Gustave Moreau - Galatea (1880)
Gustave Moreau was more than a French painter, a visionary, true symbolism above who lived between 1826 and 1898. Almost had a self-education, because for unclear vicissitudes had to leave mainstream education.
was admitted to the Royal School of Fine Arts in Paris, he copied works of masters like Correggio, Michelangelo or Raphael. It was when he began to translate his own works, to deliver energy that craves the magical image of a dream, it is said, starting to paint winged creatures, apparitions, angels, extra-terrestrial landscapes they were criticized for the artist.
There were certain events that they recorded it with mixed feelings. Witnessing unfortunate deaths in the battlefield of the Franco-Prussian War, where he spent a short time, death as his mother and later his lover of life: Alexandrine Dureux were possibly precipitating to the surface in search of what he ineffable, an obsession with sacred themes, showing a lively interest in the link between the human and divine, real and unreal, the highest ideal and misery coarser. Examples are "Galatea (1880) and Galatea (1896). Moreau himself refers in this way his painting: "Here is a hideous giant who loves a beautiful nymph." And it shows the Cyclops Polyphemus in a contrite attitude of surrender to Galatea that embodies the perfect ideal of beauty and goodness. Is it possible that the beast can hold deep within themselves feelings of pure love? "You may be able to experience a feeling that touch the sublime?
These works clearly shows how Moreau longs to find the link between malignancy and goodness, these extremes well represented with these characters. Polyphemus, forgetting his fierceness, summum hanker after the divine through contemplation Galatea. The latter appears as a hieratic image, dazzling and even indifferent to the presence of the giant, his hair very long, falling as gold filigree and it seems that a self-conscious aquatic vegetation is entangled fine the contours of your body, framing her silhouette and subtly covering the pubic area. The ideal height of a dream that the artist sketched in the prime of his life. Gustave Moreau was thus more than an artist, a weaver of dreams and myths that all of us.
Gustave Moreau - Galatea (1896)