Christa Giles

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foreground. In ˝Salome Dancing Before Herod,˝ we see
again the immobile figure in the foreground, hand raised,
implicitly contrasted with the icon-like Herod in the
background and the elaborate, fantastic, repeated forms in
the architecture, Moreau’s theory of ˝la belle inertie et la
richesse necessaire˝ uniting the whole composition in a
tension between the overwrought surfaces and the stark
dramatic postures of the figures.
In an article written in 1886, Renan referred to
Moreau’s ability to capture a single moment in time and
claimed that: ˝A painting can represent only a moment; it is
true that it must eternalize this moment.˝ 522 Wilde wrote, in
Paterian tradition, that the purpose of life and art was
contemplation: the capacity to dream was all; and Moreau’s
paintings certainly are faithful to this idea. The figures
seem to be frozen eternally in a moment, suspended in a
kind of limbo. The lapidary detail and the brilliant colours
culminated in a decorative effect which served to crystallise
the ˝moment’s˝ vision. These paintings have their literary
counterpart in Wilde’s and Huysmans’ prose poems in the
sense that the authors also attempted to capture a moment
in a single impression.
In A rebours Huysmans rhapsodizes over Moreau’s
painting of Salomé entitled ˝The Apparition˝: