Note: this was adapted from a presentation given at the Ohio State University’s Department of History of Art’s 2016 Graduate Symposium. Copyright © 2016 Natalie Pretzman.
With my lute of gold, it is my custom to sing,
Beguiling mortal ears, so that under this guise
I can impel their souls to the sonorous
Harmony of Heaven’s lyre.
– La Musica, Orfeo (Monteverdi, 1607)
As with many Grecian mythologies of ambiguous record and origin, the character of Orpheus is as mysterious as he is ubiquitous. Son of a Muse, student of Apollo, companion of the Argonauts, husband and lover, object of both hetero and homosexual desire, prophet, poet, martyr. Conflated at times with the Good Shepard, with Apollo, even with Christ himself, the figure of Orpheus is said to have brought civilization and knowledge to mankind, peace and harmony to nature, and been priest and founder of an entire religion. He has been many things to many artists, but perhaps none were so fascinated with the mythic musician as the European Symbolists. It is no surprise that Orphic imagery was particularly attractive to Symbolist artists: emerging out of Romanticism in the second half of the nineteenth-century and closely related to the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements in Europe, the Symbolist movement in art revolved around issues of spirituality, magic, the occult, ancient mythologies, and the imagination. Most particularly, Symbolist artists, writers, and composers aimed for artistic expression that required the active involvement of the viewer’s own inner psyche and mystical leanings to complete the meanings of their often extraodinarily evocative subjects and imagery. Orpheus was to be the perfect figure onto and through which they could project certain of their most mystical ideas.
In this paper I will present a secession of Orpheus images from the Symbolist movement of the latter half of the 19th-century. Despite the differing regional origins of the works, they each serve to illustrate certain interpretations and beliefs about the Orphic mythological narrative, beliefs that reveal a greater series of concerns and anxieties prevalent in the late 19th-century. In the depiction of very particular aspects of the Orpheus myth and in privileging these parts over others that had been emphasized in art prior, Symbolist artists were actively working out these societal and philosophical anxieties. I will focus on one of these concerns in particular, that of the subject of harmony. Harmony in this case refers to harmony of the arts in a musical sense, as well as harmony as a more abstract term: harmony between the sexes, and harmony of the body and the mind. As will be seen, out of the idea (the ideal?) of harmony emerges numerous other issues and problems present in the art and thinking of Symbolist artists.
This paper will also, then, concern itself with the idea of Orpheus as androgyne, the ultimate harmonious being, desexed and no longer in conflict with either the earthly or the spiritual realm. I will argue that there was an explicit change in focus in Orphic imagery of the later 19th-century away from the subject of taming of nature and beasts, towards a certain taming or degendering of the body in achievement of the afore-mentioned harmony. Additionally, I will show that in this taming of the Orphic body, there was also a conscious isolation and movement away from the mythological Orpheus narrative and towards an abstraction of Orpheus as symbol. In these two conjunctive ideas, the taming of the body and the isolation from narrative, both closely connected to the harmonious ideal of Symbolist art, we will begin to see why the subject of Orpheus was so attractive to Symbolist artists and why Orphic Symbolist imagery was increasingly abstract in style.
A productive discussion of Orphic imagery requires a brief explanation of the Orpheus myth and its history. According to a number of fragmentary ancient writings, particularly those of Apollodorus generally dated to the first century AD, Orpheus was the son of a Thracian king and the muse Calliope. Other sources claim he was a son of Apollo himself, but in all versions of the origination myth, Orpheus is at some point in his childhood reared and taught by Apollo, who gives him the golden lyre that will enable Orpheus to perform music that can tame any animal or beast and cause peace and civilize any who hear it. As a young man, Orpheus accompanies Jason and the Argonauts on their adventures, aiding in their defense against the Sirens. Later, Orpheus would marry the nymph Eurydice, who would die tragically of a viper bite. Journeying to the Underworld to retrieve her, Orpheus strikes a deal with Hades and Persephone: Eurydice may return to the world of the living with Orpheus as long as he does not look at her on their journey upward. Tragically, Orpheus does end up looking at his wife, for reasons which I will discuss later, and she dies for the second time. Orpheus is forced to return without her and spends the rest of his life alone and in mourning. Eventually, he is set upon by the Maenads of Dionysus, who literally tear his body apart in rage after he spurns their sexual advances. His decapitated head lives on, endlessly singing his harmonious song, and preserved in perpetuity with his characteristic lyre by the Muses.
Prior to the nineteenth-century, many artists that depicted the Orpheus myth emphasized the “moment” of the narrative in which Orpheus is shown bringing harmony to nature and creating peace between animals and beasts. It is important to note that this element of the Orphic myth is not truly a concrete narrative moment.Orpheus as bringer of harmony to both nature and mankind is an abstract concept: it does not occur at any particular, chronologically exact point in the story, but is rather an all-encompassing theme that pervades the myth and character of the figure. Orpheus creates harmony in perpetuity, separate from the limitations of time and space. This idea will be adopted by the Symbolist artists as an abstracted concept, but prior to the nineteenth-century it was given physical, literalized depictions in the form of showing Orpheus in nature, usually a forest, playing his lyre and surrounded by a multitude of beasts.
Starting with the artists associated earliest with the beginnings of the Symbolist movement in the 1860s, there was a particular change in preference when it came to depicting the Orpheus myth. There was also an increase in depictions of the myth more generally. In this paper we will focus on four of the most popular Orphic moments and attempt to tease out why Symbolists artists became so fascinated with these parts of the narrative in particular, how they chose to depict them differently from art prior to the Symbolist movement, and how we can see, in these chronologically successive moments, an accompanying successive stylistic development from objective figural representation to abstracted subjective imagery.
These moments and the themes I argue they explore are, first, the bringing of harmony by Orpheus and the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk; second, the death of Eurydice and the denial of sex; third, the lamentation of Orpheus and the increasing isolation from gendered sexuality; and last, the decapitation of Orpheus as a type of castration and final degendering and abstraction of the body.
Though we begin our exploration with a relatively late work, I believe that its particular and unique usage of the Orphic theme will enable us to visualize this all-encompassing and imperative ideal of harmony in a way that is necessary to understand the Symbolist preoccupations with the Orpheus narrative. The Villa Stuck was designed and built in 1897-98 by the leader of the Munich Secession and the German Jugendstil, Franz von Stuck. Known equally for his very Germanic, Art-nouveau style as much as for his intrinsically Symbolist themes and ideas, von Stuck was one of the most important figures in the German art world, a professor at the Munich art academy, and teacher of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joseph Albers. The 34-year old Stuck designed his villa to be a conglomeration of antique and contemporary styles, and this can be seen most strikingly in the so-called Music Room. Meant to serve as a transition between house and garden, interior and exterior space, the Music Room appears similar to the garden rooms of Roman villas, with the geometric wall niches designed as a pseudo-religious altar of sorts.
Lording over the Music Room is the fresco painting of Orpheus with his golden lyre, creating music and pacifying the animals. Scenes of harmony play out below and around him on the wall, a replica statue of the virginal goddess Artemis strides above the carefully placed furniture, and lines of Orphic poetry are written in traditional Jugendstil font, telling of Orpheus’ dominion over all living things. Above, the ceiling is painted with the constellations of the night sky and the signs of the zodiac.
The theme of the Music Room is, thus, harmony. The Orpheus wall represents the beginning of this harmonious peace, and the ceiling has been interpreted to represent the “harmony of the spheres” of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who spoke of an analogy between the movements of celestial bodies and musical harmony. The Orpheus wall, placed centrally in the Music Room, begins this harmony, and the rest of the room, and the villa itself, continues it. Goethe said that architecture was nothing but frozen music, and the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the Total Work of Art, began with musical harmonies. The idea of musical harmony and its mystical, magical effects on mankind was a key point of interest to the imaginations of the Symbolists like Stuck, and therefore Orpheus was a primarily important mythological symbol for them. In the Villa Stuck, Orpheus represents the harmonious element that binds the universe together in peace and stability, bridging both the earthly and the heavenly realms. In quite a literal sense, too, the Music Room brings together the various elements of the villa into a centralized position, out from which the other rooms emanate, and from where the interiors and exteriors merge. The Villa Stuck is an immense Gesamtkunstwerk, and the Music Room, and Orpheus himself, is its harmonious center.
We now move to the intermediate stage of the Orpheus myth. Orpheus’ marriage to the nymph Eurydice has ended with her death and he has travelled to the Underworld to retrieve her. However, as we’ve already seen, he mustn’t look at her, lest she die a second death. Frederic Lord Leighton’s 1864 Orpheus and Eurydice teases out this event in a Symbolist manner. Associated with the English Pre-Raphaelites but also closely tied to the Symbolist movement, Leighton’s work ranges from large-scale historicism to Symbolist portraiture. Here he represents a unique moment not depicted in representations of the Orpheus myth previous to the second-half of the nineteenth century, that of the temptation of the sexual gaze.
Leighton’s depiction of the lovers is unique in the history of art. It is, to my knowledge, one of, if not the only, work by a major artist in which Orpheus is actively resisting and pushing Eurydice away. By way of the narrative we know that this is because of his awareness of what his look would bring. However, if we consider this painting in the vein of Symbolist ideas of gender and sexual relationships, I would argue that there is a more contemporary social anxiety playing out here. The idea of the femme fatale or the dangerous woman was extremely pervasive in the art of the second half of the nineteenth-century, particularly among the artists of the art nouveau and Symbolist movements, who were quite fearful and anxious of her powers of seduction and arousal. The idea that a woman could have such power over men, and that this was an inherently negative thing, was a key inspiration for many dark and often violent depictions of women in Symbolist art.
Though Leighton’s painting is not at all dark or violent, he depicts Eurydice as beseeching, tempting, and straining the careful relationship that Orpheus must maintain between them in this moment. Knowing this, Orpheus pushes her away with force, his symbol of harmony slung over his back and forgotten. He grimaces in anguish, despair, dismay, anger, even disgust. In this moment the sexual and romantic longing of the opposite sex is not wanted for fear of ruination. We know that he will eventually give into the temptation to gaze upon her, and that this leads to his own eventual undoing after her second death. Here the woman represents the breaking of Harmony; the temptations of sexual and bodily love signify death and destruction.
We move now to the isolation of the lamenting Orpheus after Eurydice’s second death, the cause of which was his own doing, in accordance with her tempting cries. Alexandre Seon, a major French Symbolist artist, illustrator, and decorator of the last decade of the nineteenth-century, was closely involved with the Salon de la Rose + Croix founded by Josephin Peladan, leader of a Rosicrucian-style occultist movement in Paris in the 1890s. Unsurprisingly, much of Seon’s work leans toward occult and mystical themes, often with overly simplified palettes and compositions highlighting singular thematic elements. Seon’s Lamentation of Orpheus of 1896 succumbs to this simplification of composition: after the final death of Eurydice, Orpheus lies prostrate on a beach in lamentation and mourning. He clutches to his chest his faithful instrument of harmony, the lyre of Apollo, wears a crown of flowers or laurel leaves, and is draped revealingly in a blue cloth that defines his shapely, curving hips and the bend of his legs.
Here Seon represents Orpheus is an androgynous figure, sprawled and revealing the fluid curves of his body, his genitalia hidden beneath the drapery, the jut of his hips and gentle curve of his buttocks yet revealed. The complex Symbolist struggle between genders continues to play out here: Orpheus has lost (or perhaps rejected?) the opposite sex, and so begins to take on traditionally feminine forms himself in an androgynized, even homoeroticized fashion. We can compare elements of this half-nude sprawling male figure to the homoeroticized nudes of Jacques Louis David and Anne-Louis Girodet, both major artists involved in homosocial male culture at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. In all, the genitalia are virtually unidentifiable or hidden; the bodies are lying exposed and open; their hips curve and the flesh of their thighs is supple as a female nude. All, also, represent figures in varying states of death or death-like sleep. Returning to Seon’s Orpheus, it is as if with the death of woman, there has also been a death of man; no longer will he be joined sexually with any woman, the mythology tells us, and so there is, in effect, an abandonment of heterosexualized manhood with Eurydice’s death. This in turn leads to the death of Orpheus himself.
According to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Orpheus goes on to spurn the sexual advances of the Ciconian women, followers of Dionysus and related to the orgiastic Maenads. In their insane anger at his preference for the company of men since the death of Eurydice, they quite literally tear Orpheus to pieces with their bare hands. This end of the Orphic myth brings us to one of the most popular Symbolist categories of Orphic imagery, that of the decapitated head. Odilon Redon, perhaps the most well-known of the French Symbolists, and one of the most prolific, depicted numerous variations of the decapitated, floating head of Orpheus, often placed on or before his golden lyre. This pastel from the Cleveland Museum of Art, dated circa 1903-1910, depicts the gruesome end of Orpheus’ life not as violent, depraved, or particularly tragic. Rather, Redon’s head of Orpheus seems merely to sleep peacefully against the shores of the island of Lesbos, where the mythology tells us it floated and inspired the building of a shrine.
This final abstracted rumination on the myth depicts Orpheus as the ultimate androgynous figure: the head without possession of a body is completely desexed and degendered, figuratively castrated, free from the disharmonies of gender relations and bodily sexuality. It has become an abstract symbol that merges harmoniously into the synaesthetic, ethereal landscape of the universe. Dreamlike and transcendent, the spirit of Orpheus is what is on display in Redon’s pastel, not his physical, earthly body. Drawing upon ideas of Neoplatonism and the transcendence and freeing of the soul, Orpheus ultimately becomes, once more, a symbol of musical harmony.
In conclusion, the Orpheus myth is an intensely complex narrative with an enormity of interpretations, both textual and visual, from throughout the millennia since its earliest written recording. I have attempted with this talk to present a very simplified version of the use of the myth by the Symbolists to represent and signify, to symbolize if you will, their often very personal contemporary concerns and social troubles in the latter half of the nineteenth-century. There are numerous further Symbolist examples that I do not have the time to explore in great detail, and the topic of Orpheus and Symbolism opens an entire Pandora’s Box of possible theoretical and interpretive issues to work out. Subjects such as the reception of the male nude in Symbolist circles, further exploration of Symbolist perspectives on the role of women, and even alchemical and occult notions of androgyny are topics I intend to pursue in the future, not all of these having to do particularly with the Orpheus myth. But in the end, I believe that the Orpheus myth provided Symbolist artists with the perfect imagery to tease out issues of harmony and the Gesamtkunstwerk, sexual relations, androgyny, and Neoplatonic spiritualism. Though these issues may seem at first unrelated, Orpheus, as he tends to do in his own harmonious way, serves as the connecting thread between them and the greater problems of the body in the nineteenth-century.