Gustave Moreau and the Doors of the Unconscious
Many are the works of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum that fascinate me and many are, likewise, those that have dazzled my imagination, to repair details that test the most subtle suspicions.
But there is a particular work, which whenever I pass through Room 32, attracts me irresistibly as a magnet: ‘La Galatea’, by Gustave Moreau.
This small but wonderful watercolor, made towards the end of his days - apparently, he did it in 1896, two years before his death - by that precursor of symbolism, which was said in critical circles, something as mysterious as' we do not know anything of its interior '(1), leaving aside its mythological connotations, it seems to me a real key to the world of dreams: to that supreme Collective Unconscious, to which, as Rafael Llopis affirmed, even writers like Lovecraft had an innate ease to enter and where they came back with suggestive ideas for their horrifying stories.
Leaving the supposed masks of Polyphemus and Galatea, at this edge of a more or less exoteric or known mythology, I would like to invite you to participate in the opinion that, in reality and unlike the opinion of Odilon Redon, the inner world of Moreau, He was always in sight, widely represented in his works.
In this one, Polyphemus represents the can Cerbero, metaphorically speaking: he is the guardian of the threshold, the monster that we inevitably have to overcome in order to continue our journey, as will be left under notice in Homer's Odyssey and that in the ancient Romanesque churches was represented, among the most popular ways, for the knight's fight with the great snake or the dragon.
It is easy to reach this conclusion, if we look at a really suggestive detail, which leads us towards such a possibility: the Cyclops Polyphemus has three eyes. Two of them, the físicos physical eyes ’, are closed. But the other eye, the one that in Eastern traditions is known as ‘the third eye’, is completely open.
That is, the spiritual eyes, which stares at us from the front of Polyphemus, invite the soul, spirit or soul represented by Galatea, to perform the most fascinating but at the same time, also the most dangerous of travel: the inner journey.
Notes, References and Bibliography:
(1) Odilon Redon (Bordeaux, 1840-Paris, 1916). Symbolist painter, who is also considered a precursor of surrealism.
NOTICE: Both the text and the photographs reproduced here are my intellectual property. The photographs, with their different shots and angulations, were taken with permission from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Anyway, anyone who has an interest in this watercolor of Moreau, can easily find it on the page of the Museum itself, simply by typing in the browser's browser: gustave moreau Galatea.
