"Orpheus and Eurydice - a polyphonic myth" Orphée et Eurydice: polyphonie d'un mythe En Fr

Résumé En

In her 2015 article entitled “Unprintable Lyrics: The Unpublished Poems of William Morris”, Florence Boos argues that the poet-designer’s unpublished story of Orpheus and Eurydice indirectly alluded to the loss of his wife, Jane Morris to the poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.However, beyond this singular and ever fascinating underground plot of lost love and betrayal, one has to acknowledge that the mythical story of Orpheus and Eurydice had long been continuously recast and rewritten in various ways by European artists and writers, acting as powerful magnet for what writers of different eras have had to say about love and loss and the force of poetry to reclaim the past and transform the experience of loss into a sublime song.In the Victorian age and as translating the classics had become, in James Porter’s words, a ‘national past time’, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice not only inspired new translations but also invited new visual renderings in poetry and painting (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, F.G. Watts and Frederic Leighton) that formed a variety of artistic responses to the myth. Focussing on several artworks and poems of the Victorian period, my paper intends to examine how the story of Orpheus and Eurydice circulated among artists and came to embody their aesthetic beliefs in the transformative power of the arts. In the course of my analysis, I should like to address the following question:Does the treatment of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice by the Pre-Raphaelites exemplify the position they held as a group towards classical antiquity as an endless source of pictorial and narrative motifs, or can it also be read at the level of aesthetics as a metaphor for the way in which text and image – or inter art relations – intersect and aspire to transcend the boundaries of form (an operation of “Anderstreben” famously described by Walter Pater in his 1877 essay, The School of Giorgione)?