A weekend task...

For a little extra interest, if you are doing Paradise Lost, I suggest that you mosey along to the Ashmolean.

There, on the third floor, in Western Art, amongst the impressionists and so on, you will find a wonderful bronze statue of Satan, just past the Degas ballerina sculpture (I attach an image, but it is sadly not a patch on seeing the real thing--perhaps bronze does not photograph well?)

It's by Jean-Jacques Feuchere, and the copy in the Ashmolean is actually owned by Jeffery and Mary Archer (I wonder why it is not in Cambridge?) and only on loan. The Louvre has a version as well. It's quite large, and very impressive, and some of the detail is worth an essay in itself.

While I was looking for an image, I came across two other Satan statues, by two brothers, Joseph (1808–1885) and Guillaume (1805–1883) Geefs, which have an intriguing history.

The statue is called L’ange du mal, or sometimes Le genie du mal (the genuis of Evil). Though both Geefs brothers were sculptors (they came from a talented family; their brother Jean was also a famous sculptor), it was the younger bnother, Guilliame, who was first given the commision in 1837 for St Paul’s Cathedral in Liège. Accordingly in 1843, the statue on the left, bearing Joseph's signature, was installed in the cathedral.



It didn't stay there long. The church authorities were disturbed by the beauty of the satanic figure sitting at the foot of the pulpit, declaring 'this devil is too sublime'. It was criticised for not representing the Christian ideal, and even for distracting the 'pretty penitent girls' who should have been listening to the sermons, according to the local press (did it distract the less beautiful, I wonder?)

Finally it was removed from the cathedral because of its 'distracting allure' and 'unhealthy beauty', and Guilliame stepped up to the mark and replaced it with the statue on the right in 1848. As you can see, he has been much more explicit with the Christian iconography, including a bitten apple, a broken crown and sceptre, horns, chains and much more closed body language, but it's still a fairly beautiful male figure, and taps into the Romantic idea of Satan as misunderstood hero. Apparently, L'ange du Mal is still seen as a 'dangerous' image, because it links Satan with the figure of chained Prometheus (Prometheus was a favourite subject for the Romantics), and this encourages a level of satanic tourism (something I didn't realise existed).

A curious link to the gothic here: in a 1990 essay, Belgian art historian Jacques Van Lennep discussed how the conception of Le génie du mal was influenced by Alfred de Vigny's long philosophical poem Éloa, ou La sœur des anges ("Eloa, or The Sister of Angels"), published in 1824, which explored the possibility of Lucifer's redemption through love. In this "lush and lyrical" narrative poem, Lucifer sets out to seduce the beautiful Eloa, an angel born from a tear shed by Christ at the death of Lazarus. The Satanic lover is "literally a handsome devil, physically dashing, intellectually agile, irresistibly charismatic in speech and manner": in short, a Romantic hero. "Since you are so beautiful," the naïve Eloa says, "you are no doubt good." Reminiscent of Heathcliff, no?