Gustave Moreau
Orfeo

The myth of Orpheus is very well-known, but for some obscure reason, it is often reduced to the double loss of his wife Eurydice... yet the story continues: Orpheus no longer wants anything to do with women, but the Maenads, in love with him, do not accept this and kill him by tearing him to pieces. His head ends up in the river and continues to sing for eternity.
This is the moment chosen by Gustave Moreau for his painting. A young girl contemplates him absorbedly (probably still sensitive to his poetic talent) and slightly sadly. Despite the Greek profile, the dress she wears rather evokes India with its rich drapes, rich decorations... This is a constant for Moreau and many of his works blatantly flirt more with India than with mythological Greece. Her tall and slender silhouette is not provocative at all, and the line of her body follows down, down to the feet... a bit stubby, clashing with the graceful face: but what if it's a trick to draw attention to the turtles? It is said, in fact, that the lyre was invented precisely from a turtle shell: Hermes used it as a sounding board and, once completed, he finally gave it to Apollo, the god of poetry... and a poet was our Orpheus, whose head rests precisely on that instrument.

By a sort of reflection, our eyes move from bottom to top... and what appears to the left? A group of flutists, other artists, these alive: like an invitation not to limit oneself to worship the productions of the past (though always wonderful), but to dare to continue to create, since inspiration is here. But there is a time for everything: now it is a time of mourning, of meditation, of silence: and therefore our attention must first concentrate on the silent young woman. The painter seems to insist especially on the power of art: the landscape is actually rather desolate and the cliff where the musicians stand does not inspire much confidence... Yet, what appears near Orpheus's head? A bush of fruit (oranges?)! It's as if art had the power to transfigure reality, and moreover, everything seems wrapped in a dreamlike atmosphere or simply magical thanks to those clouds far in the background.

I had the fortune to see it... I was with two friends at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and I didn't even know this masterpiece was there. I stood there contemplating it, ecstatically: sensitive to the soft light of the canvas, the grace it emanated, those little turtles, so humble and lost in the darkness, yet so grandiose... like a sort of journey: the lyre at the base of poetic art, Orpheus, the poet par excellence, and finally posterity, up there, but not with eyes turned up, towards the ideal, but downwards, towards Orpheus's head as if they drew inspiration for their work from there... a bit like Moreau who started from that myth to paint his canvas.