to the trials of life, the poet – in taking up the paint brush, pencil or chisel or, equally, the eternal Lyre – devises a humanity, the synthetic transfiguration of the terrestrial humanity, an ideal humanity, extension of ours into the endlessly-enriched Universe of appearances.

In this universe, in the secular field of aesthetic creation, spiritual Beauty finds its equal and its expression in artistic Beauty. 912

Responses to L’Ecole de PlatonThe effect of L’Ecole de Platon on Delville’s contemporaries was, in a word, overwhelming. The review in L’Art Moderne, the leading critical journal of the Belgian avant-garde, which was generally guarded and reserved in its critical opinions – and whose attitude towards Delville was previously reserved, even hostile – expressed effulgent praise for the work: ‘Jean Delville … has created a work! A superb work of art: The School of Plato, to which he refers as “an essay in Fresco” – Go and see it! It is of a calm, a serene, a grand and delicious Beauty … Ideal, yes, truly ideal. The programme shows his worth and it is magnificent.… It is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!’913 This response by L’Art Moderne, in its long review of the exhibition and Delville’s art, marked a significant turn around in its relation to Delville, which would be reinforced the following year when it published, over three issues, essays by Delville outlining his Esthétique Idéaliste (expanded significantly in his book published in 1900, La Mission d’Art).914 Delville was also invited to exhibit at the Libre Esthétique for the first time in 1900.

Moreover, Ernest verlant, who, as we have seen, had been consistently critical of Delville’s colour in previous years, was largely unreserved in his admiration of the technical skill of the work: ‘The scene is of Elysian serenity, and everything in it contributes to the mingled expression of gravity and softness.… The line is very pure, and the colourings, nearly always in greens, blues and purples, are of a happy and significant harmony. Between the spiritual meaning and the stylistic interpretation of it, there is


accord and a fine balance. without doubt, Mr Delville shows much evidence of his mastery in this painting.’915

An extensive essay by Lucien Solvay appeared in the Belgian daily Le Soir in which the naturalist and idealist tendencies in Belgian art were examined, with particular reference to the third Salon d’Art Idéaliste. After a summary discussion of Delville’s views and the relative success of some of the exhibitors in achieving the specific aesthetic standard set by Delville, Solvay wrote:

Fortunately, amidst these works, there is one which very nearly completes the programme, it is Mr Jean Delville’s great painting, “essai de fresque” L’Ecole de Platon. Here is something, I would say, which is worth more than all the theories, if one did not know that theories always come after the works, and not the works after the theories; Mr Delville’s theory explains his work proudly, victoriously; it applies to himself, first and foremost, to his talent, his personality; – woe unto those who thought they were as good at doing the same thing!

This Ecole de Platon is a truly remarkable painting, and I cannot resist its charm any more than I would any other, corresponding to another Ideal and stirring in me the emotion of Beauty through different means.… The colouring is harmonious, the form is perfect, the sentiment is deep and powerful. I do not ask myself if it is idealist art or not; – it is art. I am moved. For such a beautiful work, I will excuse all the speeches. I will applaud and I will admire.916

Further reviews of a similar tenor appeared in the press, notably by Francis vurgey in La Fédération Artistique who wrote: ‘It is not only an interesting attempt, but a very harmonised major work. Its composition is, technically, absolutely remarkable. It is of superior conception, with a perfect intelligence of subject. … One finds oneself lulled by a softness so even, a placidity so constant, this silent calm embraces one’s soul.’917

Delville’s L’Ecole de Platon was widely exhibited after the Salon d’Art Idéaliste, notably at the Salon d’Anvers in August 1898 as well as in Berlin that year. It was also exhibited in Paris at the annual Salon, where it received a favourable response. A review of the Paris Salon in L’Artiste noted that ‘The purity of Phidias provokes hallucinations in the Flemish painter Jean Delville … the author is a neo-Platonist and symbolist, who appears to be a contemporary of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite or of Proclus; his Plato dreams of Christ and announces him; the painter has read the Symposium through the Pauline epistles’.918 Delville’s work was later exhibited at the

International Exhibition in Milan in 1906 where it won a Gold medal and generated an enthusiastic reception, especially amongst the Italian critics.919 It is not only the obvious public success of this work, but also its artistic coherence and aesthetic integrity that suggests that it is an important work in the context of non-realist tendencies of the era, and deserves fully to be reinstated into the canon of Symbolist art.

Fig. 75. L’Ecole de Platon (detail), 1898.

'L’Ecole de Platon' – Delville’s Initiatory sermon on Love, Beauty and Androgyny

Documents

Transcript of 'L’Ecole de Platon' – Delville’s Initiatory sermon on Love, Beauty and Androgyny