,%20ca.%201907,%20marble,%20Auguste%20Rodin.jpg) |
| Madame X (Lady Unknown), ca. 1907, marble, Auguste Rodin. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Gallery (Gallery 800), Metropolitan Museum of Art |
“This is doubtless the perfected image of that idea of which the peoples of the earth have had an intuition from the beginning, and which artists have unceasingly invoked in poems, in symphonies, on canvas, in clay. Everything in her is expressive, everything is a symbol.” ~ Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Virgins of the Rocks
Some people visit the museum in search of great works of art. I find myself returning instead to a ghost.
Though I admire John Singer Sargent’s celebrated portrait of Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau) at the Met, I am more often drawn to Auguste Rodin’s Madame X (Lady Unknown). My friends know the ritual well. Nearly every visit ends with me leading them to the Gerald Cantor Sculpture Gallery, where she waits in pale silence.
There is something unsettling about her. Her face, drained of life, is suspended somewhere between memory and oblivion, as though she had emerged from a dream, only to discover that the world which had summoned her had long since disappeared.
She has become a kind of muse, joining Anna Cutolo, Rosina Ferrara, Eleonora Duse, and Suzy Solidor among those elusive women who inhabit the borderland between history and chimera. They return unbidden in idle moments, stealing their way into verses that never quite satisfy me and drawings I rarely allow anyone else to see.
Perhaps that is fitting. Some figures remain just beyond reach, drawing us onward because they can never be fully captured.
And so I return to her, content to linger in the company of a beautiful apparition, destined to haunt the imagination rather than the world of the living.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, August 3rd, Feast of Sant’Aspreno
Though I admire John Singer Sargent’s celebrated portrait of Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau) at the Met, I am more often drawn to Auguste Rodin’s Madame X (Lady Unknown). My friends know the ritual well. Nearly every visit ends with me leading them to the Gerald Cantor Sculpture Gallery, where she waits in pale silence.
There is something unsettling about her. Her face, drained of life, is suspended somewhere between memory and oblivion, as though she had emerged from a dream, only to discover that the world which had summoned her had long since disappeared.
 |
| Hand of Eleonora Duse, ca. 1927, marble, Arrigo Minerbi. Exhibited in Gabriele d'Annunzio: Living Life as a Work of Art (2010), at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò |
Perhaps that is fitting. Some figures remain just beyond reach, drawing us onward because they can never be fully captured.
And so I return to her, content to linger in the company of a beautiful apparition, destined to haunt the imagination rather than the world of the living.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, August 3rd, Feast of Sant’Aspreno
