the franco-prussian war and cosmological symbolism in odilon redon's noirs.pdf

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The Franco-Prussian War and Cosmological Symbolism in Odilon Redon's "Noirs" Author(s): Barbara Larson Source: Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 25, No. 50 (2004), pp. 127-138 Published by: IRSA s.c. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1483791 Accessed: 14/05/2009 23:12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=irsa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. IRSA s.c. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus et Historiae. http://www.jstor.org

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The Franco-Prussian War and Cosmological Symbolism in Odilon Redon's "Noirs"Author(s): Barbara LarsonSource: Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 25, No. 50 (2004), pp. 127-138Published by: IRSA s.c.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1483791Accessed: 14/05/2009 23:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=irsa.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

IRSA s.c. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus et Historiae.

http://www.jstor.org

BARBARA LARSON

The Franco-Prussian War and Cosmological Symbolism in Odilon Redon's Noirs

Odilon Redon found inspiration for his fantastic charcoals and lithographs in transformations in scientific fields in the sec- ond half of the nineteenth century. Developments in evolution- ary theory, microbiology, psychology and astronomy provided fertile terrain for an artist drawn to the powerful forces of the invisible world and their implications where humanity was con- cerned. Astrophysics, based on a dynamic and sometimes unpredictable cosmos, emerged as a new field after 1860 and replaced the old astronomy which was steeped in Laplace's vision of a clockwork universe. The new revelations of astrono- my engaged Redon's fatalistic speculations on man's declining sense of control over his place in the natural order of things. The artist's darkspirited approach was not unique: after the loss of the Franco-Prussian War early in 1871, cultural dis- courses that emerged from scientific fields in France tended towards the morbid as much as the celebratory as the defeated nation grappled with an unfamiliar sense of diminished strength. With the new astronomy, powerful new telescopes were revealing the existence of unknown stars, nebulae and intensively active cosmic phenomena so memorably encapsu- lated in Van Gogh's Starry Night of 1889 that made earth (and man) seem ever more humble and minute. In what now seemed to be an expanding universe with randomly shooting meteors and comets many times the size of our own planet,

earth was but a vulnerable speck, and most possibly-even the scientists agreed-subject to a sudden and cataclysmic end.

In light of rapid developments in astronomy after 1860, never since the age of Copernicus did man's position seem so diminished. Stars and asteroids seemed to multiply by the dozen. Meteorological curiosities, comets, spiral nebulae and the passage of planets were observed and upcoming cosmo- logical events reported to the public. Newly detailed maps of planets were drawn up, and an international "carte du ciel" pro- ject initiated in 1887 was spearheaded by the Paul and Prosper Henry brothers at the Paris observatory.1 Scientific populariz- ers of the period capitalized on the idea of man's minute exis- tence in a vast universe. Typical are these words written by Amadee Guillemin in his Le Ciel in 1877: "Chained to the sur- face of the earth, intelligent atom on a grain of sand lost in space, man invents technology that multiplies by 100 the pene- tration of knowledge; he probes the profound abyss, judges the dimensions of the visible universe and counts the many stars that populate the terrible expansion of space" [Fig. 1].2

Redon began to explore the sidereal world in the 1870s. By the time of his lithographic print "Germination" from the series In the Dream of 1879 some 20,000 stars were known to exist [Fig. 2]. In "Germination" barely visible planets or stars as well as larger bodies, including an enormous dark orb, converge

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1) <<The Sky over Paris,,, color lithograph (from: A. Guil- lemin, Le Ciel: notions 6l6mentaires d'astronomie physique, Paris, 1877).

with germinating cells that culminate in a fully developed float- ing head, as Redon explores the evolution of the universe and life itself. In this work he recreates an active, unfolding uni- verse. The artist positions the viewer in the midst of a pulsating field, a device which may well respond to the growing literature on the "voyage sidereal" as a way of popularizing knowledge about the universe. In the astronomer Camille Flammarion's Les Etoiles, for example, the chapter on the contemplation of the heavens begins, "Earth is forgotten with its miniscule and ephemeral history. The sun itself, with its great solar system falls back into the infinite night. Under the wing of stellar comets we have taken flight towards the stars, the suns of space."3 In Guillemin's Le Ciel we are stationary observers, but the cosmos's ongoing drama is enacted: "A luminous globe appears in the distance. Little by little, it approaches-its great circumference is over one hundred thousand leagues. Rapidly rotating it passes in front of us, carried away by space with twenty-four times the rapidity of a cannon ball. This is Jupiter circling the sky. The vertiginous orb would fly on forever were it not for the attraction it has for the heavenly body of the sun..."4

"Germination", with its eclipselike central orb surrounded by flame-like projections, may also contain a reference to another aspect of the emerging new astronomy: the birth of solar physics, which was indebted to the development of spec- troscopy and, in these early years, eclipse studies. The invention of spectroscopy in 1859 even more profoundly altered man's

2) Odilon Redon, <<Germination>,, lithograph on tan wove paper, from In the Dream, 1879. 27.3 x 19. 5 cm, The Stickney Collection, 1920.1841, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Museum.

previously held belief in eternal cosmic truths than did telescop- ic observation. Spectroscopy broke down the light received from a given heavenly body into a series of colored bands that revealed the elements of which a star or planet was composed. It was used to study the physical structure and chemical sub- stance of heavenly bodies. From this information, data about temperature and age could be deduced, revolutionizing the study and understanding of the solar system. Variability seemed

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THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND COSMOLOGICAL SYMBOLISM IN ODILON REDON'S NOIRS

to support the notion of uneven ages of planets and stars and reinforced dynamic principals. With the advent of spectroscopy, the study of solar eclipses showed promise in determining infor- mation about the most important of celestial bodies. During an eclipse, the corona surrounding the sun, which revealed solar activity, could be observed. Pink projecting flames called "prominences" could also be studied. Eclipse studies began in earnest in 1868 and were also popularized to a broad audience. In his Astronomie populaire (1879) Flammarion summarized recent investigations: "The study of eclipses from 1868 on has proven that around the sun an immense atmosphere of hydro- gen boils ceaselessly in which the height of the flames varies and in which metallic vapors can be detected. Through these vapors spurts of material from the center of the sun are thrown intermittently. Around this ardent fire innumerable particles cir- culate carried away by the solar whirlwind. We are unable to anticipate the turbulent movement that incessantly moves about on the stormy surface movement so formidable that entire mass- es bigger than the earth itself are displaced and reproduced within minutes!"5 This account of the ceaselessly burning, ever transforming solar ball was part of the changing perception of the universe once thought to be so consistent. In "Germination" the dramatic uneven light behind the black celestial body sug- gests the new information on the activity of the sun revealed through the study of solar eclipses.

Iconographically, the solar eclipse is an ageold portent of impending doom and was revived as such in the work of Redon and others immediately following the loss of the war.6 The renewal of this symbol owes not only to scientific eclipse studies in general but even more specifically to one eclipse in particular: that of December 22,1870, which took place during the last desolate days of the war, two days after the defeat of Redon's own battalion of the Second Army of the Loire at La Monnaie near Tours. Awareness of this event was sensational- ized when one of France's earliest solar physicists Jules Janssen, convinced the Academy of Science of the impor- tance of observing the eclipse from aloft, even while Paris was under siege by the Prussians. Following his appeal, the bal- loon the Volta was placed at his disposal. Janssen escaped Prussian bullets and left Paris on December 2 heading south on what would be his most famous scientific voyage. Redon's "Sad Ascent", another lithograph from In the Dream, with its black celestial body hovering ominously over the rooftops of Paris and melancholy balloonhead conflation, may be a com- bined reference to political disaster and Janssen's mission. Balloons were used during the siege of Paris to fly military per- sonnel and mail out of Paris; to avoid detection they were often launched at night, another possible reference in "Sad Ascent". One of the most famous heroic moments of the war

3) c<Solar eclipse of Dec. 22, 1870,,, wood engraving (from: C. Flammarion, Astronomie populaire, Paris, 1879).

involved the flight of Gambetta, who flew out of Paris on October 7, 1870 on his way to join the government of the National Defense in Tours.

The eclipse of 1870 was widely reproduced [Fig. 3]. Flammarion, in Paris at the time, reported of this event on the coldest day of the war, "birds that were singing grew silent and hid. The temperature lowered two-and-a-half-degrees. For a quarter of an hour there was absolute silence except for the distant roar of the canon."7 Redon, who often spoke of his love for the sun, would certainly have known of this solar event.

The eclipse of 1870 is surely the source of Redon's repeated images of a black sun, and it first appeared in his work in 1871 in association with a despairing military figure. In his Woman Wearing a Kepi, the female, who undoubtedly sug- gests Marianne, personification of France, stands before a black sun with her head lowered [Fig. 4]. She wears ban- dages and the cap of French military men. This combination of bandages and cap occurs throughout heroic post-war imagery including sculptures and paintings specifically devot- ed to the infantrymen of Redon's own battalion [Fig. 5].

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4) Odilon Redon, (<Woman Wearing a K6pi>>, graphite and gouache, 1871. Paris, Mus6e du Petit Palais. Photo museum.

In Daumier's The Eclipse. Will it Be Total? of 1871, a Prussian helmet blocks the light of freedom, which is, of course, France [Fig. 6]. In 1871, the journal The Eclipse changed its logo so that the sun was stamped with the map of France and the dark celestial body with three Prussian faces, including that of Bismarck [Figs. 7, 8].

In his war-time journal Redon had often used the metaphor of light for France in the days before the defeat, "France is considered the flame of the world... one can't kill the light."8 in L'Annee terrible or "The Awful Year" of 1871, Victor Hugo would write, "The eclipse arrives and gives the population a terrible shudder as though some obscure mon- ster appears on the horizon..."9 Of the signing of the treaty with Prussia, Hugo would pen from Bordeaux: "Our eclipse is their dawn and our grave, their heaven."10

The dark orb in Redon's work has traditionally been traced to the image of the "black sun" in Romantic literature. The black sun is used, for example, as an abstract poetic reference

5) Francois Lix, (<The Second Army of the Loire, 1870-71,,, c. 1872. Location unknown. (From: Armand Dayot, Linvasion, le sibge, la commune, Paris, c. 1890, p. 124).

in the writings of Nerval where he refers to "the black sun of melancholy" ("El Desdicado"). Baudelaire had often evoked nocturnal scenes and the contrast of light and dark. The sun could be cruel or nourishing or treated as a duality of rising or setting on the horizon. The contradictory phenomena of light and dark recur often in Redon's favorite work by Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal. The "black sun" has biblical origins as well, where it was used in Revelations as an apocalyptic sign; the sun becomes "black as sackcloth."

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THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND COSMOLOGICAL SYMBOLISM IN ODILON REDON'S NOIRS

6) Honor6 Daumier, ((The Eclipse. Will it Be Total?,,, lithograph (from: Actualit,s March 17, 1871). Photo: Bibliothbque nationale de France, Paris.

Gautier too was interested in the "black sun" and treated it as a sign of the agony of the universe. He tied it to one of Redon's favorite prints, Durer's Melancholia, a copy of which the artist kept on his studio wall [Fig. 9]. Gautier interpreted the comet that appears in the print as a "black sun":

Dans le fond du tableau, sur I'horizon sans borne, Le vieux pere ocean leve sa face morne Et dans le bleu cristal de son profond miroir Reflechit les rayons d'un grand soleil noir Une chauve-souris, qui d'un donjon s'envole Porte ecrit dans son aile ouverte en banderole: Melancholie.11

7) Gill, (<Remember!>,, etching (from: LEclipse, August 6, 1871). Photo: Bibliothbque nationale de France, Paris.

Gautier would evoke Durer's Melancholia in his Tableau de siege (1870-71) in the context of the unhappiness that pen- etrates France under "l'ombre du crepuscle."

References to solar mythology were popular in fin-de- siecle writing. Mallarme, who later befriended Redon, believed

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that all myths were variations on solar mythology. The Symbolist Rimbaud was also interested in solar myths. Among other images he used that of the setting sun to suggest the Prussian advance.

Traditionally, the sun has been the star of France and the symbol of its glory. The most famous example is, of course, Louis XIV the "sun king". Along with the eclipse, images that featured a reemerging sun also were references to recent events. In L'Univers Illustre of February 11, 1871, for example, the illustration "The Genius of France shows its star coming out from behind the clouds" suggests a hopeful image for the future and the possibil- ity of national recovery. Redon's Marianne explicitly demon- strates the resumed power of France through the regaining of the sun, which here blocks the dark celestial body [Fig. 10].

The comet was another ancient sign of disaster that Redon revived in his post-war work. At the time, predictions and stud- ies of comets had been given impetus by new scientific advances. In addition, the idea of a huge flaming body sudden- ly colliding with earth seemed to be a real possibility to a pub- lic increasingly convinced of an unpredictable universe at the end of the century. Whether this catastrophe could occur on a grand scale, given the fact that the earth was now thought of as a mere and vulnerable speck in the universal scheme of things, was the subject of much debate. Jules Verne's popular Off on a Comet was about a piece of earth, with a handful of

inhabitants, torn away by a comet and hurtling through space. Flammarion himself was convinced that this was the way the world would end and is the subject of his Fin du monde (End of the World) of the 1890s. The French Symbolist Gustave Moreau also makes use of a comet as a sign of cosmological disaster. It appears to the left of the rearing horse in his Death of Phaeton of 1878 (a work Redon admired) as Phaeton's world is destroyed [Fig. 11]. Moreau's personal library included many books on astronomy and he used star maps to lay out the constellations represented in Death of Phaeton.

Tying together fin-de-siecle and cosmological catastro- phe, the subject of the Apocalypse of Saint John with its visionary index of celestial disorder became current in the late nineteenth century. This is the subject of a set of Redon's lith- ographic prints of 1899 which draws on Durer's celebrated Revelation of Saint John woodcuts. Redon's Apocalypse prints united the idea of overwhelming demonic forces, a sub- ject popular in the nineties, and uncontrollable celestial events. Among these prints is "And There Fell a Great Star Burning as if it Were a Lamp" [Fig. 12]. Here the destruction of the world by a molten dislodged star echoes the warnings of star-gazing doomsayers at the end of the century. This image responds to the biblical verse, "The third angel blew his trum- pet and a great star fell from the heaven blazing like a torch".12 Throughout this chapter are repeated warnings of celestial

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THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND COSMOLOGICAL SYMBOLISM IN ODILON REDON'S NOIRS

9) Albrecht Durer, <<Melancholia 1>>, engraving, 1514. London, The British Museum. Photo: Marburg/Art Resource, NY.

disaster. In chapter eight, for example, "the fourth angel blew his trumpet and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon and a third of the stars, a third of all light was darkened" and in chapter nine, "the fifth angel blew his trumpet and I saw a star fall from the heaven and the angel was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit, he opened the shaft and smoke rose from the pit and darkened the sky".13 Taking up the same subject across the channel in England at the turn of the centu- ry was Henry Stock whose Revelation series includes And I Saw a Star Fall from Heaven: Revelation 9: 1 of 1902.14

10) Odilon Redon, <<Marianne,, n.d., charcoal. Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum. Photo: Museum.

While advances in astronomy are undoubtedly behind the revived interest in ancient cosmological symbols, recent dis- coveries also contributed to a renewal of the extraterrestrial life debate, a discourse that may well have influenced Redon's cosmological imagery. The most famous book on this subject was Flammarion's La Pluralite des mondes habites, first pub- lished in 1862. Two years later Redon added the significantly expanded second edition to his library. A number of Redon's images like Nightmare of 1881 or "The Breath that is in all Beings Is also in the Spheres" from the lithographic series To

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11) Gustave Moreau, (<The Fall of Phaeton,, 1878, Paris, Mus6e d'Orsay. Photo: Michele Bellot, Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND COSMOLOGICAL SYMBOLISM IN ODILON REDON'S NOIRS

12) Odilon Redon, <<And There Fell a Great Star from Heaven, Burning as if it Were a Lamp,,, from The Apocalypse of St. John, 1899, lithograph in black on ivory chine affixed to ivory wove paper, 30.2 x 23.1 cm, The Stickney Collection, 1920.1841. Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Museum.

Edgar Allen Poe of the same year suggests the artist's interest in other planets [Figs. 13, 14].

What seemed to confirm to many the otherwise extraordi- nary possibility of life elsewhere was the new astronomy itself. Stellar spectral lines of other orbs were believed to corre- spond to terrestrial elements and thus seemed to establish similar operating principles throughout the universe. Jules

Janssen himself reported what he believed to be the discovery of water vapor on Mars and asserted, "Water, which plays so important a part in all organized beings is also an element common to the planets. There is powerful reason to think that life is no exclusive privilege of our little earth".15 He along with many astronomers became increasingly convinced of extrater- restrial life following the Martian canal debates of 1877.16

Flammarion was the most influential pluralist-astronomer in France. In La Pluralite he asserted what would become common thinking later in the century: earth was small, not par- ticularly favored in position and thus highly unlikely to be the only inhabited planet. He assures us, "the world that we inhab- it is nothing but an atom in the relative importance of the many creations of space. We will see that the ants of the countryside will have infinitely more basis to believe that they are the only inhabitants of the globe, than we to believe that infinite space is but a desert where we are the only oasis, where man would be the sole contemplator of eternity".17 "The Breath that is in all Beings Is also in the Spheres" may echo in title Flammarion's words, "the breath of life that is found through- out the universe transforms apparent solitude and peoples space with the splendor of existence".18

One of Redon's noirs is called Meteor and is a conflation of a human head and a falling celestial body beneath a night sky. Meteor studies were used in France at the time to advance the theory of extraterrestrial life. In 1864 one of the largest meteors that would be known for the next century fell in Orgueil, France. Scientists believed that it carried earth-like substances including peat and lignites and a debate over meteors as a clue to life elsewhere was initiated. More curious than the idea that meteorites carried information about life elsewhere was the proposal by a number of prominent scien- tists that life on earth may itself have originated by comets car- rying organic materials from other worlds, a possible refer- ence in Redon's "Germination."

Flammarion and a number of other pluralist writers in the late nineteenth century joined their belief in life elsewhere with an idea of a more distinctly spiritual nature-after death the human soul itself journeys from planet or star to others in the solar system, then ranged throughout the universe in a series of rebirths improving throughout eternity. Earth was the most lowly of all planets, the site of "the fall." This is why God became incarnate on earth and had to die to redeem the ter- restrial sinners. One might hope for better existences else- where. The ancient idea of reincarnation was joined with the dream of voyages to other worlds.

With the loss of the war this idea of a spiritual escape from a doomed and lowly planet was revived. It forms part of the discourse, for example, in Hugo's LAnnee terrible and Louis

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BARBARA LARSON

13) Odilon Redon, <<Nightmare>, c. 1880, charcoal. New York, private collection.

Figuier's Le lendemain de la mort, ou la vie future selon la sci- ence (1871). According to Figuier, after death the spirit of a given planetary inhabitant gravitates into the ether of the atmosphere. If his life was not perfected enough he will be reincarnated; otherwise, he will find his eventual home in the sun. Here the spirit becomes part of solar light, spreading life throughout the universe. Another dreamer who sought spiritu- al escape from war-time disaster was Louis Blanqui. Arrested one day before the Commune began, this political figure spent five months in a dank, gloomy cell penning the treatise L'Eternite par les astres: Hypothese astronomique, published in 1872. According to these remarkable ideas, the earth is repeated as a planet throughout eternity with carbon copies of

14) Odilon Redon, ((The breath which leads living creatures is also in the spheres,,, from To Edgar Allan Poe, 1882, lithograph in black on ivory chine affixed to white wove paper, 27.3 x 20.8 cm, Charles Stickney Collection, 1920.1691. Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Museum.

each human and their actions duplicated ad infinitum through- out time. Like so many who were writing about existences on other planets and stars, he brought up new spectroscopic studies as proof that all worlds were in fact the same as our own.19

Certain of Redon's images such as "Pilgrim of the Sub- lunar World" from the lithographic series Dreams (1891) sug- gests an interest in metempsychosis [Fig. 15]. Here Redon

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THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND COSMOLOGICAL SYMBOLISM IN ODILON REDON'S NOIRS

seems to be following Flammarion's conviction that in the spir- itual journey of rebirth earth is lowly with better expectations .. =: for the next life. These ideas, based on ancient notions, had its most important source in recent literature with Reynaud's -"-.':",s-;' : ' t

Terre et ciel of 1854 which established the doctrine of transmi- ..-, , . ':,t ' ., gration. Reynaud had posited progressive improvement as _AI; :

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one passes from planet to planet in a series of rebirths. ;

Redon's fantasies of planets, stars and other lives :. respond to a fertile era of development in astronomy. The _ renewed appeal of historical astronomical symbolism and the imaginative theories of stargazers at the end of the nineteenth century were both points of inspiration. Gloomy aspects of the artist's cosmological works in part reflect the philosophical discourses that attended developments in this scientific field in a nation that despaired of regaining its former power. The intoxication of space and the reaction against an amputated France, whose lost regions of Alsace and Lorraine were not to be forgotten, had reverberations in an expanding colonial .

empire and collective celestial fantasy. These were worlds without imposed limits. Fantasy and escapism itself was a way to ease post-war anxieties in the late nineteenth century. The illusion of distance, travel, and other possibilities made use of the fantastic potential of "cosmos."

15) Odilon Redon, <<Pilgrim of the Sublunar World,,, from Dreams, 1891, lithograph, 34.9 x 26.7 cm, Charles Stickney Collection, 1920.1691. Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Museum.

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BARBARA LARSON

1 On photography of celestial bodies in these years see exh. cat. Dans le champ des etoiles: Les photographes et le ciel 1850- 2000, Paris, Musee d'Orsay, 2000.

2 Amadee Guillemin, Le Ciel (5th ed.), Paris, 1877, p. 5. 3 Camille Flammarion, Les Etoiles, Paris, 1882, p. 310. 4 Guillemin (as in note 2), p. 10. 5 Camille Flammarion, Astronomie populaire, Paris, 1879, p.

250. 6 For a brief history of cosmological symbolism see Jean-Pierre

Verdet, Le Ciel: Ordre et desordre, Paris, 1987. 7 Flammarion (as in note 5), pp. 252-253. 8 Andre Mellerio, Odilon Redon, peintre, dessinateur et graveur,

Paris, 1923. 9 Victor Hugo, L'Annee terrible, Paris, 1871, p. 115.

10 Ibid., p.93. 11 Theophile Gautier, "Melancholia", Poesies completes de

Theophile Gautier, Paris, 1970, vol. II, p. 88. Melancholia was con- nected to the "mal du siecle" and the artistic temperament during the Romantic period and continued to have significance as such in the late nineteenth century. See Ulrich Finke, "Durer's Melancholie in der franzosischen und englischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts", Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins fur Kunstwissen- schaft, XXX, 1976, pp. 67-85. On the history of the black sun as a cosmological symbol, its connection to the planet Saturn and its significance for the artist, see H. Tuzet, "Elmage du soleil noir", Revue des Sciences Humaines, XXII, 1957, pp. 479-502. According to Tuzet, the black sun (as an eclipse) historically symbolized dark- ness or cosmic chaos before the dawn of a new creation or spiritual rebirth. Also see Giuseppina dal Canton, "Redon e la melanconia", Artibus et Historiae, no. 14, 1986, pp. 125-152 for a discussion on the alchemical significance of the black sun. For other images of the black sun in Redon's work see Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonne de I'oeuvre peint et dessine, I, nos. 249, 263,

265, 294, 656, 664; IV, 2574, 2625 and Andre Mellerio, Odilon Redon, 1913, nos. 39 and 42.

12 Revelation, chapter 8, verse 10. 13 Ibid., chapter 8, verse 7 and Chapter 9, verse 10. 14 On the history of apocalyptic imagery see exh. cat. The

Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, London, British Museum, 1999 and Frederic Van de Meer, LApocalypse dans I'art, Paris, 1978. On the apocalypse, also see Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millenial Beliefs through the Ages, London 1999 and Pierre Prigent, L'Apocalypse, Paris, 1998.

15 Quoted in Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell, Cambridge, 1986, p. 402.

16 In 1877 Mars was in close opposition to earth and the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported that he observed "canali" on Mars. The interpretation of this word, which simply means "channels", as something suggesting waterways formed by intelligent beings was made by Schiaparelli's colleagues who did not speak Italian, rather than by the Italian astronomer himself. The idea generated by the "canali" was that intelligent Martians had built canals to channel melting ice masses to dry central regions of the planet. Capitalizing on a discourse that had gone past his control Schiaparelli himself appeared before the king and queen of Italy the following year in what he later admitted to be a "Flammarionesque style", requesting a larger telescope to find addi- tional evidence about "Mars which appears to be "a world little different from our own." This controversy brought Flammarion's writings on extraterrestrial life to center stage. The extraterrestrial life debate would peak twenty years later with Flammarion's own La Planete Mars et ses conditions d'habitabilite and H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds.

17 Camille Flammarion, La Pluralite des mondes habites, Paris, 1864, p. 9.

18 Ibid., p.319. 19 Crowe (as in note 15), 99. 407-408.

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