The
Sphinx was a popular image for painters working with mythological and allegorical themes in the 19th century. Many painters chose to paint sphinxes as "real", half human chimeras that interacted with the protagonist in the painting, but I prefer sphinxes as enigmatic stone sentinels gazing over moonlit deserts. I find it much more mysterious and romantic.
Luc Oliver Merson "Le Repose En Egypt" 1897
Frantisek Kupka "The Path of Silence" 1900
Salvador Dali (strangely I snagged this image, lost the page with the info- and can't find it again!)
Louis Welden Hawkins "The Sphinx and the Chimera"
Elihu Vedder "Listening To The Sphinx" 1863
3 comments:
I recall reading somewhere of the change in human awareness that the sphinx expressed: the animal has raised its head from the ground -- a human head -- and is gazing toward the horizon. Ancient peoples really hadn't developed much of the conceptual framework for self-consciousness that we today take for granted. Go back 2500 years and only then do you discover the Greeks starting to develop a theory of their own thinking as something apart from the meanings put to things in the public sphere by language. That's the birth of Western Philosophy, baby.
There is also that great Tansey painting Secret of the Sphinx that follows along in his own wry way with this last painting. Great collection.
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