The Arcades Project - Operi

Baudelaire in L'Art philosophique," an essay concerned mainly with Alfred Rethel;
Here everything-place, decor, furnishings, accessories (see Hogarth, for
example)-everything is allegory, allusion, hieroglyph, rebus." Baudelaire, L 'Art
romantiqu,e, p. 131:10 There follows a reference to Michelet's
Durer's Melancholia, I.
interpretation of
[J5a,6]
Variant of the passage on Meryon cited by Geffroy, in Peintres et aqua-fortistes"
(1862): I.Just the other day a young American artist, M. Whistler, was showing . ..
a set of etchings ... representing the banks of the Thames; wonderful tangles of
rigging, yardarms and rope; farragos of fog, furnaces, and corkscrews of smoke;
the profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital. . .. M. Meryon, the true type
of the consummate etcher, could not neglect the call . ... In the pungency, finesse,
and sureness of rus drawing, M. Meryon recalls all that was best in the old etchers.
We have rarely seen the natural solemnity of a great capital more poetically depicted.
Those majestic accumulations of stone; those 'spires whose fingers point to
heaven '; those obelisks of industry, spewing forth their conglomerations of smoke
against the firmament; those prodigies of scaffolding 'round buildings under repair,
applying their openwork architecture, of such paradoxical and arachnean
beauty, upon architecture's solid hody; that foggy sky, charged with anger and
spite; those limitless perspectives, only increased by the thought of the dramas
they contain-he forgot not one of the complex elements which go to make up the
painful and glorious decor of civilization." Baudelaire, L 'Art romantiqlle (Paris),
pp. 119-121:'1 [J6,1]
On Guys: 'The festivals of the Bairam, . .. in the midst of which, like a pale sun,
can he discerned the endless ennui of the late sultan." Baudelaire, L 'A rt romantique
(Paris), p. 83.42 [J6,2]
On Guys: " Wherever those deep, impetuous desires, war, love, and gaming, are in
full flood, like Orinocos of the human heart ... ,our observer is always punctually
on the spot." Baudelaire, L'Art romantiqlle (Paris), p. 87.4:1 [J6,3]
Baudelaire as antipode of Rousseau, in the maxim from his essay on Guys: "For
no sooner do we take leave of the domain of needs and necessities to enter that of
pleasures and luxury than we see that nature can counsel nothing but crime. It is
this infallible Mother Nature who has created parricide and cannibalism;' Baudelaire,
L'Art romantique (Paris), p. 100:'" [J6,4]
"Very difficult to note down in shorthand" -this, from the essay on Guys, is
Baudelaire's appreciation, obviously very modem, of the movement of carriages.
Baudelaire, L'Art romantique (paris), p. 113.15 [J6,5]
Closing sentences of the Guys essay: 'He has gone everywhere in quest of the
ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic
traits of what, with the reader's permission, we have called "modernity. ' Often
bizarre, violent, excessive, but always full of poetry, he has succeeded, in his