Copyright © 2017 Natalie Pretzman.
Measuring a monumental six feet tall by nine feet wide, Karl Strathmann’s Salammbo (Figure 1) was an immediate sensation upon its exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1895.[1] Despite mainstream audience’s initial scandalization, it was immediately purchased by representatives of the Weimar Museum, where it still hangs to this day.[2] Depicting an almost incoherent amalgam of decorative influences, from its Orientalizing draperies and set pieces, to the mosaic-like quality of the all-over patternings, Strathmann’s Salammbo is nearly as stylized and inexplicable as the 1862 novel from which it drew inspiration. In the following paper, I present a close comparison of Karl Strathmann’s Salammbo with the Flaubert novel of the same name, positing the central theme of decadence as existent in both the novel and the painting it inspired. Decadence, a term negatively associated with decline or lack of growth, decay, sinful morality, greed, and excessive living, can easily be applied to the novel’s narrative and the over-the-top decoration of the painting it inspired. Decadence can, as well, be applied to Western Europe’s nineteenth-century view of the Orient itself as a region inert and timeless, lacking in reason, intellect, moral virtues, and excessive in its sexuality, violence, and luxury. These two applications of the idea of decadence, I argue, are intrinsic to the viewing and interpretation of Strathmann’s Salammbo, an interpretation which takes into account the painting’s decorative inspirations as well as the numerous symbols contained within. Furthermore, I argue that this decadent decoration served to overcome and contain the figure of Salammbo herself: an eroticized and sexual femme-fatale of the ancient Orient who brought about the demise of the man who lusted after her, she represents the feminized Orient/East which was alternatively seen as a threat against and submissive to the dominant, masculine West. In encrusting his canvas with decoration, and covering the naked body of Salammbo with textiles, embroideries, and jewels to the extent that her sexuality is eliminated and her powers contained, Strathmann has metaphorically constrained the feminine East within its own decorative excesses.
Published in 1862, Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbo tells the story of Ancient Carthage in the third century BC during a mercenary revolt that took place after the Third Punic War against the Roman Empire. The title character is the virgin daughter of Carthage’s reigning general, Hamilcar, as well as the high priestess of the Carthaginian (and Phoenician) moon goddess Tanit. A mercenary captain named Matho falls in love and lust at first sight of Salammbo and is convinced by a conniving slave to steal the sacred veil of Tanit from Salammbo’s home, both in order to get closer to the priestess as well as to bring destruction to the city. In the end, touching the sacred veil brings death to both Matho and Salammbo after a short-lived lust-filled romance, though the city is saved from the attacking mercenary army.
Literary criticism of Salammbo is prevalent in both French and English. Major theories explaining the strange story of the novel compare the trials and tribulations of the ancient city-state to contemporary France. This dominant strain of criticism cites Flaubert’s disillusionment with the decadent lifestyles of France as seen in his previous novel Madame Bovary, as well as the current state of French politics and the economy, as reasons for his writing Salammbo. However, it is immediately apparent from the very first pages that Flaubert was equally as fascinated by the details of Carthaginian history and archaeology itself. In fact, contemporary criticism focused on Salammbo’s apparent lack of modern relevance and its over-reliance on exoticized and orientalizing archaeological details.[3]
As early as March 1857, word of the novel appears in Flaubert’s correspondence with his associates Jean Clogenson and Frederic Baudry, a French politician and a librarian/translator, respectively. Flaubert apparently began to write the novel in September of the same year, though sources imply that he had been gathering research and sources on the Near East and the Orient for many years prior.[4] Between 1849-1850, Flaubert travelled with his good friend Maxime du Camp to Greece, Beirut, Istanbul, and Egypt before writing Madame Bovary. In April of 1858, after beginning work on Salammbo, Flaubert travelled to Carthage itself.[5]
In the case of his historical writing, Flaubert stated that he wished for two things: “rigorous research and scientific accuracy, and deep imagination.”[6] According to Green in Flaubert and the Historical Novel, the author was interested, as were the earlier French Romantics, in the attraction of man to the irrational, the superstitious, and the supernatural, citing the emotional need for the fantastic in the formation of primitive religion.[7] These elements can most explicitly be seen in Flaubert’s 1849 Temptation of Saint Anthony, but the deeply mythological and cultic religiosity of the ancient Carthaginian civilization in Salammbo also exemplifies Flaubert’s fascination. Fundamental to Flaubert was also the symbolic purity of the ancient Orient: as Donato says, “what makes ancient figures so beautiful [for Flaubert] is that they are original: to derive only from oneself is everything.”[8] This idea of the Ancient mirrors the idea of the modern, nineteenth-century Orient: the primitive, originary nature of the ancient Oriental figure as well as the modern Oriental figure makes them timeless and ever-lasting, unchanging symbols against the modernization of Western Europe.
The question of Salammbo’s Orientalism is a pertinent one. In 1978’s Orientalism, Edward Said discusses Flaubert’s ideas of the Orient in great detail, taking an unusually appreciative and fairly uncritical perspective of the novelist’s travels and writings about the Middle East.[9] Said, father of Orientalist critique in the 20th-century, uses the novel as an example of nineteenth-century Orientalist decadence, citing it’s “amalgam of imperial vagueness and precise detail”, the blending of “radical realism and…projected mystery…” as evidence of Salammbo’s orientalizing prose. For Said, Salammbo represents the perceived “reality effect” often utilized by artists or authors to effectually “prove” the veracity of their depiction of the Orient. According to Said and other contemporary critics, the exaggeratedly detailed descriptions of costumes, objects, sets, and even Middle Eastern cuisine in Salammbo is supposedly meant to trick the audience or reader into believing the archaeological truths presented to them.[10] Flaubert’s frequent assertions that he wished to live in the “ancient Orient”, a world of barbaric and extravagant civilization, and his lamentation over the supposed disappearance of the “Oriental difference” in the modern era, corroborates Said’s assertion that Salammbo was written in a distinctly Orientalizing mode. Flaubert, according to Said, wished to emphasize the perceived differences between the Orient, especially the ancient Orient, and modern Europe.
According also to Said, Flaubert’s Orientalism is of a different vein than the majority of French Orientalism; it is more appreciative than domineering, more exploratory and genuinely curious than it is degrading.Said does indeed refer to Flaubert as a literary genius who was inspired to create masterpieces even prior to his Oriental travels, and who made much better use of his experiences than the majority of his French fellows. For Flaubert, the Orient provided a place in which his imagination and genius powers of creativity could soar.[11]
A common thread found throughout recent commentaries and critique of the novel’s written style describes it via the vocabulary of materiality. Sima Godfrey’s “The Fabrication of Salammbo: The Surface of the Veil” describes the materiality of the text by way of textile metaphors, beginning with the literal manifestation of textiles in the form of the veil of Tanit and the detailed descriptions of costumes throughout the story. Godfrey emphasizes also the prevalence of the “papyrus workers” mentioned throughout the novel as well as the related textile manufacturers and merchants who make up the main economy of Carthage.[12] Godfrey then goes on to imagine the actual text and writing as possessive of textile qualities, citing first the “peculiar structure and difficult texture of Salammbo” and the novel’s “heavily embroidered style”. She says that “Flaubert’s language is…woven onto a flat visual surface”, and notes the “embossed effect of this highly embroidered text”.[13]
Interestingly, Godfrey’s textile metaphors soon transform into other types of artistic similes: “The eye dances around each page as it does a painting, reading several paragraphs and suddenly having to retrace that reading in an effort to absorb the intricate rhythmical pattern of images”.[14] Images become a key element in Godfrey’s descriptions of the novel’s metaphorical use of language. Words become visual tapestries which become paintings: “Like a carefully constructed Symbolist poem, Salammbo is meticulously woven out of a texture of images that echo each other in an intricate pattern of sonoric and visual play.”[15]
Godfrey is not the only critic to speak of Flaubert’s novel by way of visual art forms. Contemporary critiques also focused on Salammbo’s utterly painted style of writing. Arthur Symons, a Decadent author writing about the novel in 1901, stated that “Flaubert notes every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural things”. For him, the novel’s characters (especially the titular heroine-femme fatale) were “reified creatures [that] move somnambulistically through rehearsed positions in post-Delacroix tableaux vivants”. Symons compares Salammbo to the Decadent personas of Gustave Moreau, noting her bejeweled flesh and the fact that she was “sexually responsive only to the cult serpent” (referring to the scene that Strathmann himself painted).
In translating this scene from the titular novel onto canvas in 1894, Munich-based Symbolist Karl Strathmann drew inspiration not merely from the subject of Flaubert’s novel, but from the literary style, which he then translated into a decorative pictorial vision on canvas. Just as an ancient Oriental subject allowed Flaubert to populate his novel to the nth-degree with exaggerated details of costume, cuisine, and culture, the subject of Salammbo, based on the archetype of the Oriental femme-fatale with her blatant sexuality and her exotic origins and religion, allowed Strathmann a chance to fill a canvas with all of his imaginary decorations and dreamlike imagery that few other narrative subjects would allow. Just as Flaubert placed emphasis on every tiny written detail, factual or not, Strathmann delineates and emphasizes every inch of the decorative surface with interwoven patterning.
Salammbo the painting was produced in the years 1894-95 while Karl Strathmann was still under the influence of the Munich Secession, of which he was an ex-member. Strathmann’s own training in “Ornamentik und Dekor” at the Düsseldorf Academy in the 1880s,[16] and his interests in the arts and crafts movement, in Munich’s home-grown brand of Jugendstil, the influences of the dominant Munich variety of Symbolism, and stylistic references to ancient Byzantium, culminated in this fantastical painted subject. The monumental canvas was shown in a special exhibition of the artist union “Laetitia” in 1895 in Düsseldorf, where it was quickly purchased by the Weimar Museum. Salammbo was also shown in the 1896 International Art Exhibition in Munich (Internationalen Kunstausstellung) and Berlin (Große Berliner Kunstausstellung).[17] Heavily influenced by Strathmann’s fellow Munich Secessionist Franz von Stuck and his paintings Sin (Figure 2) and The Vice (in which femme-fatales are wrapped in the embrace of terrifyingly large black serpents), Flaubert’s scene seems to have been the perfect excuse for Strathmann to portray this peculiarly Symbolist theme.[18]
Strathmann’s close friend and major Munich Secessionist artist Lovis Corinth writes in his autobiography on the production of the Salammbo canvas, stating how Strathmann gradually covered the originally nude model with “carpets and fantastic garments of his own invention so that in the end only a mystical profile and the fingers of one hand protruded from a jumble of embellished textiles…colored stones are sparkling everywhere; the harp especially is a glitter with fake jewels.”[19] Corinth says that Strathmann knew how to expertly attach, glue, and sew these gems and bits of colored glass to the canvas due to his art school training.
Salammbo is an enormous canvas of roughly 6 feet tall by 9 feet wide.[20] In the center of the canvas, the figure of Salammbo lies swathed in layers of densely patterned textiles and fabrics, the shape of her body nearly invisible beneath the wrappings, though instances of her tan skin appear underneath a netting-like fabric covering her breasts, shoulders, and what appears to be her thigh. From beneath a dark purple head wrap with flowing veil emerges a thick black braid of hair; over her face lies another conical-shaped netted veil. The figure closes her eyes, her lips pursed in a slight frown, but her face otherwise devoid of emotion. Her limbs are not visible under the heavy layers of textiles except for a hand that appears out from under the fabrics at a strange and somewhat disturbing angle, implying an outstretched arm under the draperies. A slight bend in the knees is also apparent, causing her lower body to shift slightly closer to the viewer. The serpent, black with subtle diamond-shaped outlines of gold repeating along its flesh, wraps its thick body around the figure’s midsection, slithering beneath her back and emerging from behind her head to lift the veil over her face. It pauses mere millimeters above Salammbo’s lips, about to impart a ritual kiss. Close examination reveals the tail of the serpent trailing away into the background toward the left half of the canvas.
At right sits a large decorative lyre with thin strings revealing the landscape in the background. The right edge of the lyre curves upward from the thick base, eclipsed in part by the ornate frame of the canvas, and continues around to the top edge of the instrument, meeting the left edge at it’s top corner, which culminates in a decorative carved elephant’s head (the ancient symbol of Carthage). Behind the lyre are three oblong shapes, perhaps fruits or produce. Out of the fruits grow roots which become thorny briars crawling along in groupings directly behind the lyre’s strings, and again visible at left near the tail of the serpent. Below the lyre sits a rounded and bejeweled crown. At left, a stout golden incense burner emits swirls of smoke. To its right, hardly visible amidst the draperies, is a dark bejeweled vase, in which sits a large 8-petal, star-shaped blossom. Similar blossoms crawl upward along an ornate trellis, and cover the woman and the sharply receding tiled ground upon which she lies.
In the background grows a large field of golden daisies, sunlit and shimmering. Running diagonally near the left corner of the canvas is a river, the banks of which are invisible beneath the ground-swell of the daisy field. A few sparse trees stand in the background behind the field, and silhouettes of thicker trees seem to sit beyond the river on its opposite bank. The small amount of sky that is visible is abstracted, consisting almost entirely of splotchy cream-colored clouds interspersed with swirls of grey-blue. Though the landscape at first seems to have little to do with the foreground, closer viewing reveals the rise and falls of the female figure’s body mirrors the swells of the field; the diagonal of her legs lies parallel to the river; and the tan of her skin almost matches the gold of the daisies.
The painting depicts a central event pulled from the tenth chapter of Flaubert’s novel, that of the serpent ritual that the titular priestess must complete to gain the protection of the Phoenician moon goddess for the city of Carthage. On the canvas, Strathmann depicts the moment described in the novel as follows: “Salammbo rolled it around her sides, under her arms and between her knees; then taking it by the jaw she brought the little triangular mouth to the edge of her teeth, and half shutting her eyes, threw herself back beneath the rays of the moon.”[21] Viewers and readers may immediately note that Strathmann takes multiple liberties in his portrayal of the cultic ritual: Salammbo is lying prone, not standing as she is in the novel; Salammbo is swathed in draperies instead of nude; and the image appears to be bathed in sunlight, not moonlight. Strathmann also adds a number of objects that are not explicitly mentioned in the text.
In 1865, Theophile Gautier defined Decadent art by way of the following quote: “It is a dish for the delicate, for dreamers, for the blase, for those for whom nature is no longer enough, and who seek beyond it a more pungent, a more bizarre sensation. To such minds the true seems commonplace: they need the strange, the supernatural, the phantasmal.”[22] Writing at the time about early French Symbolist Gustave Moreau, Gautier’s words would forever place the artist under the definition of Decadence and its ideals. He goes on to attribute to the figures in Moreau’s Apparition (Figure 3) and Salome (Figure 4) “the character of apparitions, a kind of disturbing dead life, a mysterious pallor, and a taste for accessories that is both precious and baroque.”[23] Another author, Marcel Proust, described a woman in his novel Du cote de chez Swann in comparison to Moreau’s figures, saying she is “a shimmering amalgam of unknown and diabolical elements, adorned, like one of Gustave Moreau’s apparitions, with poisonous flowers interlaced with precious jewels.”[24]
These descriptions of Gustave Moreau’s works bare more than a passing resemblance to Strathmann’s Salammbo. German art criticism does not abound as French criticism does, but one can readily imagine audiences saying much the same of Strathmann’s prone figure. Proust’s incantation of “poisonous flowers interlaced with precious jewels” even bears eerie veracity to the literal objects painted, sewn, and glued onto the canvas by Strathmann. Additionally, Mario Praz describes the “Beauty of Inertia” that exists within Moreau’s gemlike paintings: “All these figures seem frozen in a sleepwalker’s gesture; they are unaware of the movement they are executing, sunk in reverie to the extent of appearing to be carried away towards other worlds.”[25] Associated implicitly with the Decadent movement, and literally decadent in its overabundance of decoration and the mosaic, gemlike quality of paint, Gustave Moreau’s works themselves should be considered ancestors of Strathmann’s own oeuvre.
Unlike many examples of Decadent paintings of women such as Salome, Strathmann’s Salammbo is inexplicably desexualized…even the glances of flesh reveal almost nothing to us. Her face is curiously blank, and her overall bodily position is awkward and angular. This is discordantly unlike the other painted representations of Salammbo which either focus on the decorative beauty of the woman, or her sexuality and nudity. We can compare Strathmann’s 1894 Salammbowith multiple depictions of the same character from around the turn-of-the-century, though most were created after Strathmann’s initial Salammbo. For example, Gabriel Ferrier’s Le Serpent (Figure 5) from 1899 eroticizes the same scene from the novel quite spectacularly: on a plush, cushioned bed, the priestess Salammbo lies fully nude, flushed and writhing in apparent pleasure as the thick serpent entangles and entwines itself around her curvaceous form. Salammbo’s arm is thrown up and out, and her other arm reaches across the pillow and grasps at the bedsheets as the serpent is about to impart upon her its kiss. Her body is fully facing the viewer for the presumably male’s hungry gaze. Lurking in the background is Salammbo’s maid-servant, present at the scene as mentioned in the novel, playing a harp or lyre. The plush bedroom is decorated with Orientalizing wall carvings and paintings. Another Salammbo, painted by Alphonse Mucha in 1896 (Figure 6), shows a more generalized scene of the priestess and her maid-servant, though the title character is still sexualized: she stands in an ornate skirt, her breasts uncovered and even framed by delicately wrought golden armor that serves as a belt and shoulder and neck coverings. She wears a giant peacock-feather headdress which entirely covers her hair, and from which flows several long strands of fluttering fabrics. At her feet kneels the maid-servant, strumming the harp as in Ferrier’s picture, and surrounded by incense braziers and flowers. Finally, a third example by French Symbolist Gaston Bussiere from 1899 (Figure 7) depicts Salammbo at the moment of the snake ritual, standing naked and with a darkly leering expression on her face as she looks out at us. To her side rises the serpent, preparing to entrap her for the ritual consummation. Here again, as in Ferrier, Salammbo’s nudity and sexuality is on full display for the viewer, and she stands in an utterly exotic, oriental space, with colorful hanging curtains and golden décor. Compared to these representations of the same character, and even the same scene, in Strathmann’s Salammbo the decorative nature of the aesthetic is emphasized, and Salammbo’s body is accordingly de-emphasized.
Is this de-emphasis of Salammbo’s sexuality a way in which to control the supposed femme-fatale, or Fatal Woman, of Flaubert’s story? A way in which Strathmann is able to contain the exotic, Oriental sexuality of Flaubert’s femme-fatale? This is the only representation in which the snake, an obvious phallic metaphor, completely and tightly enwraps the heroine. In other representations the snake is absent, or Salammbo herself is shown confident in her sexuality, challenging the phallus of the snake. In Strathmann’s canvas, she looks as if she is asleep or even dead, leading the audience to guess that the phallic snake is going to awaken her…indeed, in the story, after the encounter with the snake she is exhausted and reacts as though she has just had intercourse. Shortly thereafter, she visits Matho’s tent and they have sex. Before the snake, she was virginal, even asexual to an extent that she seemed to desire nothing…does the snake, then, signify her metaphorical and literal awakening in Strathmann’s picture? The flowers may also serve to signal this type of “awakening” which only occurs after the moment of the serpent’s kiss (a kiss that is in itself a phallic gesture): the seven and eight petalled blossoms appear most similar to passionfruit flowers, obviously symbolizing love and/or lust, and also are in possession of circular red centers, perhaps references to the female genitalia. We may compare Salammbo’s virginity prior to the serpent with a certain element of “deflowering” that occurs after the serpent’s kiss. The briars creeping along beside Salammbo’s prone figure may also symbolize the tradition of Briar Rose, a fairy tale representing the literal and metaphorical sexual awakening of the maiden by a masculine kiss. Taking these metaphors even further, the snake in itself may be representative of the form in which Satan takes to deceive Eve in the Garden of Eden. After her encounter with the serpent, Eve becomes sexually aware and awakened. After her sexual awakening, soon comes the Biblical Fall. Similarly, shortly after Salammbo’s own sexual awakening after her serpentine encounter, Carthage is nearly but not quite brought to its own doom, though both Salammbo and her lover Matho die shortly after their sexual encounter. Despite all of this probable symbolism, the serpent remains the only “character” with any level of seductive allure in an effectually de-sexualized canvas, deeply in contrast with other depictions of beautiful, sensual Salammbos. The masculine, phallic serpent fully contains and constricts the feminine, which has been de-eroticized and therefore removed of her threat.
In the creation of Salammbo, Strathmann seems to have been possessed of a hysterical and anxious need to cover the feminine body, a body which at once represents the titular heroine who brings doom to the male hero, as well as the feminized Orient itself. Strathmann’s Salammbo is covered head to toe in the excess of Oriental and exoticized decoration, the decadence of which reflects the decadence of the ancient Oriental society which is brought to ruin by its own devices. Furthermore, the decorative arts are traditionally seen as the realm of the feminine. Embroidery and the weaving of textiles especially bear feminine and domestic connotations. In the case of Salammbo, these feminine crafts have overtaken the female figure and effectually bind her, control her, and entrap her in her own femininity and Oriental exoticism. Strathmann has effectively utilized the traditional realm of feminine craft to constrain the female figure herself, perhaps speaking to a belief that the feminine Orient is bound by its own decadent “decorations” and luxuries. This is further emphasized by the additional layer of feminine decoration, the large exotic flowers that are strewn atop and at the sides of Salammbo. Finally, the objects Strathmann adds to the scene also serve to emphasize feminine decorative luxury and excess: the incense burner at Salammbo’s feet invokes a state of dreamy lethargy and slothfulness, the harp or lyre may represent the act of leisurely music-making, and the crown that is nearly hidden in the lower right corner stands as an obvious depiction of wealth, though it may also symbolize feminine power and dominance which the painting further removes from the character of Salammbo by nearly hiding the crown within the excess of decoration. Amongst these objects of excess and leisure, Salammbo herself becomes merely another object of decadence, devoid of personality and character, devoid even of her sexuality that threatens men.
Strathmann’s Salammbo might be seen in conjunction with his other and more well-known monumental canvas, Maria, produced between 1895 and 1896 (Figure 8). Also owned by the Weimar Museum and hanging side-by-side with Salammbo, the two paintings could be considered literal and figurative pendants. Briefly examining Maria allows one to further consider the implications of the themes and aesthetics at play in the Salammbo canvas. Maria depicts the Virgin praying before a columned altar, its base inscribed with the name of the Virgin in a Byzantine mosaic-like style of epigraphy. The altar and column are swathed in thorny briars, creating a continuity with Salammbo. Maria is herself draped in several layers of heavy cloths and veils, and the main dress and sleeves are covered in mosaic-like patterning and gems.
Maria presents a direct thematic counterpart to Salammbo: where Salammbo is lying prone, Maria is upright. Salammbo takes part in an erotic, pagan ritual, her nakedness beneath the draperies visible. The purity and Christian piety of Maria is signified by not only her gesture of kneeling prayer, but her conservative and covering drapery. Strathmann presents the two types of fin-de-siecle women here, the fatal woman and the good woman. Even the snake, typically a symbol of evil, may symbolize Salammbo’s communion with the dark and the pagan, while Maria’s piety and communion with the Christian God is well-established. The two women also present two opposing views of the Orient: on one hand, it is a place of myth, cultic religions, and strange eroticism. On the other, it is the birthplace of Christianity and all that is held holy by Western Europeans.
A place specifically associated in the nineteenth-century with both the Orient and Christianity was ancient Byzantium, a civilization from which the Decadents as a movement, and Strathmann specifically as an artist, draw inspiration. One of the only writers on the visual arts of the Decadent movement, Philippe Julian, writes about the influence of Byzantium on the Decadents in Dreamers of Decadence. He quotes the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine:
“I m the Empire at the end of Decadence
Watching the tall white Barbarians go by
While composing indolent acrostics
In a golden style in which the languid sunshine dances.”[26]
For Julian, Byzantium represents the ultimate in Oriental Decadence, relating it to the idea of civilization’s decline, an anxiety preoccupying minds at the fin-de-siecle. For the French intellectuals especially, Western Europe was in a state of cultural decline similar to that which caused the destruction of the great Byzantine Empire, a decline which was believed to be caused by overly decadent lifestyles and morals. Powerful, sexual women (the Empress Theodora especially), gold-encrusted art and architecture, and excesses of food and drink all contributed to the downfall of the once-glorious and preeminently Christian empire. Julian compares Byzantium and Sodom, placing the Babylonian empire in the midst of the two in its Oriental splendor.[27] He compares Rochegrosse’s Les derniers Jours de Babylone (Figure 9) to Flaubert’s Salammbo, claiming that Rochegrosse must have been inspired by the overly wrought decorative surfaces and the pleasurable excesses depicted in the novel. Incidentally, Rochegrosse produced a painting of Salammbo herself in 1886 (Figure 10), and again in 1910 (Figure 11). The 1886 picture is especially pertinent. In it, Salammbo is shown emerging out from an open doorway which is covered in geometric Greco-Roman designs depicting animals and patterning. On the left of the doorway hangs a tapestry, and behind the figure of Salammbo is a gold-encrusted back wall, shining in its opulence. Salammbo herself holds a thin Near Eastern lyre, and wears a tall crown with the sideways crescent moon of the goddess Tanit. She is swathed in sheer black draperies covered in exquisite patterns, her nudity visible beneath the deep cut in the front of her robes. Rochegrosse’s Salammbo, like many representations of the heroine, is all decadence, her character overcome by the decorative excesses of her draperies and jewelries. The fact that Rochegrosse’s representations of Salammbo also depict no specific narrative scene removes the element of personality attached to the character. For Rochegrosse, she becomes a generic woman of the Orient, decorated and encrusted with jewels and expensive silks, and posing solely for the viewer’s delectation and gaze.
Aside from Rochegrosse, I have found no other examples of artistic depictions of the character Salammbo before Karl Strathmann’s canvas from 1894 (except for a lithograph from 1890 by Odilon Redon, a known follower of Flaubert, simply entitled “Serpent” and depicting a naked woman with a thick black snake entwined around her standing body, Figure 12). A number of artist depictions of the femme-fatale were produced after Strathmann’s, however, around the year 1899, and interestingly enough, all the artists who portrayed the character of Salammbo on canvas or print were associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements. Strathmann’s Salammbo was never exhibited in France (and to my knowledge has never left Germany), so it is unlikely that it would have been known to artists such as Gaston Bussiere, Leon Bonnat (Figure 13), and Gabriel Ferrier. However, this influx of representations of Salammbo coincides with the 1899 revival of Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role of Victorien Sardou’s stage production Theodora, one of the most overtly Decadent plays in the late nineteenth-century (Figure 14).
Originally premiering in September of 1884, Theodora tells the story of the last weeks of the infamous sixth-century Byzantine empress and her supposed lust for power as told in Procopius’s Secret History.[28] Scholars suggest that Bernhardt’s Theodora single-handedly created a Byzantine craze throughout Western Europe in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, but Procopius’ Secret History had actually been translated and published in France by 1856 and inspired new levels of Byzantine scholarship and interest. The Byzantine Revival in Europe can indeed be traced to the middle decades of the nineteenth-century, and Sardou’s 1884 play was only a latter stage of Western Europe’s interest in the ancient empire, which stood in a unique position as both Oriental and Christian.
Procopius and his lurid tales of the scandalous and decadent life of Theodora may have played a part in the creation of Flaubert’s Salammbo, which was published six years after Secret History, but I have found no record of Flaubert writing about it as an inspiration. Nevertheless, there are pertinent similarities between the two tales and the decadent women and civilizations at the center of their narratives. Like Theodora, Salammbo fits the archetype of the femme-fatale, a darkly powerful woman who is able to use her powers of seduction, her wit, and her deceitfulness to gain power over the men in her life, often bringing them to ruin. And like Constantinople, the decadence and arrogance of the Carthaginian empire leads to conflicts with barbaric hordes, eventually leading to the kingdom’s fateful destruction. We recall also Rochegrosse’s Babylon, a warning against the downfall of an empire brought about by its own excesses.
It is not merely the novel of Salammbo that I argue was likely inspired in part by the popularized myth of Theodora and Byzantium, but Strathmann’s painted version as well. As early as 1886, a production of Sardou’s Theodora came to Berlin and was an instant sensation throughout Germany.[29] Sarah Bernhardt herself reprised the title role, and all sets and costumes were kept the same. We might at this point note that Karl Strathmann was at this very moment studying the decorative arts in Düsseldorf, and his artwork produced from 1890 onwards bears great aesthetic and stylistic resemblance to the intricately ornate and over-the-top decorative costumes and set pieces of the Theodora stage-play (Figure 15). In the play, famed actress Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora wears incredibly over-the-top and ornate robes, absolutely covered head to toe in intricately patterned textiles and layers of gems and jewelry. An exquisite crown is ensconced upon her head, from which flows dozens of strings of pearls and other precious stones (Figure 15). Just as Salammbo in Strathmann’s canvas, Bernhardt is swathed in decoration, almost to the point of constriction, the shape of her body nearly hidden beneath the heavy draperies. A likely unrelated, but unmistakably similar decorative element in both the stage play and Strathmann’s painting is the crowns, both of which have a sideways crescent-moon shaped top. The crescent-moon topper in the painted crown of course represents the traditional Phoenician/Carthaginian emblem of Tanit, the moon goddess (Figure 16), and though Theodora’s crown in the stage production likely has nothing to do with any sort of moon deity, it yet remains a similarity that cannot be overlooked.
Though Theodora took the entirety of Europe by storm, Germany, and Bavaria more specifically, had long since been interested in all things Byzantine, thanks to the influence of Ludwig II (ruled 1864-1886) and Richard Wagner. Ludwig II’s father Ludwig I had already begun an immense building program and reconstruction of Munich in the 1840s and was himself interested in Byzantium and it’s styles, particularly architectural.[30] However, Ludwig II, known as Mad King Ludwig and the Fairy Tale King, was obsessed with the Byzantine style of art and architecture. Ludwig saw Byzantium as a fantastical realm in which he could escape the mundane life and duties of the crown, as well as to provide comfort from his sexual anxieties. Ludwig II was not the only German to be attracted to the decorative ornateness of Byzantium: a number of major studies on the Byzantine Empire and its aesthetics were published in Germany in the first part of the nineteenth-century, including Joseph von Hammer’s Constantinople and the Bosphorus of 1822, Labarte’s The Imperial Palace of Constantinople in 1861, and Johann Heinrich Krause’s Byzantines of the Middle Ages of 1869.[31] The Court Theater of Munich and Bavaria was particularly inclined toward Byzantine stage sets and decoration thanks to its set designer Christian Jank, and Richard Wagner was in the midst of producing several Byzantine-inspired operas such as Lohengrin of 1861, and Parsifal of 1865. For our purposes, a certain commonality also existed amongst the leaders of this group of German Byzantine-lovers of the 1860s: both Ludwig II and Richard Wagner were tormented by their sexualities, and anxieties about female sexuality and the idea of the feminine in general. Finally, an element of German nationalism often was in play throughout the Byzantine craze in the nineteenth-century: German legend was filled with tales of the Holy Grail, the German knights who protected it, and the Byzantine locales in which it found its final resting place, thereby creating a mythic connection between Germany and Byzantium by which Karl Strathmann may have also been influenced.[32]
Karl Strathmann went on to produce another version of Salammbo in 1900 (Figure 17). This time Salammbo stands proudly before the coiled serpent, her arms outstretched and her face turned upwards to the night sky, eyes closed, welcoming the oncoming embrace of the serpent in an almost trance-like ecstasy. This time her sexuality and nudity is on full display, her body covered by only a sheer robe composed of gemstones and a belt with hanging strands of pearls. Her luscious black hair flows freely across her milky white shoulders and back, and she stands on the same tiled ground as that which the 1894 Salammbo laid upon. Instead of sunlight, the scene is moonlit and takes place in a clearing amidst a forest. Two tall braziers emit smokey incense which wafts through the air around Salammbo and the serpent. In the middle ground grows an immense bramble of white roses and vines, though they are curiously absent of thorns, and none of the thorny briars of the 1894 painting are present. Six years have passed since Strathmann’s first Salammbo and so much has changed…now the heroine is confident in her nudity and sexuality, and the strange passionfruit blossoms and briars have changed to softer roses. Salammbo confronts the serpent with confidence, curiously dressed in the same accoutrements as Gustave Moreau’s Salome. Strathmann has freed her sexuality and allowed her power as a femme-fatale to be placed on full display. Gone, too, is the overly wrought decoration, the thick, constraining textiles, and the mosaic, gem-like quality of decoration. The only Oriental elements that remain are the braziers and Salammbo’s fantastical pearl draperies.
Is this extreme difference in Strathmann’s Salammbos merely an evolution in the artist’s own style, a movement toward a more classically idealized portrayal of the feminine form? Or is there a greater significance to this drastically different portrayal of the same subject, the same scene, the same Decadent story? Continued explorations of Strathmann’s evolving oeuvre as the century turns are beyond the scope of this paper; however, a comparison of the 1894 Salammbo allows one to observe how significantly unique it is amongst depictions of Flaubert’s titular character. Decadent in its ornateness and decoration, and decadent in its subject matter, Strathmann’s 1894 Salammbo was not merely an innovative interpretation of the Flaubert novel from which it sourced its subject, but also a telling symbol of European and masculine views of both the feminine and the Orient around the fin-de-siecle. The inherent vices and excessive, decadent luxuries of Flaubert’s novel represented the Western view of the East’s decadence, and Karl Strathmann’s decision to curtail that decadence by showing the character of Salammbo overcome and entrapped by luxurious decoration was, I have argued, an attempt to constrain the threat not only of woman’s powers of sexuality and seduction, but also of the Orient’s own parallel dangers.
FIGURES
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FOOTNOTES
[1] Michael Buhrs, Secession: 1892-1914 (Minerva Hermann Farnung GmbH, Munich: 2008): 192.
[2] Joachim Heusinger v. Waldegg, Grotesker Jugendstil: Carl Strathmann 1866-1939 (Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn: 1976): 36-37.
[3] Constable, “Critical Departures: Salammbo’s Orientalism”: 630-632 and Eugenio Donato, The Script of Decadence (New York, Oxford University Press: 1993): 36-37.
[4] Anne Green, Flaubert and the Historical Novel (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1982): 28-30.
[5] Green, Flaubert and the Historical Novel: 31.
[6] Green, 94.
[7] Green, 95.
[8] Donato, The Script of Decadence, 41.
[9] Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, New York: 1994): 180-185.
[10] Said, Orientalism, 186.
[11] Said, Orientalism: 181.
[12] Sima Godfrey, “The Fabrication of Salammbo: The Surface of the Veil”. MLN Vol.95, no.4 (1980): 1005-1006.
[13] Godfrey, 1007.
[14] Godfrey, 1006.
[15] Godfrey, 1009.
[16] Waldegg, Grotesker Jugendstil, 9.
[17] Waldegg, 12.
[18] Waldegg, 33.
[19] Horst Uhr, Lovis Corinth (University of California Press, Berkeley: 1990): 76-77.
[20] Buhrs, Secession, 192.
[21] Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo (Pantianos Classics, 1982): 121-122.
[22] Peter Cooke, Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality, and Symbolism (Yale University Press, New Haven: 2014): 12-13.
[23] Cooke, Gustave Moreau, 13.
[24] Cooke, 13.
[25] Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford University Press, New York: 1985): 303.
[26] Philippe Jullian, Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s (Praeger Publishers, New York: 1974): 149.
[27] Jullian, Dreamers of Decadence, 151.
[28] Elena N. Boeck, “Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s Theodora”, Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (Koninklijke Brill, Leiden: 2015): 102.
[29] Boeck, “Archaeology of Decadence”, 107.
[30] J.B. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered: The Byzantine Revival in Europe and America (Phaidon, New York: 2003): 34-35.
[31] Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered, 35.
[32] Bullen, 38-39.