"Jupiter and Semele" by Gustave Moreau

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Jupiter and Semele

Gustave Moreau

186

Oil on canvas

213 x 118 cm.

"It is important to appreciate the profound transformation in Moreau's attitude between . . . Leda and the last of his completed paintings, Jupiter and Semele, which it is tempting to regard as his pictorial and spiritual testament. According to myth the mortal Semele, perfidiously advised by the goddess Juno, asked Jupiter, her lover, to appear in all the splendour of his majesty and so brought about her own violent death. Moreau's commentary repeats and develops a sentence he wrote in connection with Leda: 'The great mystery is accomplished, all nature is penetrated by the ideal and the divine, everything is transformed.' In his eyes, the union was once again a 'sacred marriage' but without any implication of degradation in Jupiter's animal metamorphosis either for her, who was the cause of it, or for the hierogamy itself. . . . "

Moreau was none the less glorifying for the first time the physical love of man and woman; divinized physical love perhaps, but physical love all the same, and the radiance that consumes Semele as Jupiter appears in his supreme beauty is quite simply the most sumptuous expression imaginable of an orgasm: It is an ascension towards the upper spheres, refined, purified beings rising towards the divine.'

[Continued below]

Jupiter and Semele can be interpreted as 'an allegory of regenera- tion by death', as Ragnar von Holten has described it, because Moreau himself wrote, 'Semele, penetrated by the divine effluence, regenerated and purified by this consecration, dies struck by lightning and with her dies the genius of terrestrial love, the genius with the goat hooves'. The symbolical interpretation of 'this birth-death in one', as Malcolm de Chazal calls it, does not have to be taken literally: 'As voluptuousness is the universal crossroads of the senses, the mind, tly heart and soul, and also a point-state where death and birth meet halfway, where the entire man is intersected within himself, voluptuousness is for this very reason the greatest source of knowledge and the widest field for studying the deep-seated workings of the human being.' On the contrary, there seems to me to be every reason to consider Jupiter and Semele an exceptional gamble to fix through the medium of painting 'the supreme point capable of being reached from which, briefer than a flash, without having to pay it any attention - thus betraying the voluptuousness itself and accepting that it should betray you — you have the chance of apprehending unrevealed aspects of the world." — José Pierre, p. 128.

Bibliography

Paladilhe, Jean, and José Pierre. Gustave Moreau. Trans. Bettina Wadia. New York: Praeger, 1972. [This volume actually contains two separate studies, the first Paladilhe's "Gustave Moreau: His Life and Work" (pp. 1-72); the second Pierre's "Gustave Moreau through the eyes of succeeding generations" (pp. 73-171).

Created 11 April 2008

Last modified 18 October 2021