L' OEUVRE AU NOIR L'ICONOGRAPHIE AU SERVICE DU ROMAN
THE BLACK OUT THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE SERVICE ROMAN

Summary/Abstract: Marguerite Yourcenar has always been preoccupied with creating a work based on concrete reality and on the endless resources of the soul and of the spirit. With a view to respecting these criteria, she gathered among others an important iconographic file representing Zenon on the road or in the Bruges asylum. If we were to simplify in the extreme and to follow exactly the plan of this file, we might mention, in order to represent what the author names “the aspects of the world”, a retable known as that of the “mystic lamb”, which opens a large perspective on a Flemish city, or the beautiful Innsbruck aquarelle painted by Dürer. The composition of the portraits, of the characters, of the “human faces” comprises several examples in that particular sense. The most famous of them, that of Erasmus bent over his desk, is kept at present in the Louvre museum, together with that of the “Moneylender and His Wife”, an expressive symbol of the attraction exerted by gold and gain. Breughel, whom the novelist appreciates very much, could not be absent from this line. Two of his most famous paintings invite us, one tempting us with a dance among the peasants, the other suggesting us to pity five miserable blind creatures, but moreover to understand, by means of allegory, that, very much like these disabled human beings, probably the leaders of the world guide us without clearly seeing themselves the destination towards which they take us. Dürer’s “melencolia” suggests a state of mind haunted by dark forces before the possible lightning of the genius. Whichever the painting considered, its interest always surpasses simple description, elevating us to the level of reflection.

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