Serpentinisme in French Art of the Second Half of the XIXth Century
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.200907.009How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- French art, femme-serpent, Eve’s daughter, hysteria, principle of visual analogy
- Abstract
This article is devoted to the study of the medical institutions’ influence on the modification of the plot about the Eve’s sin in the second half of the XIXth century. In 1896, the inventor of the graphic pun, Henri Avelot, created the caricature “Four arts”, singling out “serpentinisme” among artistic trends (such as symbolism). Using this neologism, the cartoonist criticized contemporary art of his time that borrowed physical manifestations of pathologies (for example, hysteria) to create “innovative” art concepts and works. Analyzing major masters’ artworks of this period with “serpentine” movements, it can be traced how the development of the health cult and the strengthening of the disciplinary power of hospitals started the process of aestheticizing diseases. As a result, three new iconographic types appeared in French culture: the snake woman; the “Eve’s daughter”; the woman and the “phallic serpent”, in which the serpent appears as an allegorical embodiment of a doctor. The snake woman image became an aesthetic ideal that permeated all aspects of culture, which was expressed in the neologism “serpentinisme”, which ironically brought this trend closer to the artistic direction.
- Copyright
- © 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Daria Martynova PY - 2020 DA - 2020/09/07 TI - Serpentinisme in French Art of the Second Half of the XIXth Century BT - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Art Studies: Science, Experience, Education (ICASSEE 2020) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 46 EP - 51 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.200907.009 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.200907.009 ID - Martynova2020 ER -