Oedipus and the Sphinx (Moreau)
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| Oedipus and the Sphinx |
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| Gustave Moreau , 1864 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 206.4 x 104.8 cm |
| Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Oedipus and the Sphinx ( French Œdipe et le Sphinx ) is a painting by the French artist Gustave Moreau . It was first exhibited in an official salon in 1864. With this picture, which shows the key scene of the ancient Oedipus myth, the painter first became known to the general public. Today it belongs to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York .
Image composition
The center of the picture is dominated by a winged mythical creature that hangs from Oedipus' chest and pushes him against the rock wall on the right edge. The latter, wrapped in a draped chlamys , leans on his spear and looks the sphinx straight in the eye. The two protagonists can be seen full-length.
A sudden break, from which a hand and a foot of a dead man protrude, distances the viewer from the action. A snake winds its way up to a butterfly on a column on the right edge of the picture, and bushes grow to the left and right: fig and bay tree . On the left in the background the rocky narrowness through which the road to Thebes leads.
interpretation
In the underlying myth, the Sphinx lies in wait for travelers on the way to Thebes and poses a riddle to them ; if the candidates fail, they will be torn apart. The Sphinx has just asked Oedipus its riddle and is waiting. However, Oedipus fixates the mythical creature unimpressed and will soon give the correct answer, whereupon the monster will plunge into the abyss.
In the foreground are the corpses of those who did not know this answer. A foot and a hand can be seen, as well as a piece of red cloth and a crown: fame and power are in vain and irrelevant. A snake, a ( chthonic ), deadly animal belonging to the earth, winds around a column on the right edge of the picture , and above it flies a butterfly, the symbol of the immortal soul. The bushes on the left and right are a fig that is associated with Saturn and thus with all-consuming time, and the laurel means immortality.
Moreau explains his concept like this:
“The painter describes people in their hardest hour, when they are faced with the eternal riddle. It presses and clasps him with its terrible claws. But the traveler, proud and serene thanks to his moral strength, looks him in the eye without trembling. It is the chimera of the earthly, as void as matter and as tempting as it, portrayed as that enchanting woman's head with wings, the expression of the ideal, but it has the body of a monster, a predator that tears apart and destroys its victim. "
Snake
butterfly
Execution and role models
The analytical, traditional method with initial picture ideas, drafts, studies, sketches and squaring is atypical for Moreau . While he roughly executed other pictures with a spatula, he worked on Oedipus and the Sphinx for around four years. He writes about this in his notebooks: Oedipus is a figure who must be shaped strictly according to nature, because the greater one approaches the human being as he is, the better one will achieve sublimity and the ideal.
Direct models are different versions of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres from the years 1808 to 1825, from which Moreau adopted a lot: the spear pointing to the ground, the draped chlamys (Greek cover), the body parts in the foreground and the appearance of the sphinx. Finally, in Ingres, as in Moreau, a narrowed point forms the background. However, with Ingres the hero is in the center of the picture and not the mythical creature and the scene has a philosophical character: Oedipus asks and argues.
Moreau probably knew a poem by Heinrich Heine from the preface to the third edition of the Book of Songs . There the poet imagines a stone sphinx that comes to life under his kisses. An excerpt from it:
She almost drank my breath -
And finally,
lustfully, she embraced me, tearing my poor body
with her lion's paws.
The underlying myth
An oracle warns King Laios of Thebes about a possible biological son, because he would kill him. When a son is actually born, Laios and his wife Iokaste decide to abandon him. However, a shepherd saves the child and King Polybos of Corinth adopts him. When the adult Oedipus in turn consults an oracle, it prophesies that he will kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid this, he leaves Corinth. On his journey, without knowing it, he meets his biological father and kills him in an argument. With that the first prophecy is fulfilled. On the way to Thebes he meets the Sphinx, which poses a life and death riddle to him. It is said:
“It is four-legged in the morning, two-legged at noon, and three-legged in the evening. Of all creatures it changes only in the number of its feet; but when it moves the most feet, strength and speed are the least with it. "
Oedipus answers correctly:
“You mean the person who crawls on two feet and two hands in the morning of his life while he is a child. If he has become strong, he walks on two feet at noon of his life, at the end of his life, as an old man, he needs support and uses the staff as a third foot. "
The riddled Sphinx then leaps into the abyss. The grateful Thebans crown Oedipus king and give him his birth mother Iokaste as his wife. With this the second prophecy is fulfilled. After many years the plague breaks out and the Thebans consult an oracle. This proclaims that the plague does not end until the murderer of Laios leaves the country. When it turns out that Oedipus is a patricide and his wife's son, he stabs his eyes out and leaves his home.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Metropolitan Museum: Oedipus and the Sphinx (English), accessed on August 18, 2016
- ↑ a b c d Jean-Louis Ferrier: The adventure of seeing. An art history in 30 pictures . Piper Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-492-04019-5 , chapter: The premonition of the unconscious , pp. 191 to 198.
- ^ Project Gutenberg - Heine's preface to the third edition of the book of songs. accessed on March 19, 2019
- ↑ Quoted from: Gustav Schwab: The most beautiful sagas of classical antiquity . Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-15-056386-0 , p. 259.
