(Wikimedia)
Evelyn de Morgan’s paintings usually indicate
their blatant symbolism by their (subtly or unsubtly) implausible settings.
In The Crown of Glory, though—which de Morgan
painted in 1896—the scene, though obviously invented, doesn’t have the same
immediate feeling of impossibility.
Certainly it isn’t a precise depiction of the
classical world: de Morgan has no interest in the careful historicity of
Alma-Tadema. The fish at the edge of the tapestry or fresco behind her evoke
both her husband’s ceramic tiles and the ancient Roman motifs that inspired
him. The little telamon and caryatid that support the bookshelf again suggest
the classical world, while the raised-cord-bound books on them are clearly of
more modern origin. The three-legged table with its climbing snakes, and the
subject’s own draped and gathered garments, both straddle that same line
between a modern and a classical aesthetic. For the most part, though, the work
looks at least internally consistent.
But perhaps the most important element—the
large image towards which the subject looks as she casts off her ornaments—is a
total break from even the fairly modernized Greco-Roman style of the rest of
the scene.
After all, it is practically a copy of one of
Giotto’s 14th-century frescoes for the Lower Basilica in Assisi, which (as
Christie’s points out), de Morgan “may well have seen…on one of her numerous
visits to Italy, or she may have known the design in reproduction, possibly the
engraving in William Young Ottley’s Florentine School (1826) which her mentor
Burne-Jones had copied in an early sketchbook (Victoria and Albert Museum).”
The result is to produce a sort of dissonance
between the ornate, finely wrought Greco-Roman objects in the rest of the
scene, and the incredibly simplified—even flattened—Medieval depiction of Saint
Francis’ allegorical marriage to Lady Poverty.
Which is, of course, the visual equivalent of
the spiritual dissonance which is suddenly brought to the attention of the
painting’s subject.