Apel·les Mestres Oñós, Grasshoppers, Dragonflies and Beetles Dancing the Sardana.
 Page heading for the poem “Liliana”, 1902, pen and ink on paper, MNAC (Inv. No. 046469D).

EDITORIAL BOARD

Scientific editors:

Teresa-M. Sala, Fátima Pombo

Anna Calvera, Antoni Ramon

Mireia Freixa, Cristina Rodríguez

Isabel Campi, Eliseu Trenc

Gonçal Mayos, Pilar Vélez

© Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona

Adolf Florensa, s/n

08028 Barcelona

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ORIGINAL TITLE

Arts i naturalesa. Biologia i simbolisme a la Barcelona del 1900

COVER PHOTOGRAPH

Detail of a mosaic from the Park Güell in Barcelona

Legal deposit number: B-20.554-2015

This book is part of the Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness research project, “Biology and Symbolism in Barcelona circa 1900” (HAR2012-35927) of the University of Barcelona (2014 SGR 834).

All papers published in this volume had been peer-reviewed through a process administered by the editors. All reviews were conducted by external experts referees.

INTRODUCTION

Print illustrating the article by Valentí Almirall, “Darwin”, L’Avens, year 1, No. 8, Barcelona, May 1882, p. 68.

CONCERNING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ARTS AND NATURE:
 Biology and Symbolism in Barcelona circa 1900

Enric Ciurans, Sergio González-Crespo, Teresa-M. Sala

In isolation, the word nature has different values;

a force that is active, then inert;

or a group of the essential characteristics of

something.[1]

LUCRETIUS, On the Nature of Things

Thank you, Nature!

You have opened the book of life for me,

you have made me love it.

J. MASSÓ I TORRENTS, Nature

“On the Nature of Things” (De rerum natura) is a poem written by Lucretius in the first century BC that had great repercussions in the ancient world and which is considered to be a foundational text of physics. Nature, evoked from the beginning as “Mother of Aeneas’ sons, joy of men and gods, Venus the life-giver, who beneath the gliding stars of heaven fills the sea that carries the ships and the land that bears the crops,”[2] evolves towards the idiosyncrasy of a nature that, “if we believe all that has been said about her, must be quite an extraordinary being: she has horrors (horror vacui), she allows herself whims (lusus naturae), she commits foolish acts (errors naturae, monstra). Sometimes she is at war with herself, for, as Giraldus told us: ‘Nature produces goat’s feet against nature’; and, in recent years, we have heard talk of her power of selection.”[3] This last explanation, collected in 1864 by the German-born philologist Max Müller, shows that the new theory about the origins of living beings – formulated by Charles Darwin in 1859 – represented a veritable intellectual revolution that spread beyond the field of biology. With On the Origin of Species Darwin broke with the idea of God the Creator, but he seems to evoke the idea of “Nature the artist”, an image that, besides the Romantic movement, reconnects us to Antiquity, namely, to our cultural origins.

From the trunk of the tree of life two main branches appeared: the animals and us, human beings. In his History of Animals Aristotle, considered the founder of rational zoology, established two main categories: the red-blooded animals (enhaîma) and those that were not (anhaîma). The former represented the vertebrates and the latter the invertebrates, which he developed in books III and IV of his treatise.[4] Rationality was the organizing principle of the two categories, but with regard to myths such as the unicorn, for example, Aristotle showed himself to be totally incredulous, and he claimed that there was only one animal with a horn, the rhinoceros.[5]

Like the man from Stagira, Pliny the Elder was very curious about phenomena of nature, and he also dealt with zoological themes in his “Natural History” (Naturalis historia). In it, unlike the Greek philosopher, he included the description of fabulous beings that would be rediscovered later in medieval bestiaries. He dedicated a chapter to the “Remedies extracted from animals” and he listed recipes for magic potions based on the ashes of the bones or the horns of other animals, or how the bile duct of the wild boar could be used to cure the centipede’s sting or remedy hair loss, something that apparently concerned the Romans. Among the fantastic visions that we find in Pliny’s book there is the claim that terrestrial octopi are larger than marine ones.

Throughout the Middle Ages animals and other products of nature were thought to be the result of the combination of the four pre-Socratic elements. The concept of “natural history” referred generically to the products of nature. Animals were carefully described with reference to their magical or medicinal properties, the stories or legends about them used as symbols on a coat of arms, in the illustrations of a book or in the paintings in a church, or as a source of food and medicine or a means of transport. We therefore see zoology imbued with a magical and at the same time a religious concept, of which bestiaries are the most consummate form. Xavier Fàbregas, however, places their origins long before the medieval period: “The origins of bestiaries have to be sought in second-century Alexandria, in a zoological compilation by a writer who signed using the name Physiologus. This name merely means ‘naturalist’.”[6] The finest example in Catalan culture of this genre that flourished during the Middle Ages is to be found in the works of Ramon Llull, Llibre de natura (Book of Nature) and Llibre de meravelles (Book of Wonders), and in several Catalan Gothic codices, such as the Llibre de natures de bèsties e d’aucells e lur significació (Book of the types of animals and birds and their meaning), attributed to Pere Pasqual.

The different scientific revolutions that took place during the Renaissance made the creation of a new “natural history” possible, of which zoology became an essential branch, far removed from any magic or divine meaning. During the sixteenth century the contributions in this respect of the Swiss Conrad Gesner and the Italian Ulisse Aldrovandi were fundamental. The latter followed Aristotle’s classification, laying the foundations for a scientific approach that maintained the animals’ mythological and legendary meanings.[7]

During the seventeenth century, anatomy studies and the use of the microscope made decisive new progress in zoology possible. The English botanist John Ray established the concept of the species, defining it as a group of individuals that reproduce with one another and which have direct descent. It was at that moment when the first Catalan natural history studies appeared, very especially the Llibre primer de la història catalana en lo qual se tracta d’història o descripció natural, ço és, de coses naturals de Catalunya, (First book of Catalan history in which history or natural description is dealt with, that is, things native to Catalonia) by Pere Gil i Estalella (1600). But the crucial step forward was taken in the eighteenth century by the Swede Carl von Linnaeus, who introduced to the study of living beings a descriptive order that made it possible to compare and classify in orders, genera and species, creating an immense set of combinations (Taxonomia universalis) of the possible forms existing in nature.[8] In the tenth edition (1758) of his Systema naturae 4,730 species were described. It is from this moment onwards that we may properly speak of zoology and the whole of natural history as a science, and one of the consequences of this was the appearance of the first zoos and museums of zoological collections, whose function essentially complemented the systematic one. Despite other attempts at classifying the animal world, the Linnaean system prevailed.

At the turn of the nineteenth century there was a new development in the way of considering natural beings: the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck established the concept of the internal organization of living beings, and for his part the French aristocrat Georges Cuvier began the study of comparative anatomy and palaeontology.[9] All these factors paved the way, under the impetus of Lamarck and, especially, Darwin and Wallace, for the appearance of the theory of evolution and a new science called biology, the study of the internal organization and the unique properties of organic beings. From this point onwards any and all important zoological questions were approached in the form of a problem of animal evolution inserted in the context of the birth of the human sciences. The concept of mankind as we know it was born thanks to Foucault’s extraordinary analysis. Using Velázquez’s Las Meninas as a paradigm of his thinking, the French philosopher defines it as follows:

When natural history becomes biology, when the analysis of wealth becomes economics, when, above all, reflection upon language becomes philology and classical discourse, in which being and representation found their common locus, is eclipsed, then, in the profound upheaval of such an archaeological mutation, man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator …[10]

There thus appears an “ambiguous historicity” that in the last lessons on the end of mankind, based on Nietzsche’s thinking, are the reason for another now remote reflection.

Episodes in the reception of the theories of evolution in Catalonia

The idea of the evolution of living beings had been circulating in European scientific and philosophical circles since the eighteenth century. For example, in France, the naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) had formulated a theory of evolution based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism), which, however, has not been validated as a general mechanism of evolution. In Germany, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) had suggested that the different organs of plants are formed due to metamorphosis from a basic organ type (the leaf) with a great plasticity of forms and potential for adaptation. Finally, in the United Kingdom, Robert Chambers (1802-1871), in his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), had talked directly of the transmutation of species.

In Catalonia, the idea of transformation, although of the Lamarckian kind, was introduced by the Hellenist and philologist Antoni Bergnes de las Casas (1801-1879), editor of the journal La Abeja, published in Barcelona between 1862 and 1870, and rector of the University of Barcelona. In issue number three of La Abeja, dated 1st January 1864, he tells us: “Lamarck claims that plants and animals change continually due to the influences of climates and food, the effects of domesticity, and the crossing of breeds.”

In this context that recognized transmutation, it was On the Origin of Species (1859), by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), together with the separate contemporary contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), that for the first time provided a real mechanism, natural selection, to explain the phenomenon of the evolution of living beings. Darwin’s evolutionist ideas expressed in his book were introduced to Spain chiefly through the various scientific societies that were created after the Revolution of 1868 (La Gloriosa), which saw the deposition of Isabella II and the start of the Democratic Sexennium (1868-1874), a period during which social freedoms made great headway. Examples of these were the Spanish Natural History Society (1871), the Free Histology Society (1874) and the Free Teaching Institution (1876), founded in the wish to perform scientific studies from clearly evolutionist perspectives, as opposed to the traditional academic institutions. We must add the part played by the Revista de Antropología (1874), which also helped to introduce Darwinism to Spain through the publication of articles by different authors adhering to the new evolutionist theories.

Finally, there was the publication in 1877 of the first edition in Castilian of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, translated by Enrique Godínez. The poet Bartrina mentions the appearance of this book in Castilian in the magazine La Renaixensa. Apparently, in 1878 Manuel Duran i Bas, the president of the Ateneu Barcelonès, put a stop to any further discussion of Darwin’s theory of evolution.[11]

Unfortunately, the first edition in Catalan of the book did not arrive until 1982, translated by Santiago Albertí and Constança Albertí (Edicions 62). Nevertheless, part of Darwin’s pioneering work written 20 years before On the Origin of Species, in which he describes his voyage around the world as a naturalist, had been published in instalments in the republican Valentí Almirall’s Diari Català (1879-81). It is A Naturalist’s Voyage Around the World on Board the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, translated by Leandre Pons i Dalmau (c. 1815-c. 1887), which is considered the first book about science to have been published in Catalan in the nineteenth century.

It could be said that in Spain, during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church and the government exercised control over the freedom of thought and education. In this context, the spreading of Darwin’s ideas, at odds with the official religion, was hindered by both institutions. Consequently, Darwinism was used indirectly as a sign of identity by those opposed to the continuity of the system. Thus, a defence of Darwinism was a sign of free thinking, reinforced after the 1868 Revolution. A representative example of this is Odón de Buen (1863-1945), a professor of zoology at the University of Barcelona, republican, free thinker and an advocate of Darwin’s evolutionism, for which his work was condemned by the Church. During the Democratic Sexennium, Darwin’s evolutionist ideas became consolidated in Catalonia.

The role played by museums should also be mentioned as a key factor in this consolidation, and specifically the Martorell Museum in the Ciutadella Park in Barcelona. The Martorell Museum, along with the Castell dels Tres Dragons, also in the Ciutadella, the Botanical Gardens on Montjuïc and the recently created Museu Blau in the Fòrum, make up the so-called Barcelona Museum of Natural Science (MCNB). The history of the Martorell Museum began with the bequest that Francesc Martorell i Peña (1822-1878) left to the city of Barcelona, consisting of his archaeology, numismatic and natural science collections, his library and a considerable sum of money, in order to conserve these materials in a new place and create a five-yearly archaeology prize. The new building, in neoclassical style, was designed by the architect Antoni Rovira i Trias (1816-1889) and is the first building in Barcelona built expressly to house the city’s first public museum in its first urban park. Its inauguration, as the Museo Martorell de Arqueología y Ciencias Naturales, took place in 1882. In 1891 the archaeological collections were moved out and it incorporated the Baron palaeontology collection. Later additions were collections from the Universal Exhibition of 1888, the collections of salts from Cardona, and the Antiga and Saura collections, among others.

I would like to point out that that same year, 1882, flanking the entrance to the Martorell Museum, two white-marble seated statues by the sculptor Eduard Batiste Alentorn (1856-1920) were set in place, corresponding to the figures of Jaume Salvador and Félix de Azara. Jaume Salvador i Pedrol (1649-1740) was the most outstanding member of the Salvador family of pharmacists and naturalists from Barcelona. He created a botanical garden in Sant Joan Despí and a natural science museum that is now conserved in the Institut Botànic de Barcelona and is the oldest collection in Catalonia.

Félix de Azara (1746-1821) was a naturalist and military engineer who made important contributions to knowledge of the fauna, flora and cartography of South America. Born in Huesca and a veteran of the Algerian War, he was posted to Paraguay in order to establish the frontiers between the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. During the 20 years his stay in South America lasted (from 1781 to 1801) he described a host of animal and plant species with an approach halfway between the creationism of the period and the future Darwinian evolutionism. His studies were published in several works, one of the most important being Viajes por la América meridional (Travels in South America, 1809). So, despite being a creationist, Azara came to the conclusion that some species of insects and quadrupeds must have been created simultaneously in different places and did not derive from a single original pair. On the other hand, other species could have been created several times successively in time and others must have disappeared forever. Azara also considered the existence of species’ adaptations in the struggle for survival, like for example the case of the adders, the less agile species of which have more potent venom. Surprisingly, Azara discovered concepts that genetics has confirmed two centuries later, such as variability between individuals of the same species, the heritability of characteristics and the random appearance of certain morphological traits. Darwin, who knew of Azara’s work, mentions it repeatedly in his most important works, including On the Origin of Species.

Feelings about nature: between Romanticism and Symbolism

With Romanticism, feelings about nature were expressed poetically. In a certain way this aesthetic view connects with the original spirit of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, a book that does not deal with the sciences of nature but of mankind with regard to nature and itself. This is how Romantic artists approach the “landscape”, an autochthonous genre that creates an imagery of its own, with marshland, foggy or crepuscular ruins, damp and mysterious castles or cathedrals, stormy torrential downpours and waters that drown or cause shipwrecks.

They are of different kinds while nature is the original source of the mystery of life. To paraphrase Antoni Gaudí, the “great book that is nature” is the original source of knowledge and creative inspiration. The human being has, by nature, culture; thus, language is the human invention that enables us to see through another person’s eyes. At the end of the nineteenth century a great debate was generated in the field of culture in general in a context marked by a profound crisis of values. On the one hand, there was a certain rejection of the prevailing Positivism, which gave rise to the appearance of a pan-European movement called Symbolism.[12] In these final years of the nineteenth century, we can follow the close relationship between the form and the meaning – poetic or creative – of a symbolic imagery full of personifications of nature and metamorphoses, a sort of hybridism that is expressed and broadened when music is also incorporated in it. For it is significant that in this period marked by the ideal of total art we can say that nature became a realm of inspiration, and the transformation of nature into art meant symbolization. Artists put their ability to the test to puzzle out a group of figures yet to be deciphered that nature constitutes as enigmas. Moreover, the break with the traditional creationist worldview can be linked to anarchist anticlerical or secular pantheistic currents that believe only in the religion of art.

Symbolist artists interpret the landscape as a dream of escape, becoming a suitable means to express “moods”, as an “Idealistic crescendo of symbolic representations”.[13] Inner landscapes are understood as mystical, idealistic moods that place us beyond feelings. Unlike the landscapes of the impressionists, who true to their feelings could only produce instant snapshots, or the realists, who were obsessed with the physical appearance of people and things, Symbolist landscapes go in search of an eternal beauty, beyond perceived reality. At the end of the century, a certain “feeling of the twilight of culture” or the pain of living took hold of artists. Some chose to withdraw into themselves, while others chose real flight, an escape from reality. The cult of nature is at the origins of the poetic, where there is room for both the arts and poetry.

The artist and poet Santiago Rusiñol took refuge in Cau Ferrat, which is a world, the compendium of a world, where the priest / artist resembles the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich’s monk before the sea. The triptych of Poetry, Painting and Music are the synthesis of his painted interiors, pre-Raphaelite style. Saint Poetry looks up to heaven hoping for inspiration, standing still in the middle of a path that rises towards celestial buildings, in a sacred garden that is watered by the fountain as the source of life. On the other hand, in the middle of a field of white lilies – the symbol of purity – the young painter captures the band of angel musicians that turn into clouds. Finally, in the allegory of Music, the path towards the light is a river in which the nymph plays the sounds of the spirit of nature on her harp. Without doubt, this suggestion of the landscape is captured in what are poetic paintings. They are inner landscapes, some of them veritable paradises, and if we look at the etymology of the term “paradise” in Greek we see that it means “nature + artifice”. Paradises that can only be, as Marcel Proust would later say, paradises lost. And nostalgia, with the sadness of living, is one of the faces of melancholy that at the same time can become a source of creation. Therefore, in the book Oracions (Prayers), Rusiñol writes 32 poems or prayers recited in an attitude of contemplation and adoration of art and nature: “The sun going down at sunset, the sky crowned with stars, the moon silently sliding, the dew covering the earth with pearls, the rain singing the song of water, Beauty gliding majestically, adored by Art, who kisses her silvery locks, the bell tolling for the dying day, and dreamy night waiting for the love of the dawn, these are the beauties that the soul realizes, and so that we may contemplate them it warns us and stops us.”[14] The spirit of the place, where the ideal of Absolute Beauty “is the harmony that the soul keenly seeks, the joy that the spirit dreams of, the golden dust that the angels sprinkled with their wings when passing near the ground.”[15]

Moreover, domesticated nature refers to the interest in knowing nature, mankind’s work to transform it, to master it when creating a garden, which is a sight for the eyes. Because, in short, the notion of the garden is by definition a notion of aesthetics.[16]

DARWINISM IN SPANISH NATURAL SCIENCE SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
 A brief approach to art in teaching the theory of evolution

Margarita Hernández Laille

Introduction

Throughout my research I have considered interdisciplinarity and different contextual perspectives to be essential factors when transmitting knowledge. In this article I shall analyse the presence of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the natural science school textbooks published in Spain in the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the wish to interrelate natural history and education, basically from the political and ideological point of view. At the same time, I shall introduce another disciplinary interaction. I am going to look at art, to find out if it is in any way related to the science that Darwinism represents and to its teaching through the textbooks.

The school textbooks analysed are considered the research subject, not only as a source of curricular information, but also as a means of communicating the development of the disciplines and an ideological transmitter of the historical period to which I am referring. Their content tells us how, when and with what values Darwin’s theory of evolution was taught. In the analytical process I have used my own methodology, which comprises 17 well-defined stages.[1] The result of this study reflects both the defence of Darwinism and opposition to the new theory by the authors.

I have called school textbooks “creationist” in cases where their authors upheld a divine cause when explaining the origin of the Earth and the beings that live in it. At the same time, I have grouped together, under the heading “anti-Darwinist”, school textbooks by creationist authors who in them declared themselves to be explicitly anti-Darwinist. Those in which the authors introduced the harmony between science and the Bible to their content, I have called “conciliatory” textbooks. Lastly, among the textbooks that advocated Darwin’s theory of evolution there is a distinction between those that mentioned him and those that did not.

To end with, I shall mention some of the artistic movements that through his works dealt with nature in the nineteenth century, the cradle of much of modern science. I also briefly analyse the possible artistic content in Darwin’s theory of evolution, basing myself on the knowledge that this theory is an observed and contrasted scientific fact, and bearing in mind that the knowledge it asserts is the product of its author – an author who personally oversaw the illustration of his books and who was the first to include the art of photography in a science book. Lastly, I very briefly touch on the teaching and learning of the theory in question, its pedagogy, the science and art in it, and I refer to the fact that the textbooks used by teachers at school contain art through their illustrations.

The presence of Darwinism in the natural science school textbooks published in Spain in the last decade of the nineteenth century

A brief look at the political and educational context in the reception of Darwinism in Spain

When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859,[2] he changed the way the world was interpreted, something that had a significant influence on the development of human thought. Nevertheless, the introduction and dissemination of Darwinism took different paths in every country, and the controversies that arose in each place differed greatly in their intensity and duration.

In Spain, discussion of Darwin’s theory of evolution began before the Revolution of 1868, and it sparked off a huge controversy in all areas of politics and society, fundamentally education and religion. As a consequence of this situation, Spanish thinking was torn between different standpoints, although the ideological controversy was actually focused on the conflict between religion and science, and especially the question of scientific freedom. Darwinist concepts were introduced to Spanish classrooms quite early on amid controversy, and this occasionally led to the professors who upheld these ideas being expelled from their Chairs.

The Restoration of the monarchy in 1875 saw the beginning of the alternation in government of the conservative and liberal parties, shadowed by two opposition movements, the Carlist and the republican. The first stage of this political alternation was chiefly conservative in nature, led by Cánovas del Castillo. In 1881 the liberal Sagasta came to power and, although Cánovas came back in 1884, the liberals returned in November of that year and stayed there until 1898, with two conservative intervals. However, from 1885 to 1902 the parties established a truce during which time the dominant figure was Sagasta, always under the regency of Queen María Cristina. In short, the politics of the last decade of the nineteenth century was mostly liberal, except for some conservative phases. In 1898, the events known as the “disaster” aroused the opposition of intellectuals and of the Spanish Catalan and Basque regions. The most serious problems arose in the former, and a profound crisis emerged in Cánovas del Castillo’s regime.

In the sphere of education important changes took place right from the start of the Bourbon Restoration. On 26th February 1875 the famous decrees were published by which Manuel de Orovio, then Education minister in Cánovas del Castillo’s government, ordered rectors to impose teaching in accordance with Catholic dogma and the regime’s political ideas. The list of authorized and censored textbooks was also reinstated, which had come into force in 1857 with the Moyano Act and this time would last until 1923.

Despite everything, the Restoration entered Spain hand in hand with Darwinism and Positivism. At that time there was an enormous desire in Spain to gain access to modern ideas, and some teachers began to introduce the new theories in their classrooms. In 1876 this circumstance led to the second university question, in which several lecturers were expelled from their university. Among them were the Darwinists Augusto González Linares and Nicolás Salmerón, who, under the direction of Francisco Giner de los Ríos, founded the Free Teaching Institution, of which Darwin was an honorary member and in whose classrooms Darwinism was taught. In 1877 On the Origin of Species was published in Spanish. At the same time, many authors included the new theory in their school textbooks. In reality there was a great diversity of natural science textbook authors in Spain; some were Darwinist, others were creationist and anti-Darwinist, and even those who reconciled Biblical dogma with scientific theories were disseminated.

Some of the first natural science textbooks that introduced Darwinism to classrooms

The first natural science textbook to include Darwinist concepts in its content, although without mentioning Darwin, was Nociones de historia natural (Notions of Natural History), published in 1867 by Professor Rafael García Álvarez of the Instituto de Granada. In its pages we read that “the animal kingdom considered as a whole represents a plan of gradation, in which the animal condition, rising from a minimum where it touches the vegetable condition, reaches a high point of development crowned by mankind, a synthesis of the former and whose ascendant series has been called the animal series or scale”.[3] Later, in 1873, Augusto González Linares would cite Darwin in his Ensayo de una introducción al estudio de la historia natural (Attempt at an Introduction to the Study of Natural History).[4] A year later, Rafael García Álvarez declared himself to be explicitly Darwinist in his Tratado elemental de ﬁsiología general y humana (Elementary Treatise of General and Human Physiology), where among other things he said that “[some scholars] suppose that all the immense variety of complex organisms that have followed one another in the series of the ages down to the present day are the effect of slow and gradual metamorphoses over time. This theory[,] upheld by philosophers in the ancient world and by modern naturalists, is known by the name of the theory of transformism or genealogical descent, and is currently the subject of numerous works and brilliant discussions in the field of science.”[5] In 1877 Peregrín Casanova Ciurana published Estudios Biológicos (Biological Studies).[6] The first volume of this book, on the subject of General Biology, was completely Darwinist. In its pages one can read claims such as “the doctrine of evolution is the opposite of that of fixedness, it is the theory of change and transformation […]. It encloses a complete philosophy of the entire Universe […]. It does not introduce any supernatural agent to the explanation of all the facts, because that would be to go beyond the limits of science”[7] or how “many know Darwin by name, very few know his ideas, far fewer understand them and yet […] he has earned the hatred of uneducated people for whom the name Darwin is the name of the devil”.[8] The book also includes a letter seven lines long, sent by Haeckel from the city of Jena to D. Peregrín Casanova on 3rd May 1877 with regard to the book’s publication.[9] These Darwinist authors were followed by many others, and their school textbooks proliferated most strongly in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when they were introduced to Spanish classrooms for teaching purposes.

Darwinist natural science textbooks that explicitly mentioned Darwin in the last decade of the nineteenth century

In 1890, Ignacio Bolívar, Salvador Calderón and Francisco Quiroga published their Elementos de historia natural (Elements of Natural History),[10] in which they explained, with examples, natural selection, the struggle for existence and all the other concepts upheld by Darwin in his theory, such as variability and heredity. The three authors explicitly mentioned the English naturalist, claiming that, “Whatever the true value of the theory of descent, transformism or evolution, which we have expounded so imperfectly, and whose founder was the English naturalist Darwin, it is undeniable that it has served to give a great boost to the biological sciences.”[11] This book marked a new direction in Natural History studies in Spain.

In 1894, the professor of Natural History at the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros in Madrid, Manuel María José de Galdo López de Neira, published the first part of the brand-new edition of his Elementos de historia natural (Elements of Natural History),[12] in which for the first time he mentioned “Charles Robert Darwin!”,[13] saying that he was “one of the most remarkable figures in the world”. The second part of this edition was published the following year, and Darwinist doctrine had spread to every page.[14]

The founder of Oceanography in Spain and professor of Natural Sciences in the Science Faculty of the University of Barcelona, Odón de Buen y del Cos, also defended Darwin’s theory tooth and nail. In the first volume of his Historia natural (Natural History), prefaced in Barcelona in 1896, Odón de Buen mentioned Darwin on every page. In one paragraph he claims that, “modern times began in 1859, when Charles Darwin published his memorable book entitled On the Origin of Species, which caused a profound revolution in Biology. It is true that before Darwin some naturalists had rebelled against the immutability of the species; but this idea was dealt the coup de grâce when Darwinist propaganda introduced the opposing tendency to European and American universities. The predominance of the transformist evolutionary school, which prescribes the accidental nature of organic forms and their slow modification due to adaptation to the environment and natural selection, which is based on the unity of the biological plan, is the most salient aspect of contemporary zoology.”[15] In the second volume of his book Odón de Buen claims that, “Nothing in the cosmos remains inert, everything is modified and changes, from the mineral most averse to the action of the agents that surround it to the organism of the higher animals, which has a transitory existence. Transformation in nature is continual; some forms are destroyed and other forms are conceived; […] variety increases ceaselessly […]. There can be no permanent compounds; the molecule will exist in one form as long as no external circumstance forces it to break down, imposing change on it; the most stable compounds may be able to withstand very variable environments, but no body is indestructible.”[16] In his opinion, “the concept that we should form of life is an evolutionary concept.”[17]

In 1897, José Gogorza y González, professor of the Instituto de Salamanca, claimed in his Elementos de historia natural (Elements of Natural History)[18] that Darwin’s ideas were at that time accepted by most scholars. In this work the author distinguishes and explains the adaptation, the heredity and the variability of organic forms, under the heading “General principles of the development of living beings”. In the section devoted to the “origin of organic species” the school textbook contains three sub-sections entitled “Ideas emitted in different periods concerning the origin of organic species”, “Unitary theory” and “Darwinist theory or of natural selection”.

Darwinist school textbooks in which Darwin is not mentioned

In 1891 Professor Odón de Buen published a magnificent Diccionario de historia natural (Dictionary of Natural History), with colour illustrations.[19] That same year, Rafael García Álvarez introduced Darwinism explicitly in the first edition of his Elementos de historia natural (Elements of Natural History) in which he said that “[Evolution] Is the law or principle by virtue of which, in nature, everything tends to go from the indefinite to the definite, from the simple to the compound, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous and from the non-complex to the complex. […], everything seems to obey this law, which applied to our globe to make us aware of the numerous transformations […] and the most varied forms in which life has manifested itself from the incalculable epoch of its appearance to the present day, is what is known as the theory of evolution […]. Life is not subject to or is not the effect of any vital agent or principle as was previously believed.”[20]

In 1894 Manuel María José de Galdo published Taxonomía y cuadros sinópticos de historia natural (Taxonomy and Synoptic Tables of Natural History)[21] and at the end of the century Salvador Calderón Arana brought out the first edition of Nociones de historia natural (Notions of Natural History), in which he commented that, “When mankind is compared to the other animals one of course notes that in its organism there is nothing essentially different and peculiar that compels us to separate it from the other beings in the animal kingdom and establish with it an independent or hominal one, as some naturalists have tried to do; but[,] without offering essential or quality characteristics, our species presents some that place it far above the other beings.”[22]

Creationist school textbooks

Many school textbooks introduced creationism to their pages. Of them I wish to point out the teacher at the Instituto de Huesca, Serafín Casas Abad, who in 1897 upheld in his Elementos de historia natural (Elements of Natural History) that, “this business of admitting a creative pro-life energy, sufficient for the conservation and reproduction of all beings, without admitting the existence of God, is absurd nonsense”.[23] I also wish to mention Manuel Díaz de Arcaya, professor of the Institutes of Ávila and Zaragoza, who in 1898 put forward conservative ideas in his Elementos de historia natural (Elements of Natural History).[24]

School textbooks that reconciled religion with science

The conflict between faith and science intensified in Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century. This led not only to the proliferation of authors that reconciled these two spheres, but also to the consolidation of the anti-Darwinists. In the last decade of the century there were also plenty of creationist textbooks, and even Darwinist ones, reconciling Biblical dogma with scientific theories and they often devoted a specific chapter to this subject in their pages. Notable among them, with several works, were Emilio Ribera Gómez[25] and Manuel Mir y Navarro, who insisted in the first edition of his Programa-sumario de elementos de historial natural (Programme-summary of Elements of Natural History) that “the advance of progressive ideas is gradually bringing natural science into line with the revelation.”[26]

Anti-Darwinist school textbooks

Other authors declared themselves to be anti-Darwinist in their school textbooks, and some of them mentioned Darwin when expressing their ideas. In this respect Felipe Picatoste claimed, in his Elementos de historia natural (Elements of Natural History), first published in 1889, that “Science has been unable to explain either the principle or the succession of organic species, regardless of how many hypotheses have been presented, including the two most important ones, called spontaneous generation [sic] and the transformation of the species” and that “among the many scientific eccentricities that have attempted to explain the generation of the current species, […] may be mentioned. Lastly, Darwin admits that every organism is capable of perfection and of transformation transmissible to the descendants of the species, whose transformation leads to the perfection of the species or its disappearance. Apart from that he admits that the cell was the first organism and the origin of all the others.”[27]

There were even some professors who denied the scientific validity of geology and geogeny, such as Luis Pérez Mínguez, of the Instituto de Valladolid, who went so far as to say that “Geology and geogeny are without doubt the two natural sciences that have supplied the most ammunition to those who have been looking to use it against our religion. […] and as both geology and geogeny are far, even today[,] from being true sciences, founded on inconclusive principles […], the foundations of geology are far from being absolute and incontrovertible truths, and therefore they cannot be used to either support or destroy an institution that has its foundations in heaven.”[28]

In 1897 Pérez Mínguez published the eighth edition of Nociones de fisiología e hygiene (Notions of Physiology and Hygiene)[29] and Demetrio Fidel Rubio y Alberto, a professor at the Instituto de San Isidro, called Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species “as seductive as it is untrue, which is based on more or less gratuitous hypotheses, it being impossible to quote one single fact of observation or experience to confirm it.”[30] In 1898 Fidel Faulín Ugarte also stated that, “No species, regardless of how much variety and the changes it has undergone, has ever been transformed into a new type, due either to slow successive variations or brusque changes.”[31]

As we have seen above, despite the controversies Darwinism was present in the natural science school textbooks published in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

A brief look at art in the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution and in natural science school textbooks

Science and art in Darwin’s century

Science, from the Latin scientia, is defined in the Spanish Royal Academy’s dictionary as the knowledge as a whole obtained through observation and reason, systematically structured, from which general principles and laws are deduced.

Art, from the Latin ars – artis, is understood generally as any activity done or product made by human beings for an aesthetic or communicative purpose, through which ideas and emotions are expressed via different resources such as, among others, the plastic and the linguistic ones.

Historical development and the advance of scientific knowledge have led to relations between the sciences and their fields of study changing continually, so much so that one may think that in time all scientific theories may become obsolete.

Art, as a component of culture, transmits the ideas and values of each historical period. It is generally thought that, with the appearance of Homo sapiens, art originally had a ritual, magical or religious purpose, but that function has changed along with the evolution of the human being, nowadays having an aesthetic purpose that affects all areas of society.

Due to the huge growth of science in the nineteenth century, many new scientific disciplines emerged. In general terms, this historical period was characterized by the great transformations, both political and social and scientific and artistic. A period with great ideas had commenced that was seeking modernity, although in some aspects it stayed with classicism as a symbol of power, order and tradition. Europe went from life in the countryside to the urbanization of the cities. With the birth of industrialization, which led to collaboration between the mathematical, physical and natural sciences and industry, factories and the mechanization of production appeared on the continent. In actual fact, the discoveries in all areas of industry that emerged in this period were closely linked to scientific experimentalism and the role of the universities. New sciences such as psychology appeared, which became important after Sigmund Freud, and sociology, which was consolidated in France with the Positivism of Auguste Comte. In the social sciences there were the contributions of Marx and Engels, which explained history and society from an economic perspective for the first time. In biology Charles Darwin stood out: with the publication of On the Origin of Species, in which he put forward his theory about the origin and evolution of species by natural selection, he revolutionized the traditional worldview at that time.

Art also witnessed important progress from the nineteenth century onwards. Already in 1840, the progress of science had in some ways influenced the appearance of French realism and some artists devoted themselves to painting the landscape with the aim of getting close to nature. Also around that time, artists such as Fuseli, Hamilton, Turner, Constable and others, as well as the Pre-Raphaelites, captured a certain symbolism in their works. In 1851 the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was held In London, where, besides industry, science and art played a very significant part. In Spain Modernismo was the thing in the 1880s. In 1881 Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga, considered one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and, together with Juan Gris, the creator of the Cubist movement. As Professor Teresa-M. Sala says,[32] that same year Massó i Torrents founded the journal L’Avenç, in which several of the most renowned artists and writers of the day were involved. Just then, when naturalism was the dominant style, the artist Ramon Casas painted the famous poster for Anís del Mono, which showed a young woman strolling with a monkey that was carrying a bottle of the company’s anise drink under its arm. In 1889 impressionism burst onto the scene at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, and in 1893 a social and spiritual crisis caused some artists and intellectuals to take refuge in a type of art that went beyond Positivist naturalism and was heading towards European Symbolism, due also to the crisis in Positivism. At the same time the Arts and Crafts movement against the homogenization of industry spread in Great Britain; it had emerged in that country in 1882, the year Charles Darwin died, and was to last until 1912.

Darwin the scientist and artist

As a scientist, Darwin investigated the past through fossils, studied the books of great scientists, observed the transformations in the world around him and continually established hypotheses about what he saw and learned. In this way, he was able to realize the differences that had taken place in species according to the environment that had surrounded them and thus establish his theory of the origins and evolution of species by natural selection, which has since been corroborated by genetics and modern biology. Darwin also applied the conclusions he reached in his study to Homo sapiens in order to explain where our species comes from and where we are going.

But, besides being a scientist, Charles Darwin was also an artist. In the first place this has to be related to natural beauty. Darwin observed and described facts of nature in which beauty is of paramount importance, for example the courtship rituals of male birds to attract females or the evolution of orchids. His notebooks contained his own drawings, including the first diagram of the tree of life, which appeared in his First Notebook on “Transmutation of Species”, written by him in 1837.

Darwin also took personal responsibility for how his books were illustrated. In On the Origin of Species his second diagram of the tree of life was included as the only picture.

According to Phillip Prodger, Charles Darwin, who had already mixed with the artists on the voyage of the Beagle, was the first to introduce photographic art in a science book; it was in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.[33] Prodger maintains that Darwin visited galleries, bookshops and photographic studios in London in search of images to illustrate his book and that he eventually settled on one of the giants in the history of photography, the eccentric art photographer Oscar Rejlander. Later he corresponded with the famous photographers Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron and G. B. Duchenne de Boulogne. Prodger also claims that Darwin visited museums, read art history books and mixed with artists of his day, such as the animal painters Joseph Lobo and Rivière and the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner.[34]

The presence of art in the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural science school textbooks

We say that pedagogy is a science when we observe it through methodology and research, but we also consider that it is art when the person teaching does so with their personality, using strategies to keep the students active and interested in the subject, and dealing with the pupils on a personal basis. In the light of science, pedagogues have to experiment and try out hypotheses; however, when transmitting knowledge, they have to be artists. This combination of art and science in teaching and learning leads us to the need for educational standards that take into account the social and cultural context of the environment in which they are teaching.

In the case of the teaching of Darwinism, we could say that pedagogy is science from the moment when the knowledge acquired in the light of observation and experimentation is transmitted. But we could also claim that it is art, as it needs the activity of the human being to be implemented. Art that will be more or less developed depending on the attitude of the teachers, on their knowledge of Darwinism and on the clarity of the content of the textbooks used in the classroom to study the theory of evolution. Not all the school textbooks analysed in this article explain Darwinist concepts in the same way. The exposition that some books make of this science is very brief or almost non-existent, as is the case with the first volume of the brand-new edition of Elementos de historia natural (1894) by José de Galdo, in which he only mentions Darwin in one paragraph. In this case, the teachers would need to have a great deal of knowledge of the theory in question in order to put it across in the classroom and apply their teaching skills for the pupils to understand the subject. Other textbooks explain Darwin’s theory of evolution very precisely on every page, as is the case with Odón de Buen y del Cos’s Historia natural. On this occasion the teachers could limit themselves to following the explanations of the book’s contents to give the class, convinced that the knowledge they are transmitting is sufficient. Here the teacher shares his skill with the author of the book.

The school textbooks tell us how and when Darwin’s theory of evolution was taught; but just as their texts spread and contextualize this knowledge, they contain art in the form of their illustrations. Virtually all the natural science school textbooks analysed were illustrated with similar images, almost all in black and white. One of the most repeated images in these books is the reproduction of the skeleton of Megatherium drawn and described by the French zoologist and naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1836.[35] Megatherium’s fossilized bones had been unearthed in 1787 by the Dominican friar Manuel de Torres in a gorge of the river Luján (Argentina) and the following year they were transferred to the Royal Natural History Cabinet in Madrid. Juan Pimentel tells us in his book El rinoceronte y el megaterio (The Rhinoceros and Megatherium)[36] that Megatherium was assembled and drawn with great difficulty and with a huge lack of knowledge about which animal the group of bones belonged to. He also tells us that numerous people took part in this difficult process, including Juan Bautista Bru and Manuel Navarro, but that it was the great Cuvier who reconstructed the giant animal, basing himself on the existing drawings without having personally seen the bones. He named it Megatherium americanum and claimed that it was an enormous extinct sloth, which was later studied by Charles Darwin.[37]

Megatherium described by Cuvier, 1836.

Cuvier showed great imagination when reconstructing, drawing and describing Megatherium without having seen the skeleton, uniting the dual task of science and art with his inventiveness. I agree with Pimentel when he says in his book that the imagination is a tool of scientific knowledge and that this skill of depicting real things in images is one of the principal faculties in the production of evidence that is the basis of science and history. I also identify myself with this author when he claims that, “The power of images in our world is undeniable.”

Conclusions

As we have seen in this article, Darwinism was present in the natural science school textbooks published in the last decade of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that the conflict between faith and science had intensified in the second half of the century, and this had led to an increase in the number of authors who reconciled these two spheres and to the consolidation of the anti-Darwinists. All these educational standpoints were heavily influenced by the politics and ideology of the time, as was art, which has always been unavoidably linked to science.

Darwin was a genius who throughout his life united science, art and nature. Through the harmony emerging between the texts in the natural science school textbooks and their illustrations we see how the science in his theory of evolution was taught at each moment.

ANTI-MATERIALIST IDEAS IN ENGLAND IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND THEIR VALIDITY TODAY

Sergio González-Crespo
 Teresa-M. Sala

Space-time travellers

On 24th October 2013 a team of researchers at the University of Texas in Austin published, in the journal Nature, the discovery of z8_GND_5296, the most distant galaxy identified to date.[1] Through the analysis of the radiation emitted, the authors of this work have calculated that this galaxy was formed just 700 million years after the Big Bang. Given that this took place 13.8 billion years ago, we can deduce that the distance separating z8_GND_5296 from the Earth is 13.1 billion light years. On the basis of these measurements it may be thought that in order to reach the galaxy in question we would have to travel at the speed of light for 13.1 billion years or, what amounts to the same thing, that the image the scientists captured through the telescope has taken that huge length of time to travel through space to reach the Earth. If as a destination we were to choose a much closer star, for example our Sun, we would only take 8 minutes and 19 seconds to get there (travelling at the speed of light, of course), the time it takes for the sun’s rays to reach us.

If we stop to think, the observation of z8_GND_5296 proposes for us a journey in space and time. On one hand, given that the universe is in a state of accelerated expansion, that is, it is expanding at an increasing rate, the galaxy z8_GND_5296 will have been on the move for all those millions of years, so it will now be in a different place in space. In other words, what we see is no longer there, but somewhere else. Moreover, given that the image of the galaxy has taken so long to reach us, what we actually see is how it looked 13.1 billion years ago. It was then a young galaxy in formation, but it is now much, much older and it will almost certainly look different. In the case of our Sun, the space-time journey is much shorter: when we look at the sun we are actually seeing it as it was 8 minutes and 19 seconds ago, and not as it is right now.

But this is not all. If we consider the evolution of the cosmos over time, the period of 700 million yeas after the Big Bang has to be considered a transition stage between the “cosmic dark ages”, in which most of the intergalactic hydrogen was neutral, and the “modern cosmos”, in which this hydrogen is ionized. In the former epoch the first galaxies were still being formed, so the structure and the properties of the cosmos were not as they are now. Therefore, it does not seem easy to identify the characteristics of galaxy z8_GND_5296 in the present time, namely, as it is, where it is and what physical properties it now has. This topical example makes it possible to show that science can be somewhat limited when providing an exhaustive knowledge of reality. Below we shall see how this idea has surfaced at different times in history.

Fin-de-siècle anti-Positivism

During the last decades of the nineteenth century there emerged in Europe an important philosophical movement opposed to the prevailing Positivism. The way the sciences were developing seemed to question the existence of sacred scientific truths and clearly showed the difficulty with formulating generalizations. Scientific results are not denied, but a limit is placed on their value and the existence is recognized of profound questions that science cannot resolve. If deduction and experimentation were the principal means of generating knowledge, these are now considered to include intuition, feeling, religious awareness, and so on. To some extent a parallel could be established between this phenomenon and the criticism made by Romanticism of the enlightened movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In this article we propose to review how this critical attitude towards the potentials of science as a tool for understanding the world went beyond the framework proper of philosophy and spread to fields as far apart as the natural sciences themselves and literature in England in the late nineteenth century. We shall also show how, against all the odds, this stance is still valid today.

Wallace, a naturalist and spiritualist

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was an outstanding naturalist who, together with Charles Darwin, formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection. From 1854 to 1862 Wallace worked as a naturalist in the Malayan archipelago and as early as February 1855 he published his first article about the evolution of species.[2] In it he presented the idea that new species originate from other very similar pre-existing ones, at the same time and in the same geographical context. Three years later, in 1858, during a fever Wallace conceived the idea of the formation of species by means of natural selection. As soon as he had recovered, he wrote an article that he sent to Darwin in order to know his opinion.[3] The latter, together with his friends botanist Joseph Hooker and geologist Charles Lyell, and fearful that Wallace would steal a march on them in the presentation of the theory, proposed the joint presentation of the work of Darwin and Wallace at the Linnaean Society on 1st July 1858.[4] Neither Darwin nor Wallace was present at the ceremony: the former was attending his son’s burial and the latter had just temporarily returned to England. In the reading it was stated that both naturalists had conceived the same theory of the origin of species by natural selection separately. The following year Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species appeared (1859), which took most of the credit for the discovery.[5]

Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory of evolution was a unifying principle of nature according to which all species, including the human one, derive from a single original nucleus and no barriers between them exist other than reproductive ones. The fact of including human beings in the context of evolution constituted a scientific guarantee of the eventual triumph of humankind.

It is surprising that only a decade later Wallace’s view of human beings and nature had changed radically. In 1869 he wrote that human intellectual faculties, conscience and morality cannot be explained by natural selection; rather, they require the intervention of a superior intelligence (overruling intelligence) that guides the action of the natural laws in definite directions and for special purposes.[6] Along the same lines, in 1875 he suggested the existence of limits for human sensibility:

For a race of blind people, how inconceivable would the power of sight be, how absolutely unknown the simple existence of light and its innumerable manifestations of form and beauty. Without the sense of sight, our knowledge of nature and the universe could not be the thousandth part of what it is […]. Thus, it is possible and even probable that senses superior to ours exist, as sight is with respect to touch and hearing.[7]

Photograph of Alfred Russel Wallace with “the spirit of his mother”, taken on 14 March 1874. It is an original in visiting card format.

Photographer: Frederick A. Hudson. Scanned with permission from an original owned by the Wallace family. Copyright of the reproduction: Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund & George W. Beccaloni.

However, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Wallace’s participation in séances, very popular that time. Spiritualism could be defined as the belief according to which souls or other immaterial entities can communicate with human beings through a medium or during unusual mental states such as trances. At séances, Wallace managed to make contact with this mother, who had been dead for five years. There is a “record” of this in photographs taken during the spiritualist sessions, but doctored by people working with the medium. His conviction is such that he speaks of the “unmistakable portrait of my mother.”[8] In line with this, Wallace wrote the definition of “spiritualism” for Chambers’s Encyclopaedia in its 1892 edition, alluding to the “intercommunion of the living with the so-called dead.”

In short, for Wallace spiritualism was a scientific fact that includes phenomena that are inexplicable in Materialist terms and acts as a complement to natural selection, as the latter cannot explain the spiritual essence of the human being. On this point, now nearing the end of his life, in an interesting magazine article Wallace claimed that “evolution cannot explain the human soul” and that “the difference between the human being and the other animals is insurmountable.”[9] He also maintained his belief in beings superior to us in power and intelligence that guide the processes of evolution and development. For Wallace, the name of these beings is irrelevant and they may be called spirits, angels, gods, and so on. The article ends with Wallace saying that, “Materialism is dead for intelligent minds” and that, “there are laws of nature, but they have a purpose.”

Darwin’s opinion of spiritualism was radically different. In 1874 he was persuaded to take part in a séance at his brother Erasmus’s home in London with Charles Williams as medium. Darwin abandoned the session shortly before it began and later in letters to his friends he defined spiritualism as “trickery” and “rubbish”.[10] Curiously, besides Darwin’s son George and his cousins and brothers-in-law Galton Wedgwood and Hensleigh Wedgwood, George Henry Lewes and the writer George Eliot were also at the session. The latter, as we shall see, went through a similar process to Wallace in the sense that, starting from a clearly Positivist attitude, she gradually began questioning the potential of science and seeing the limits of human sensibility.

Eliot, an anti-Positivist novelist

George Eliot (1819-1880), whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, was an important Victorian novelist who developed the psychological analysis of the characters in her novels very profoundly. At the age of 33, Eliot fell madly in love with an eminent radical Positivist called Herbert Spencer, famous for having coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest”, which sums up the evolutionary ideas of Darwin and Wallace perfectly (although it has also been accused of being a tautology). Eliot fell so deeply in love that in a letter to Spencer she wrote:

I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, that you will always be with me as much as you can and share your thoughts and your feelings with me. If you become attached to someone else, then I must die.[11]

Eliot’s love for Spencer was unrequited – he had a far more materialistic idea of love – but she did not commit suicide and found as a companion the versatile George Henry Lewes, philosopher, literary critic, playwright, actor, scientist and publisher. Lewes’s ideas about Positivism were rather more critical, and he wrote:

Every reality is the sum of so many relationships, a conjunction of so many events, a synthesis of so many feelings, that to know a reality deeply would only be possible through an intuition that covered the entire universe.

The universe is mystic for man, and it must remain that way forever; because [man] cannot transcend the limits of his awareness.[12]

George Eliot by Sir Frederic William Burton. Crete, 1865, 514 x 381 mm. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Whether due to the influence of Lewes or through her own conviction, Eliot gradually adopted a critical view of Positivism. Thus, in a review article written in 1856 she claimed that, “people’s real knowledge, their customs, ideas and motivations” cannot be achieved by way of “algebraic equations” and that biology covers phenomena that cannot be explained by chemistry.[13] At the same time, and in relation to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, she claimed that, although the book “marks an epoch” and “will have a huge effect on the scientific world”, his theories “make a poor impression compared to the mystery that underlies the processes.”[14]

To twentieth- and early twenty-first-century readers, immersed in the world of the two cultures (commonly known as science and humanities), the way a novelist talks authoritatively and knowledgably about the most recent scientific theories may seem strange; this is because in Victorian England science was really accessible to the non-scientist, and today’s well-defined frontier did not exist.

But it is in her most important work of literature, Middlemarch, where Eliot most clearly shows her aversion to Positivism. Published in instalments in 1871 and 1872, Middlemarch was reviewed favourably by the eminent Anglo-American novelist and literary critic Henry James, who called it a truly philosophical work.[15] Subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life”, Middlemarch is above all a network in which virtually all the characters that appear in it interact with one another and with their common surroundings. It is an organic network, connective and infinitely complex, that acts as a metaphor for society and the place that the individual occupies in it. Eliot studies her characters not as individuals but immersed in an atmosphere or society that surrounds them and shapes them.

Eliot makes a profound psychological study of two of her main characters, Mr Casaubon and Dr Lydgate, and shows the failure of their scientific attempts. Casaubon is an elderly man, scholarly and learned, but at the same time insecure, disorganized, pedantic and egocentric. He is engrossed in the search for “the key to all mythologies”, that is, the points of contact between the different religions and beliefs throughout the history of mankind. It is an extraordinarily laborious investigation that means for him years of hard work and isolation. Despite his total dedication, Casaubon cannot finish his work and dies unexpectedly due to a “fatty degeneration of the heart”, a symbolic example of the lack of the use of this organ associated with love and passion.

For his part, Lydgate is a prototype of Positivism embodied in an attractive, arrogant young man, a bachelor who has recently arrived in the village of Middlemarch. He is a doctor and a scientist, and combines medical practice with research. His objective is to find “the primary tissue”, the origin of all tissue. But like Casaubon, he too fails in his endeavour and ends up curing people suffering from gout.

Nagel, a modern-day sceptic

These critical ideas put forward by English naturalists and writers in the nineteenth century can in no way be considered old fashioned or antiquated. Indeed they connect directly with the theories of the contemporary American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-), who also questions the ability of science to reveal completely and exactly what reality is like. In his famous 1974 article “What is it Like to be a Bat?”, Nagel asks as an example whether the human being has the capacity to know exactly what it must be like to “be a bat”.[16]

To guide themselves, bats, which are virtually blind, possess an echolocation system. In flight they emit ultrasonic waves that hit the objects around them (trees, flying insects, buildings, and so on). After impact, the waves rebound and are captured again by the bat that has emitted them. Bats thus recognize the position of objects and the direction and speed at which they are moving, allowing them to fly without bumping into things, hunt their prey, and so on.

This sensorial system is completely alien to humans, and Nagel wonders whether we could ever understand the perception of the world that the bat has thanks to it. It is a problem of subjective experience that for Nagel cannot be explained using the conceptual tools of science, that is, via the Reductionist-Materialist path. This problem is part of the mind-body debate that emerged in the seventeenth century with the scientific revolution, and which is focused on understanding how mental processes are related to the physical organ on which they depend: the brain. For Nagel, the perceptions, ideas, emotions and so on that we humans experience are rather more than mere neuronal interconnections. Thus, if it were possible to draw a map of the brain’s patterns of functioning we could get to know the physical aspects of the process, but not the process itself, as there may also be non-physical aspects that exist and are important. In conclusion, using the bat’s echolocation system as an example, Nagel seriously questions whether humans have all the necessary tools for understanding the world and doubts that there will ever be a day when science can explain reality exhaustively.

In 2012 Nagel took a step further in this direction with the publication of his book Mind and Cosmos.[17] In it he sets out to extend the philosophical problem of the mind / body relationship to the entire cosmos and its history. Continuing on from his earlier works, Nagel considers that human beings must exercise intellectual humility and resist the temptation to presuppose that the tools they are at present equipped with are in themselves good enough to enable them to understand the universe. Of course scientists are aware that there are very many phenomena and processes that, according to them, we still cannot explain, but they suppose that with the passage of time and scientific progress they will be explained one day. However, for Nagel, this is not the real problem: what is truly important is to know what can be understood and what cannot.

Faced with this problem, Nagel adopts a philosophical stance opposed to the smugness of Reductionism-Materialism. Aware of scientific progress through non-specialist literature, Nagel dares to criticize today’s orthodoxy, accusing it of being based on groundless assumptions. Focusing on empirical examples in biology, Nagel asks two specific questions and shows his scepticism of the answers that science currently offers. The first of them is: what is the probability of self-reproducing life forms appearing spontaneously on the Earth due only to the execution of the laws of physics and chemistry? The second one has to do with the sources of variability in the evolutionary process: in the geological time that has passed since the appearance of life, what is the probability of a sequence of feasible genetic mutations being enough to make it possible for the organisms that now exist to emerge through natural selection? Nagel is aware that any views contrary to Reductionist orthodoxy will be treated with contempt by scientists and also seen as politically incorrect, but even so he writes things like this:

At first sight, it is highly improbable that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical phenomena together with the mechanism of natural selection.[18]

We ought to point out that Nagel does not invoke any religious arguments (he says he is an atheist), nor does he share the ideas behind the theory of “intelligent design”. On the other hand, he suggests that other laws, still unknown by humans, must exist to complement Materialist laws. He posits natural teleological laws, that is, tendencies towards an end or purpose that may govern the development and the organization of the universe over time. Thus, besides happening due to the laws of physics and chemistry, the phenomena would follow principles that would lead them to certain end results. The most notable example would be the appearance of organisms aware of themselves and the universe, human beings, not only through natural selection but also due to the natural tendency towards the appearance of an entity capable of recognizing itself. Another example could be the appearance of life as a natural tendency typical of a non-living system. In this way, Nagel formulates possible answers – hypothetical, of course – for the two questions asked earlier, contributing new pathways to complement the Reductionist-Materialist one.

We therefore see how the critical views of Positivism shown by the naturalist Wallace and the novelist Eliot in late nineteenth century England are taken up and enlarged upon by the philosopher Nagel in the twenty-first century as an example of their current validity.

What better way to conclude than with the following paragraph from Middlemarch, in which Eliot’s postulates about the limits of human sensibility are expressed poetically:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.[19]

LANDSCAPES OF THE SOUL

Josep Triadó, Ex-libris Mercè Mayol i Torné, 1900. Private collection.

CONCERNING NATURE IN SYMBOLIST IMAGERY

Teresa-M. Sala

All is symbol in creation, all is enigmatic.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Symbolism burst onto the European scene in the late nineteenth century as a creative dream. It is a movement that appeared at a time of crisis in culture with the desire to seek alternatives to Positivism and the prevailing Materialism. The Symbolists were opposed to the supremacy of historical explanation and the omnipotence of facts, returning to a foundational story[1] – that of the myth – that transported them and placed them in a far-off, memorable time. Aesthetically, one of the artists who best represented this renewed Arcadian vision was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.[2]

As opposed to the philosophical historicism of the nineteenth century, which revived the march of mankind or, strictly speaking, its history, Symbolism favoured the projection of an inner universe, formed of visions, allegories, mysteries and enigmas. Behind this symbolic view of art and life, the myth became a mirror of eternal truths, capable of being a good vehicle for expressing the desires, fears, perversions and grandeurs of the human condition. Without doubt, the rediscovery of myths entailed the possibility of studying in depth certain poetic structures of human behaviour that tell the story of the creation of the world, the origins of existence or the explanation of death. Thus, this foray into the world of myth makes a case for the predominance of dreams over reality, in which myths become an inexhaustible source of symbols, words and actions full of existential and transcendental meaning. The Symbolists turned it into an instrument bearing values that structures a community, that creates a certain sense of belonging. Moreover, the great synthesizer of myths who lit up the period was Richard Wagner – the inspirer of images that blend in with the music. He is attributed with Gesamtkunstwerk, the ideal of total art, which became the fin-de-siècle aesthetic leitmotiv.

In short, we may say that the mythical creation in the period of Symbolism places the accent on certain embodiments, which, like the figure of the sphinx, have the virtue of questioning the unknown.[3] The images are an indirect exhibition of hermetic mystery, which reconciles opposites or which “intervenes and reunites the external with the internal, the immanent with the transcendent, the figure with the meaning.”[4]

Apel·les Mestres, pen and ink drawing of Puk for Liliana (30 July 1906). Private collection.

The original world of nature

Hermes, the messenger and ambassador of the gods, the bearer and communicator, is a figure often represented by Symbolists. This god of the creative word is depicted in The Caress (1896), by the Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff, as a ritual androgynous figure caressing a female-monster (the sphinx), the bearer of enigmas.

It is an ambiguous and hermetic image, difficult to interpret,[5] but which points to a conjunction of a total being who directs his gaze towards the viewer, while the sphinx, with its eyes half open, delves into the depths of the unconscious.[6] It is a dreamy kind of nature, introspective, mysterious and timeless. The hidden face of nature becomes visible through analogies and symbols. The most favourable moments are crepuscular or nocturnal (the blue hour is the Symbolists’ favourite time of day),[7] with legendary or absent characters, a poetic fogginess and lonely places. Nature is often presented in a hostile way and the spiritual unease makes them view the passage of time somewhat nostalgically. Therefore, one of the recurring themes is the life cycle, represented by the ages and the seasons of the year, linked to that of nature reborn in springtime. It is a spiritualist reaction that leads artists to a way of explaining the mechanism of life, to a certain idea of the world, in which the myth of nature results in a kind of sacred pantheism. It is a mythologized view of nature, which takes the poetic form of a prayer of adoration to Nature and Art: “Then, from among that blue tapestry of stars, the most beautiful things in nature are born: the pure light emerging from the great cradle is born; harmony is born and colour is born, pushing the darkness that moves away in a blur.”[8]

The favourite place of the arts and the muses is the sacred forest, as Charles Baudelaire says in the poem Correspondences: “Nature is a temple and man passes through a forest full of symbols.” The exaltation of the myth finds in the forest the fertile symbol of life, a mysterious place of fairies, nymphs and elves. This is how, for example, the poet-artist Alexandre de Riquer paints it and evokes it in his collection of poems Poema al bosch (the Poem to the Forest).[9] In the sonnet that begins the journey through the sacred forest, and in perfect harmony with Baudelaire, Riquer communes with beauty and raises a “holy cup” (the Holy Grail). It is the forest itself that invites one to enter the sacred space (Sacred Nature), in which the nymphs, the undines and the trees sing legends and ballads from all periods and all cultures. A prayer that rises up wherever the Creator watches over us, in a sacred springtime, “of lush flowers” where “it is the time of the Eternal One, Lord and source of life”.[10] He commends himself to eternity, bringing together the point of view of the flowers, the birds, the trees, the waterfall. His poems, whose themes are Arthurian, Wagnerian, a return to Arcadia, are:

[…] the poetic nature of the writing, the sound and the decoration evoke a “woodland scene” that heightens synaesthesia, intensified with the superimposition of legends, symbols and myths and with the “appeal” of days of yore, ideal or exotic places, configuring an original paradise of a pre-industrial world.[11]

The birth of a regenerated world, reborn like the phoenix from its ashes, revives mythical and historical origins as an expression of the loss of original unity. Because, as Antoni Gaudí says, “originality is going back to the origins”; the cult of nature does not lose its original meaning. As the critic Raimon Casellas wrote in La Vanguardia:

[…] our generation feels exhausted by the close study of nature in which it was educated, and, discarding analyses and experiments, it aspires to brilliant syntheses, to overall harmonies, that may only incidentally have their origins in external reality.[12]

And poet-artists such as Riquer, Rusiñol, Gual, Brull or Tamburini emulate ancient prophets such as Orpheus and turn the arts into a religion.

The Pyrenees, the telluric cradle of Catalonia

Art is eternity presented through time: the divine made visible.

THOMAS CARLYLE

To speak of the origins is to speak of life on Earth, but also of a far-off, mythical and legendary idea, that connects with a community’s origins. With the Renaixença movement a dual Catalan epic came into existence in Catalonia that tells the story of the origins of its identity – civil and national – while also seeking the legendary origins of Christian Catalonia. Thus, the poem Canigó by Jacint Verdaguer, published in 1886, is an impassioned hymn to the Pyrenees, as an authentic exaltation of Catalan territory. Mossèn Cinto, the “people’s poet”,[13] tells a legendary story set on a telluric stage, in which he includes characters from the mediaeval history of Catalonia mixed up with other legendary or fictional ones: Gentil, the son of Bernat Tallaferro, captivated by the fairy Flordeneu, is killed by his uncle Guifré, accused of treason. Abbot Oliba and the dialogue between the bell towers of the two monasteries, Sant Miquel de Cuixà and Sant Martí de Canigó, make up one of the most memorable parts of the poem. It is a sublime hymn to nature that, with great plasticity, appears in every verse: “The maidens picked and filled their skirts with | sweet peas, violas and poppies”. And, above all else, we feel the presence of the mountain, Lo Canigó, which in verse II Verdaguer describes for us as a flower:

[...] it is an immense magnolia | that in a new growth of the Pyrenees opens out; | for bees it has fairies that surround it, | for butterflies the swans and eagles. |

Bare mountain ranges form its chalice | that winter silvers and summer gilds, | grandiose glass where the star drinks fragrances, | the air damp, the clouds water. | The pine forests are its blackberries, | the pools its dewdrops, | and that golden palace is its pistil, | a fairy’s dream that from heaven descends.

It is the resurgence of the mountain, of the “gifted mountains” that, as the fairies say, flower all year round.

Whereas Verdaguer rewrites history and mythologizes it, the legend of Count Arnau is revived with Modernisme with the vivid words of Maragall: “All the voices in the land” acclaim him and, as a son of the land, he will be oak, rock, sea, air, star and man over man … The poet erects a mythical / Wagnerian monument that embodies a vibrant image of the legendary hero in which we rediscover the voices of the Pyrenees.

In another order of things, the Catalanist Scientific Rambling Association and the Catalan Rambling Association had stimulated and contributed to the study of Catalan territory. In 1887 Carles Bosch de la Trinxeria published his first book, Records d’un excursionista (A Rambler’s Memoirs), a collection of the texts that he had been publishing in the literary supplement of La Renaixença. The critic Josep Yxart praised it as “Pyrenean literature!” because Bosch broke with the stereotyped picture of country life and contributed a more direct and personal experience of life in the mountains. He thus participates in the creation of a myth: that of the man brought up in the natural environment and not contaminated by civilization, so well developed in turn by Àngel Guimerà with Manelic, a shepherd in the Pyrenees (the Highlands). On the contrary, the Lowlands is the opposite place where evil occurs. In this way the essential theme of Guimerà’s popular play Terra Baixa (The Lowlands, 1897) appears.

Apart from that, the Pyrenees have a major part in a trilogy written in 1892 by the writer and politician Víctor Balaguer, which became the basic libretto for the Catalan opera by Felip Pedrell (first performed at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in 1902, in Italian). In 1896 the founder of the magazine L’Avenç, Jaume Massó i Torrents, published a series of Croquis pirinencs (Pyrenean Sketches)[14] and in 1898 the book Natura (Nature), with a last poem dedicated “To the Pyrenees”:

Catalans from all sides, | now we are up high, let us join hands: |

the wind upon greeting us seems to be brandishing swords

| to sweep away tyrants. | Leaping from crest to crest,

| from on high we shall rule the land, | and like a tall lighthouse |

we shall rest our gaze on the sea.

In 1897 the opera La fada (The Fairy) was performed for the first time in Sitges, with book by Massó i Torrents, inspired on a Catalan legend from Lake Évol in El Conflent, with music by Enric Morera, and published by L’Avenç, with a cover by Alexandre de Riquer. The devotion for grottoes, caves and subterranean or hidden lakes led them to rediscover sacred and mysterious values.

Jaume Massó i Torrents, Natura, Barcelona, Tip. L’Avenç, 1898. Private collection.

Poems of nature

When night turns to day | I have seen them

on the plains round about | flying sadly |

they are the daughters of the night | who full of sorrow |

bid it farewell | and with the moistness | of their flowers

| they revive trees and vanish | later they sigh like a woman in love |

and the breeze comes.

ADRIÀ GUAL, La rosada (The Dew)

Nature has an organic and cyclical order. The diversity of life-forms is the result of processes of transformation, mutation and metamorphosis. In the field of art, Odilon Redon became a sort of visual translator of Darwin’s work, although the great disseminator of the theories of evolution would be the important zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who studied the interdependence and the interaction between living organisms (plants and animals) and their environment (inorganic beings). Haeckel’s enthusiasm for evolutionist ideas, imbued with a certain mystical spirit, compromised his scientific influence because of the quasi-esoteric tone of some of his teachings about creation. His work Artistic Forms of Nature, which came out in instalments from 1899 to 1904, had a huge influence on Art Nouveau circles and among the Modernistes in Catalonia.

Haeckel’s ideas about nature, as an essential unit producing beautiful forms, were adopted by Antoni Gaudí. A good example of this is the design of the hexagonal paving tile with the spiral generating the universe, with a seabed inhabited by marine beings, such as octopi and starfishes.

The dominant eye is nature, said Cirici, but with significant articulations: “it dominates, greatly, the theme of plants, and within that the floral […] Of the flowers, those that have moral connotations, such as the coquettish petunia, the melancholy iris, the virile thistle, the humble violet, the deathly mallow and above all the vital sunflower and the lyrical poppy, the evoker of dreams”.[15] Moreover, the “dream flowers” – a veritable Symbolist still life painted by Khnopff – are flowers painted like those that grew in the dark cave of Hypnos, where the sun never shone, such as “the opiate poppies” that transport us to artificial paradises; “the foxglove”, which was a remedy for people with heart problems and at the same time a deadly poison, thus revealing its power over life and death, and “the dogwood or orange lily”, a symbol of sadness and madness, whilst the white lily becomes a flower traditionally associated with purity. Indeed, it is mysterious representation of the torments of the soul. As for the symbolic flower of evil, evoked by Baudelaire and painted by Moreau as Salome, it generates the image of the femme fatale that dominates the iconography of Symbolism: a “Rose of Hell” that, in the words of Jeroni Zanné, is:

[…] an immense rose of moist impure flesh | from blackest hell the haughty daughter expands […] | She is the red goddess, the horrible creature | who gives Dyonisian panting to sad bodies; | she has the heart of a monster, the figure of Venus | and she carries in her loins the jewel, the jewel that weakens![16]

The flower of evil of Picasso’s blue period is syphilis, a deadly consequence of desire, the counterpoint to the ideal of purity that is Ophelia.

Nature as a source of life or naked truth, a modern Eve that Gustav Klimt places in a “sacred springtime” in which “truth is fire and speaking of truth means illuminating and burning”. In a second version, the Nuda Veritas appears represented with a mirror that reflects the spectator’s image and, as Hermann Broch said, “even though man can live in the middle of nowhere he cannot bear to see himself.” It is an ambivalent image that refers us to a still life like that of Giovanni Segantini’s bad mothers or the Triptych of Nature (1898-1899) in which he depicts death as a premonition. In this unfinished canvas, the artist paints the refuge where he died, located amid a glacial landscape. Meanwhile, Paul Gauguin was inciting creators to “be Symbolists”, to imagine and to flee from civilization, just as the “noble savage” escaped from the urban world to live in the countryside surrounded by nature.

THE SYMBOLIST LANDSCAPE AND THE CONCEPT OF THE DEGENERATION OF RACE ACCORDING TO MAX NORDAU, POMPEU GENER, ET AL.

Irene Gras Valero

[…] because all these names, in which we take pleasure when we modify nature, only reflect states of imagination, figurations that we suggest to ourselves, taking solely as a composition of place the eternal models of the external world.

RAIMON CASELLAS (1892)[1]

As Henri-Frédéric Amiel wrote in his diary in 1846, “un paysage quelconque est un êtat de l’âme” (all landscapes are moods),[2] highlighting the subjective nature of the Romantic landscape. A few years later, at the height of the explosion of the Symbolist movement, the landscape would become a suggestive and dreamlike reflection of the author’s mood, a symbolic vehicle of transmission of his emotions and his spirituality.[3] This pantheistic concept of nature was a clear expression of the union between the macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (mankind), given that it is a projection of the human psyche over the landscape chosen by the artist or the poet. It is in fact due to an imperative of artistic equivalence between natural forms and the profound drives of inner life, which at that time exerted so much fascination over fin-de-siècle sensibility.[4] For this reason, nature takes on an intimate personality that is transferred to the recreation of other, strictly speaking interior, spaces such as the home.[5]

This subjectivism, which in fact Émile Zola had already observed when he described the work of art as “un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament” (a corner of creation seen through a temperament),[6] highlights, however, a series of considerations, both aesthetic and ideological, that have to be borne in mind.

First of all, the ambiguity represented in art by having nature as a point of reference. Although we may consider that the Symbolist period marks the high point of the confrontation between an image of the world based on the more or less faithful restoration of sensitive experience and a view of the world inspired by the imagination, contrasting a realistic conception of the landscape with an idealistic one,[7] can we really take an important amount of subjectivism from this “sensitive experience”? No, if we bear in mind that, beyond the fact that fantasy may or may not affect the process of creating the work, nature is perceived through the filter of one’s own individual sensibility, something that makes complete objectivity impossible when depicting it. And not just that, but it makes it impossible even to know it, as Hellenistic philosophy pointed out at the dawn of rational thinking and as in fact Impressionist theories revealed in the same period. Hence the importance achieved in the latter by the impressions of the sensitive experience, given that, beyond these, it is impossible for us to know anything. Ernst Mach, in his work Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contribution to the Analysis of the Feelings, 1886), said that feelings were, in the final analysis, the only real content of experience, there being no distinction between appearance and reality, given that everything is ultimately pure appearance or phenomenon (in the Kantian sense).[8] For this reason, despite being stripped of the emotional content that usually accompanies the Symbolist landscape, neo-Impressionist paintings also correspond to a wish to reshape the world in an ideal way: hence the recurring confusion between the different spatial planes, for example.[9]

In 1890 Maurice Denis was already talking about the depiction of nature in these terms:

Je cherche une définition peintre de ce simple mot «nature» qui étiquette et résume la théorie d’art la plus généralement acceptée en cette fin de siècle. Probablement: le total des sensations optiques? Mais, sans parler des perturbations naturelles de l’oeil moderne, qui ne sait la puissance des habitudes cérébrales sur la vision? J’ai connu des jeunes gens qui se livraient à une gymnastique des nerfs optiques...[10]

(I seek a painter’s definition of this simple word “nature” which labels and sums up the most widely accepted theory of art in this end of the century. Probably: all the optical sensations? But, without speaking of the natural disruptions of the modern eye, who knows the power of the brain’s skills over eyesight? I have met young people who surrendered to gymnastics of the optic nerves).

It must be said however that this interest in the way visual perception functions with regard to the different ways of painting belonged not only to the strictly artistic sphere; it was also shared by the field of clinical psychology. For this reason, a number of pseudoscientific studies proliferated that attributed the inclination towards a Symbolist aesthetic, by certain artists, to a degenerative disorder of their nervous system.

The research thus intends to look in depth at the negative considerations of this line of thinking, quite widespread at the end of the century, that coupled the concept of “madness” with the idea of “genius”[11] and with certain formal and aesthetic traits that can easily be applied to the iconographical sphere of the landscape.

Aesthetic characterizations of the Symbolist landscape

First of all, however, it is necessary to define an aesthetic of this kind, which is in itself quite complex.[12] This is largely due to the stylistic diversity that this tendency includes, something that makes it impossible to establish common idiomatic traits among its protagonists. For this reason Symbolism is usually characterized by the expression of an ideology or a sensibility linked to the feeling of mal-du-siècle, rather than through the choice of certain forms. If we cast our eyes over the specific theme here, the landscape, we shall get a glimpse of this diversity and, in any case, speak of styles, in the plural.

On one hand, for example, we observe a synthesis of pure, essential lines in certain works by Émile Bernard, Ferdinand Hodler, Albert Traschel, Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Charles Lacoste. And on the other, an air of vagueness, markedly suggestive in its formal imprecision, in different landscapes by Eugène Carrière, James McNeill Whistler, Fernand Khnopff, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, William Degouve de Nuncques, Franz von Stuck and Charles Marie Dulac. Whereas in the former group the prevalent feature is the line, the latter sort of compositions ought to be described rather as pictorial, given that the outlines of the figures appear blurred and hazy, as if the entire surface was covered by a sort of dull unifying mist that heightens the feeling of unreality.

Charles Marie Dulac (1897), in La pinetta, Ravenne (The Pine Grove, Ravenna, 1897), offers us precisely a representative example of this latter kind of landscape. The simplicity of its lines accentuates the feeling of silent holiness that invades the “exquisite hour” of dusk as painted by the artist. It is precisely the dimness of the light that characterizes this moment of the day which makes it possible to blur the outlines of the solitary trees standing out against the background of the composition, in a vague blotch that merges with the surrounding hillocks. The elements of the composition are not detailed precisely, but delicately blurred. Dulac had unquestionably managed to achieve his goal: “To idealize as much as possible without denaturing the true forms”.[13]

Charles Marie Dulac, La pinetta, Ravenne [The Pine Grove, Ravenna], 1897, oil on canvas, 34 x 44 cm. Private collection (Paris). From the book: An Ideal Country. The Symbolist Landscape in France, Girona, Fundació Caixa Girona, 2006, p. 79.

In Catalonia, and in the pages of La Vanguardia, the critic Raimon Casellas confessed to indeed feeling attracted by the art of Whistler and Carrière,[14] some months before Symbolism was officially introduced to Catalonia.[15] A year later, commenting on the 3rd General Fine Arts Exhibition, the author mentioned the new “neo-idealist” trends that were imbuing Modernisme and which meant a culmination in the evolution of the Catalan landscape, by its chief proponents Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas.[16] By going back to the art of Carrière and Whistler, among others, Casellas was pointing to the atmosphere as the indisputable protagonist of this kind of composition. In keeping with the new trends, the critic said, certain artists, moved by a desire to suggest rather than to imitate, were thus opting for a kind of painting that was “barely formulated, vague, indecisive, ‘volatile’”, which brought the more fleeting and fluctuating elements of nature to the fore, and which at times delicately veiled the forms represented with “amber-coloured vapours”, that “blur them and drown them”. It was therefore no longer a case of using nature merely as a source of inspiration: what really interested them was the pictorial externalization of the “conditions of the spirit”.

However, it must be said that only a few Catalan painters chose to make use of a truly suggestive aesthetic, similar to that of the foreign artists mentioned above. The landscapes that we could call Symbolist are not usually covered by a sort of dull misty gauze that blurs the outlines of the figures; rather, they have clearly defined lines. For this reason, Josep C. Laplana speaks strictly of naturalism on a formal level, although this, “traversed by an ever denser halo of mystery”, could actually be called spiritualized.[17]

One exception to this would be the dreamlike atmosphere recreated in several of the works of Joan Brull, such as Twilight Nymphs (c. 1898), Nymphs (c. 1904), Twilight or Fantasy (undated) or Daydream (c. 1906), which on the contrary do present the characteristics of a foggy ethereal aesthetic.[18] In 1897, Casellas himself stressed the “lyricism” that characterized the works exhibited by Brull at the Extraordinary Exhibition in the Sala Parés, mentioning the painter’s leanings “towards the vague representation of these fantasized beings, which seem more like remote apparitions than familiar reality”.[19]

Joan Brull, Twilight or Fantasy, undated, 64 x 100 cm. Private collection (Sant Feliu de Guíxols). From the book: Joan Brull: Reality and Dream, Girona, Fundació Caixa Girona, 2009, p. 66.

In his painting Twilight or Fantasy (undated) we thus see this model of the ideal woman, imbued with melancholy and mysticism, at one with the crepuscular nature surrounding her. A dim light that suggests the lonely evenings of Modest Urgell bathes every detail of the composition. The vegetation in the foreground is created using vibrant blotches whose outlines are merely insinuated. And the sky, dull and misty, seems to merge with a line of the horizon that stretches beyond the painting and gives us the feeling of being led towards the infinite.

Genio e follia[20]

The studies to which I have referred above, and which associate Symbolism with an alteration of the nervous system, do not describe any particular kind of Symbolist aesthetic in detail but talk formally and generally about this movement. Even so, as we shall see, they do highlight certain stylistic traits when exemplifying this visual perception disorder. They do not however refer to specific themes in the iconographical repertoire of Symbolism, so they do not talk specifically about the landscape, although the theories that I shall list below could be applied perfectly in the latter.

Following in the direction taken by Cesare Lombroso in Genio e follia (Genius and Madness, 1864), in which he linked creative genius directly to degeneration and madness,[21] Max Nordau associated a series of nervous and mental disorders with certain spiritual and artistic trends. He did this in his famous work Entartung (Degeneration, 1892),[22] comparing naturalist, Parnassian, Symbolist or decadent artists to common criminals. Unlike them, however, the artists in question are degenerates in their intentions, not in their actions; instead of materializing their perverse delirium, they just imagine it and recreate it, All of them, however, are equally egotistical (they think only of satisfying their own perversions), mentally unbalanced and a danger to society.

However, Nordau says, not all geniuses can be considered degenerates. Some conserve their moral rectitude and do not suffer any form of pathological or nervous disorder. Those on the receiving end of Nordau’s criticisms are none other than what the author calls “the man of the Twilight of the People”, a being possessed of a profound disgust for life that makes him continually abhor himself and the world around him. For this reason, says Nordau, he tries to fill his existential void by equipping himself with all kinds of “negative” and “sick” emotions; hence his inclination for the pessimistic and neo-Buddhist philosophies that were so in vogue at the time, such as those of Arthur Schopenhauer or Eduard von Hartmann.

Besides the negative nature of this kind of sensibility, Nordau condemns the danger of its influence on society. Thus the author speaks of those “false prophets” who poison society when proclaiming, “under the effects of an obsession”, “any literary dogma: realism, pornography, mysticism, Symbolism, diabolism”, which is, moreover, “violent, and penetrating, with overexcitement”.[23] At this point, the author announces the idea of analysing the above-mentioned aesthetic tendencies from a clinical point of view and thus demonstrating the “pathological nature” of each of them. In this way, Nordau tries to find a medical justification in order to explain the causes that give rise to this kind of cultural or spiritual manifestation. We see this, for example, in the case of the mysticism that feeds Symbolist and decadent tendencies:

The lack or the weakness of attention thus leads people to form, firstly, false judgements about the universe, about the qualities of things and the relationships between them. The conscience obtains a distorted and vague image of the outside world […] the representations – blurred outlines, barely recognizable – are perceived at the same time as the well-illuminated central perceptions; judgement becomes flickering and fleeting like the mists that the wind blows away in the morning; the conscience that perceives the spectrally transparent shapeless outlines tries in vain to penetrate them and interprets them uncertainly, as similarities with things or beings are attributed to the outlines of the clouds.[24]

From this point of view, what causes the mystic to feel that the world around him is an inexhaustible source of mysteries – which he can only penetrate through intuition, suspicion or guesswork – is none other than his neurological incapacity to perceive external phenomena correctly. Hence Nordau considers that if this type of sensibility feels attracted towards the more irrational aspects of existence, it is not the result of a free disposition of the soul, but rather the product of a “natural organic ineptitude for knowledge”.[25]

Citing a long list of names representative of the Symbolist movement – Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Adam, Paul Verlaine, Charles Morice, Jean Moréas, Joséphin Péladan, Joris-Karl Huysmans – Nordau also points out the inclination of these artists towards vagueness and dreaminess, given their scant ability to concentrate on objects in the outside world. As these are perceived defectively by their atrophied senses, the images that they later reproduce or evoke in their works will thus be “semi-clear, nebulously fluid”: in short, “embryos of barely formed thoughts”. We can see that these adjectives perfectly describe one of the several tendencies of Symbolist aesthetics that can be applied to the formal configuration of certain landscapes.

Within the specific field of literature, Émile Laurent’s study Decadent Poetry in the Face of Psychiatric Science (1897) also tried to prove that, in certain individuals, “poetry was merely a sort of externalization of a disorder of the brain, a manifestation of their mental inferiority”, although he did allow for two levels of degeneration: that typical of the “superior degenerates”, such as Verlaine or Moréas, and that of the simply “unbalanced”.[26] In the first group, the author admits, there are certainly some great literary figures, but if we study them closely we shall observe how “their weak side appears with the psychic or moral defects that give them the seal of degeneration”. In all cases we find, however, a similar style, with an excess of images, incoherence of ideas and an inclination to seek “damaged and bizarre rhythms, unforeseen drops, baroque assonances.”

Fin-de-siècle and the degeneration of race

At the same time, however, it is vital to point out the links between this type of degeneration, artistic or literary – with regard to both the spheres of formal aesthetics and of sensibility – and the decadence associated by certain authors with the notion of race. Nordau justifies the appearance of what he calls moral pathologies with the decline of the modern race, afflicting “the wealthy inhabitants of large cities, those who refer to themselves as ‘society’, whose decomposition I establish; it is they who have found the “end of the century” and to them the ‘end of the race’ is applied”.[27] Hence the real meaning of the title of his work, Entartung, the French equivalent of which is dégénérescence. But as Nordau himself admits, he is merely following the postulates upheld by a good number of supposedly scientific personality studies, which characterized this notion of decline, applied to the human race, from all points of view: biological, social and moral.

In order to understand these factors, we must bear in mind that at the end of the nineteenth century the notions of progress and evolution were synonymous, but the influence of Darwin’s theories conferred on them a new meaning, given that the latter could be interpreted in different ways. In this respect E. Ray Lankester’s study, entitled Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880), is significant. In it, some examples of degenerate evolution are described, on a zoological, historical and linguistic level.

In actual fact, what had changed was the way of perceiving evolution: instead of doing so in a linear, upward direction, it was now conceived in a circular direction. According to these precepts, and as happened with any organism, the universe, the race or the nation also experienced different periods of infancy, growth, maturity and decline, immersed in an organic cycle of development and decline. In the case of the European peoples, however, the problem was getting even worse, due both to the inexorable advance of their decline and to the besiegement by more vigorous peoples. We thus see that end-of-the-century fatalism was fed not only by the ideas of Darwin as applied to the individual – according to which he/she was merely the adapted product of a series of biological processes determined by heredity and environment – but it was also based on the theories associated with the decline of race and civilizations.

Concerning the degeneration of the individual, we find studies such as Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species, published by Doctor Benedict-Augustin Morel in 1857, in which almost all the chronic hereditary mental illnesses known up to then are described.[28] For his part the English psychologist Henry Maudsley, a follower of Auguste Comte’s positivism, managed to conclude his work Body and Will: In its Metaphysical, Physiological and Pathological Aspects (1883) with the idea that mankind is inevitably doomed:

[...] we fix attention too much perhaps on the process of evolution, to the overlooking of the correlative process of degeneration that is going on, not only in low but in high organisms [...] not only in body but in mind, not only in individuals but in societies... [...] What an awful contemplation, that of the human race bereft of its evolutional energy, disillusioned, without enthusiasm, without hope, without aspiration, without an ideal.[29]

Symbolism: suggestion and pathology

Based on this type of theory, and published the same year as the French translation of Nordau’s work saw the light, 1894, Pompeu Gener’s Literaturas Malsanas (Sick Literature)[30] is the critical counterpoint to this kind of tendency in the vitalist side of Catalan Modernisme.[31] Gener devotes his essay to studying the different literary “disorders” of the day, such as “deliquescent decadentism”, Symbolism, Zola-esque naturalism, Germanic pessimism or Russian nihilism. All of them, the Catalan author argues, are the product of a degeneration of the brain’s grey matter, caused or heightened by serious anaemia, an exhaustion of the senses resulting from sensual debauchery and drug addiction (to ether or cocaine, for instance).[32]

Describing the “decadent or deliquescent” aesthetic, Gener speaks of “delirium” and “nightmare”: “All its artistic effects consist of irrational paradoxes, conventional Symbolism and imitative harmonies”.[33] This aesthetic is found directly associated with an atrophying of the sensory nerves, which causes, as Nordau had already pointed out, the diminished and distorted perception of external reality. Furthermore, and stressing the phenomenon of synaesthesia – or the correspondence of the different senses – as Charles Baudelaire had expressed so significantly in his poem of the same name,[34] Gener criticizes some of the essential postulates of Symbolism harshly:

[…] The Symbolists […] exaggerating to an incomprehensible degree the colourful and sonorous tendency of the Romantics, end up denying the idea and confusing the fate of literature with that of music by saying that its purpose is the mere suggestion of vague states of human sensibility […] they get lost in such abstract and quintessential nebulous transpositions that they eventually dissolve in incoercible sensorial metaphysics. They are gongoristas of feeling.[35]

The images formulated by this type of trend, therefore, do not constitute a clear description of specific phenomena; rather, they become metaphors of indefinable moods and feelings. It is not so much a case of expressing or communicating concepts, but, more than anything, of making the spectator feel and of “supplying the heart with the confused feeling of things”, especially through “symbols” and an aesthetic based on pure “suggestion”. Seeing as the Symbolists, the mystics and the decadent perceive reality “vaguely” and “hazily”, thus faking the feelings that their senses perceive, their language becomes incoherent, obscure and nebulous.

Gener’s description below could undoubtedly be applied to the formal configuration of certain Symbolist landscapes:

Painting should work by visual feeling and not because it is a different order. People have hitherto been concerned with the true drawing and the true colour. These artists make sure that they overlook it, blur the objects, print the different planes, make the horizons vanish, dull the colours, grey the paint […] getting away from the real and graphic detail.[36]

It must be said, however, that Gener does not refer to any particular artists; rather, when he mentions a name, it belongs to the realm of literature. In this same field, Josep Falp i Plana, along similar lines to the studies I have just mentioned, characterizes as suggestive, “neurasthenic” and “decadent” a type of poetry emerging due to a profound nervous imbalance, which is based on the premise of art for art’s sake and which is due, above all else, to the refined “language of the feelings”.[37]

Notwithstanding that, we must be clear that, whether on a local or a European level, what this kind of postulating ultimately condemned was not so much the external or aesthetic expression of Symbolism but certain precepts associated with its ideology or sensibility, such as an excess of idealism, escapism, pessimism, daydreaming and the lack of social commitment and action. All these aspects were considered unhealthy and decadent, in complete contrast to the notions of robustness, vigour, vitality and morality. Gener himself, taking as his model the Nietzschean superman (Übermensch), compared the ideas of “beauty, life, morality and pleasure” to those of “ugliness, death, immorality and pain” that, in his opinion, were to be found associated with this kind of trend.[38]

Whatever his intentions, we have been able to see that, in conclusion, different authors used a type of supposedly scientific argument, inspired above all on clinical psychology, in order to discredit cultural trends such as Symbolism, which were an attack on the ideological and aesthetic values that they upheld. And also, that these arguments were used for the purpose of justifying the choice of certain aesthetic forms that we find applied to the representation of a certain kind of landscape.

Whatever the case, we should note the close ties that were established between different spheres – the formal or artistic, the human, the biological – with regard to the same concept: that of nature.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE WHITE ISLAND

Nina Ferrer

Santiago Rusiñol’s arrival in Ibiza, on 23rd August 1912, was quite an event. His artistic and literary fame had gone before him. He stayed there twice, the first time from 22nd August to 6th September 1912, and the second, the following year, between 13th February and 20th March. Rusiñol arrived on the island interested in the archaeological sites, about which his friend Josep Costa, “Picarol”, had spoken to him. He was not only interested in the archaeology though: he also published seven articles in L’Esquella de la Torratxa and painted five canvases.

He spent the first stay getting to know the island. It seems that he spent the mornings at Puig des Molins and other archaeological sites and in the afternoons he went on excursions around the island. During this stay he prepared his book L’illa de la calma (The Island of Calm),[1] and at night, in the tertúlies (informal gatherings of intellectuals) that were held at the Fonda de la Marina, he read extracts from the book to the people there. It was during the second stay, however, when he had time to do some painting, write and excavate.

Santiago Rusiñol Blue Patio (Ibiza) 1912-1913, oil on canvas, 85 x 73 cm. Private collection.

The commentaries (glosses) about Ibiza, entitled L’illa blanca (The White Island), which he signed as Xarau, appeared in the “Glosari” of L’Esquella de la Torratxa. The title came from the impression that the light in Ibiza, reflected on the whitewashed houses, made on him. He used an article that he had published in September 1912 as the basis for writing the first commentary about the island, “Iviça”:

The first impression that this island makes on you is the feeling of being dazzled. One comes from the blue, a blue so bright that it seems like a majolica tile, and suddenly, as if someone had thrown a beam of light in your eyes, they place in front of you a row of houses so dazzlingly white that it seems your eyes have been opened to an unknown light.[2]

The commentaries of L’illa blanca, published from 28th February to 18th May 1913, show us Ibiza as Rusiñol saw it. It was in the first one that the white image of Ibiza was associated with its name, something that still endures:

From the white of cream, to that of agate; from that of the seagull, to that of the snow; from that of the swan, to that of marble; each cottage has its white that gives it an appearance, and seen together, by the naked eye, they seem like a sound box tuned to a quarter tone, which could be said to be in the key of sol (a pun on the word sol: it means both sun and the key of G).[3]

The town appeared before him as “a swimming scallop, or an excavated piece of glass. It has iridescence of all colours and mother of pearl of every hue”.[4] We encounter the writer looking through the painter’s eyes. Ibiza will be an island of contrasts.

If in his commentaries about Ibiza the colour stands out, both when he describes the landscape and the tombs or the people, it seems natural that he should have decided to paint. According to the artist he did five paintings.[5] We know four of them: a street in Ibiza, a patio, a view of the town and another view, this one of Puig des Molins. We know the whereabouts of the first two; we only know about the other two from publications of the time. Most likely, of these five paintings only three made it to Barcelona; therefore, the other two must have remained on the island or gone to Valencia. In the exhibition held in the Sala Parés in January 1914 there were only two of them: Ibiza and A Street in Ibiza.

In none of Rusiñol’s pictures of Ibiza that we know does the human figure appear. They are all of solitary landscapes or places. Patios were one of the motifs present in his work from early on – solitary patios or with a figure. But the solitude is momentary. We know that someone has been there and that somebody will pass through there. Maybe in an instant someone will appear to water the plants and the trees; on the other hand, in the painting all is peace and quiet, serenity, calm. In the first commentary he tells us that the houses of Ibiza, on the inside, remind him of those in Sitges: “Now, the houses, seen from the inside, remind one of Sitges, before bourgeois art devastated it.”[6] Therefore, the blue Ibizan patio probably has to do with this parallel. When Rusiñol went to Sitges for the first time in 1891 he was amazed by the same thing that impressed him when he arrived on Ibiza 20 years later: the light.

The white walls of these open spaces allowed him to reflect the play of the light, so white that it seemed to reflect the blue of the sky or the sea that, in this case, surrounds the island. In the Ibizan patio the blue appears in the background; it is a curtain of wall that gives the whole picture a bluish tone. If we look closely at the foreground, which we see afterwards in a second glance, we shall see the house flowers, those we look after in plant pots, and the floor. Flowers and floor, in warm colours: yellows, oranges, reds, browns … in this way he makes up for the cold colours of the wall, the staircase, the flowers on top of the wall, and the almond tree blossom. This tree, the almond, which he had painted many times, especially in Majorca, tells us that the picture was painted during the second stay, because at the time of year he went the almond trees must have been blossoming.

The Ibiza that Rusiñol shows us is a nearby place, part of the Catalan-speaking Countries, although hardly anyone was familiar with it. In the first commentary he makes it clear that it is “a sister island, another bit of Catalonia that pokes its head out of the blue; another piece of silver, that swims in the middle of a large enamel.”[7] Therefore, he is not talking about an exotic faraway place; it is not an adventure, like that of other travellers who went to the island. He is talking about “us”, it is part of what “we” are, although we do not know it: “It may be said that we do not know Iviça, which is so Catalan.”[8]

In the second commentary, “The Bay”, published on 7th March, Rusiñol reflects on life with the sea as the islanders’ inseparable companion, conditioning their lives: “These tiny harbours, like the one in Ibiza, have the gift of making you love them. They have the gift, without doing anything, of one being able to while away the time there; one does not really know if this time is real or a dream.”[9]

The isolation, letting the time go by, leads the individual to not really know where the real and the unreal begin. The world of dreams, of the mysterious, of the fleeting instant, is part of the Symbolist aesthetic to which Rusiñol had adhered many years earlier. In paintings and in some of his writings, the idea of an unreal time is a constant feature. The artist seeks the places that make it possible to cut himself off from the modern world, from the noise that invades everything, preventing the soul from resting.

The sea, which for travellers like Rusiñol had a meaning that it has now lost, the sea as a frontier, as a barrier, defined any island. Even so, the sea was much more than a simple obstacle – it was the representation of the mystery of the unknown, of what lay beyond our world. It was the experience of adventure: “Beyond Majorca, following the blue path of the sea, this sea that erases ships’ footprints so that the route may be a mystery.”[10]

But just as it may be an obstacle, also, especially for Mediterranean culture, it is the representation of the voyage. The sea means leaving, going to get to know the other. It is beginning a journey whose point of departure we know, but we do not know quite where it will take us, or when we will return: “They come back sunburnt, they come back brave, accustomed to everything, with their eyes full of the blueness of the sky and the sea, and thus they are mysterious, these men that have sailed, that have been silent heroes and who carry in their gaze the brilliance of so many lands”.[11]

Living from the sea or in the sea means many things. It means living enclosed in a space that will necessarily be small, and at the same time living in the immensity of a space whose physical limits we seldom see. It means living far from everything and everyone. It means living dependent on nature because if the wind blows you cannot go out, if it rains the sea gets angry, if there is a storm it defeats mankind. Therefore, those who live from the sea have their peculiarities: “no one speaks on these boats; the sea, the wind or the solitude have accustomed them to not speaking.”[12] The sea, as we were saying, is the element that makes it possible to get away from everything that normally surrounds us. The solitude of the ship in the middle of the sea following its course, the contemplation of the sea from the land, the power of the element, the mysteries of the deep, the beauty of the reflections. The sea attracts, it pushes.

In “The Bay” he tells us about life in the town based on the sea. The small harbour where life goes on peacefully hides the people’s everyday life, the small joys and the everyday miseries:

They do not talk; they go about their business. They load, they stow, they loosen cable, they tie here, they untie there, and in a moment, without saying anything, not even goodbye, or going on land, you will see a boat of that sort weighing anchor, hoisting a sail, like a huge flag, and beginning to glide, and to rock, and making its way, and in no time it is round the lighthouse, and you can see it swimming out to sea, like a ghostly seagull.[13]

During his stays on Ibiza, Rusiñol centred his attention principally on archaeology and the world surrounding it. He got first-hand experience of what excavating was. The island became his particular archaeological experience. Therefore he decided to paint a view of Puig des Molins and write two commentaries about archaeology:

This author has seen an excavation and has even excavated in this burial ground, and in practice he has realized that there is nothing more interesting than looking through these drawers, these chests and desks, where the objects were kept that thousands of years ago the men who would have to sleep in those tombs had most loved.[14]

There are quite a few reproductions of the View of Puig des Molins in texts about Ibiza; the first is from the same year, 1913, in an article about “Ebusitan Archaeology” by Arturo Pérez-Cabrero in which the painting is attributed to Rusiñol. The fact that it appeared linked to Arturo Pérez-Cabrero suggests that the painting might not have left the island. Its whereabouts are now unknown, but I know of a copy on the island. The motif is the most famous archaeological site in Ibiza, the Ebusus burial ground, from where Rusiñol took his archaeological collection.

Interest in everything that evoked the past is a constant feature in his life but, obviously, where it is most clearly seen is in his hobby of collecting, in the wrought ironwork, in archaeology.

In L’illa interior (The Inner Island) he tells us what it is like to excavate, to discover unknown treasures and take them out of the ground. He talks about the archaeological site of Puig des Molins and the burials found there. These tombs were what interested him the most. For Rusiñol the island is a huge site. The remains of pottery, utensils, bones, are all around, “wherever you go, wherever there is a vineyard sowed, a cemetery.”[15] He also describes the experience of excavating: “and there is nothing more impressive than seeing the shadows of the men inside those cisterns that communicate with one another, through cracked and mysterious walls…”.[16] Of the emotion caused by coming across the secrets that were guarded by a land at that time still little excavated and little known:

At times one stops again, and from the mud a figure emerges, and it is so wet and so palpitating, that it really seems as if that earth had given birth to it; at times one finds a ring and it seems that the gold has been immortalized; not one bit of its metal has lost its virginity, after so many years of darkness.[17]

These tombs desecrated again and again by all the civilizations that have passed through the island, from the Romans to the present day, have inside them mysterious treasures to be discovered. To uncover what the earth has protected from the indiscreet gaze of men for centuries, with the doubt of whether the map has brought us to the right place to dig, is what makes the act of unearthing objects hidden for thousands of years even more exciting.

In the next commentary, “The Excavators”, he writes about the people that frequent excavations. Of them, he singles out three kinds: the collectors, of which, he says, he is one; the scrapers, who are only interested in digging and finding remains, with whom he now also feels identified; and, lastly, the archaeologists, whom he makes the butt of all his irony. The archaeologists only want bits, pieces, clues; the archaeologist is a scientist who is only bothered about data, data with which to classify and check others. Once all the data have been obtained they put the bits back together and the object, reconstructed, ends up in the hands of a collector or in the attic: “Glorious pieces that, when he dies, the housekeeper throws out of the window, because, since he has not had time to marry due to studying so much, he usually lives with a housekeeper, and it is she who liquidates the science.”[18]

We therefore have to be thankful that he has left everything written down in a book, because otherwise those bits would have to be dug up again.[19]

The collection was always open to anybody who wished to visit it and when he died he donated it to the State, as has happened in many other cases. An article that appeared in the magazine Museum in 1917 tells us what the artist felt about his collection:

Those who are collectors like Rusiñol should not be surprised that in Ibiza he felt moved to explore on his own, for the joy of giving himself the surprise of finding what has been buried there for a while… And now, this whole reminder of the Phoenicians who colonized the island; now Rusiñol looks at all this with ineffable satisfaction and meticulously shows it to strangers and friends, making him observe all the examples so that he does not miss one.

[…] He saw all this as it came to light, for all these reasons, being more fragile and not visible, he felt a double concern: firstly, that it would crumble to dust and secondly that the findings would not correspond to the exploration work that he had done.[20]

Rusiñol probably did not want to admit that those objects could be admired just as scientific pieces. At the end of the nineteenth century archaeological objects went from being an article to be enjoyed aesthetically to being a scientific datum. The Symbolists could not accept this archaeological concept that converted the pieces into pure matter without any reminiscence of the soul of time and beauty.

The collection of archaeological pieces from Ibiza that is conserved in Cau Ferrat in Sitges is one of the most important collections of ancient glass from that site. Almost in its entirety, the museum’s pre-Roman and Roman glass collection comes from the island, from the sites at Puig des Molins. They are unique objects, receptacles for cosmetics or perfumes and objects of adornment, with a purely aesthetic function, that are usually amulets or representations of deities, and also utensils such as jars, bottles, lids and so on. It is also a very beautiful collection. On Ibiza there was a place devoted exclusively to conserving the pieces that were being found at the sites; 1913 was the sixth year of existence of the Archaeological Museum of Ibiza, which had been opened in 1907.

A Street in Ibiza is a view of one of the streets of Dalt Vila, the walled town. It seems to have been done from the garden where the Ibizan painter and photographer Narcís Puget had his photographic gallery. In the foreground we see an empty street, in which the only presences are the shadows of the surrounding buildings. These shadows make the white of the houses stand out and the gaze continue towards the houses in the background, whose white also contrasts with the blue sea and the beach of Talamanca. On either side one senses the presence of gardens. There are no people, just the empty street where one may enjoy the landscape alone, with nothing to distract, where one can enjoy being alone with oneself.

Santiago Rusiñol, A Street in Ibiza, 1913, oil on canvas. Image reproduced on the cover of Ilustració Catalana, year 12, No. 602, 20 December 1914.

What is more, wherever there are walls, there is usually a passageway to the top, from where one can see the whole scene; a calm sunny walk, where there is no room for cars to pass; a specific place for going to sit down, far from everything and everyone; moreover, the walls are a frame that encircles the town; a frame where the sun has been painting all the colours of light; an immense gravestone on which it seems that the most culminating facts about the village have to be inscribed.[21]

One of the things he finds on the island is that the past is part of the people’s everyday lives, in the houses, in the archaeological discoveries and in the walls. Walls that some were considering demolishing, as they were no longer useful and thus it would be easier to enlarge the town. He begins the commentary “The walls of Iviça”, published on 4th April, by saying: “The experts say that the walls of Iviça are no longer any use, and they perhaps owe their beauty to this uselessness, this fallen majesty.”[22] Among other things, the decadentism that Rusiñol had been upholding for many years strove to recover everything that belonged to the past and restore to it the value it had lost. It meant escaping from the present in search of beauty in the testimonies of the past. In the same tone, the last paragraph says:

All this, all these walls, are useless, as has been said; in a trice the modern canons would have torn them down; they are stones that are usually sustained by the power of tradition; but we are so tired of seeing ugly things that they call useful; all the cities in the world are becoming so cellular, so from the mould, so hospicianes, that we think “Let there be old things that have ceased to be of use for what they were of use and which are useful for something else: for the repose that the eyes find when gazing upon ancient stones, tired of Porlant [sic] cement.”[23]

Rusiñol wants to make it clear that he finds new cities and buildings cold. Useful but impersonal. On the other hand, the monuments of the past, even though when they were new they might not have been beautiful, and the patina that time has given them has conferred upon them a beauty that they never had, grasp the importance of history. In this commentary we realize how important the aesthetic of the ruin had been during the nineteenth century. The styles of W. Morris and Ruskin had been quite successful in Catalonia and were followed by many Modernistes. Morris advocated the revival of the arts and crafts, a discourse that in Catalonia had great repercussions in Modernista architecture, and Ruskin, the aesthetic of the ruin: buildings became more valuable with time, nature had to be allowed to invade walls, buildings, and monuments; decadence is a fact of life.

The walls, moreover, have plants clinging to their cracks, which only grow there. They are plants that seem to have originated in the soul of the stones, and trickle downwards, forming garlands of greenery; plants that, like falcons, only make their nest in the crags where the hand of man cannot reach; plants of hermitages or ruins. We do not know how Linnaeus classifies them, but we would say “Monument solitaries”.[24]

Abandoned monuments, ruins, may not be functional, but that does not mean that they are lifeless; nature continues to give it to them, conquering architectural spaces that man has built and then forgotten. This is the case with these plants that invade the walls of Ibiza. Time has to be allowed to decorate what man no longer uses, to let nature penetrate these spaces. These abandoned gardens, these ruins, the walls of Ibiza, represent mankind’s struggle with time and nature.

The walls are also useful to him as a place where he can get away from the world, to enjoy the solitude, the view of the town, to escape from “Portland cement”, bourgeois life. The walls, the witnesses of the past, the ruins, the abandoned gardens, have this double value: history and withdrawal. They are spaces built by the hand of man, who has abandoned them because they do not fulfil their original function, but the history of these places gives them an aura, an unattainable beauty. The existence of these places allows modern man to escape from the reality surrounding him, the ugly reality of the nineteenth century.

He dedicates the last commentary to “The people of Ibiza”. Published on 18th May, it is where he shows most restraint. In it he tells us about the people of the island and their customs with the respect that in some way he had promised to maintain for them. Like the great majority of the visitors that Ibiza received in those days, Rusiñol felt attracted by the customs that the people had kept “unaltered for centuries”, but he was also aware of the impossibility of maintaining this immutability: “It is obvious that this is being lost, that the customs are becoming more peaceful, that the lady is no longer defended as in the heroic days of this island, but where are traditions not lost today?”[25]

His view of the people is not too unlike that of other travellers; the difference lies in “how” he describes them. Like other visitors, what catch the Catalan artist’s eye about the customs are the countrywomen’s traditional dress and jewellery, the courtship and the uc (cry, shout). But he tries not to place himself above the people of Ibiza in order not to hurt their feelings, so he maintains a distant attitude not very usual in him. He spends very little time on the island to understand its Ibizan traditions, but he is very respectful. In his description of the uc,[26] as in that of the courtship, he uses the same stereotypes as almost every traveller does. They suggest that an Ibizan man rejected by a woman would try to kill any other suitor. But this is not savage conduct; for Rusiñol, this attitude ennobles him. The Ibizan man, according to the writer, has something ancestral, primitive in his customs and in his nature; he is a man as men used to be:

These men are good, they are honest; here they do not know what theft is; they are generous to their fellow man in everything except honour. No gentleman, in any period, has ever carried a sword in his belt with greater dignity and nobility than the Ibizan has the pistol; […] These Ibizan men unquestionably have noble blood in their veins.[27]

I think that this attitude of respect is due to a request made to him by the people of Ibiza during his first stay. “Knowing the friendliness and affection with which he observes our customs it is to be hoped that the famous writer, in his new work that will enrich his valuable library, will do us more justice than other authors informed by people who did not truly know our customs; had they known them they would have shown very bad taste upon making the observations that we see in ‘Los muertos mandan’, the only bad things about the said work.”[28] In 1909 the writer from Valencia Blasco Ibáñez had published Los muertos mandan (The Dead Command), a novel set in Ibiza. In it he makes references to the customs of the country people that the Ibizans did not like one little bit. They considered that he had unfairly portrayed them as savages and primitives. Rusiñol includes the request: “About those who live there we shall speak in the Glosaris to come. Such strange things have been said about them, and they have been seen so quickly, that I do not feel they have been understood.”[29] Therefore, he feels compelled to speak about the customs of Ibiza with respect, with caution, in order not to make the same mistake as Blasco Ibáñez.

The Ibiza that we find in the commentaries of L’illa blanca has different meanings, and so he paints it for us in different colours. On one hand, Rusiñol tells us that it is white, lively, cheerful, bright; on the other, the island hides in its interior the mystery of an unknown world, a world yet to be discovered. This combination of light and darkness affects the people of Ibiza, who he tells us are dark blue. They live in the light, they live surrounded by the blue of the sea, but at the same time, they live on top of a world of tombs, and that makes them gloomy. The island guards secrets of past civilizations, and not just in the silent walls of the town or the caves of Puig des Molins; the customs of the Ibizan, from the dress to the uc, are age-old, they belong to the past, although, unfortunately, they will soon be gone.

He finds a world where modernity has not yet fully arrived and, therefore, one can live there without hurrying, without artificial needs, at peace with nature and with time.

Rusiñol never returned to Ibiza after 1913; in fact the island was a stopping-off place where he went to look for what he was interested in: the archaeological collection. We may therefore say that Ibiza remained in his memory as an archaeological experience: he got to know the sites, they “let” him dig and he acquired one of the most important archaeological collections from Ibiza, for both the quality and the beauty of the pieces.

“OH, WORKER, WORKER POET!”
 An overview of the concept of nature based on the literary work of Ignasi Iglésias

Antoni Galmés Martí

I shall venture, here, to take a little look at the work of Ignasi Iglésias, who, due to these circumstances that often befall the “greats” of our dramatic literature, has been pushed into the background. Oh yes, the background, because what other word can be used when talking about an author who deals with universal themes, praised in his day even by scholars of dramatic literature and placed on the pedestal along with the sacred Guimerà and Rusiñol, and who nowadays is virtually unknown?[1] We no longer say “performed”, that would be too much … Barely half a dozen publications refer to him tangentially and there is evidently no monographic study.[2]

But I shall look at Iglésias from this angle, the adventure of analysing him from a perspective that unites the natural with the cultural, considering the latter aspect to be an extension of the former. Yet if the reader finds these two concepts a touch ethereal and abstract, perhaps I might be a little more specific and – seeing as our author always writes from the urban point of view – associate nature with the city.

Nature and the city, when talking about literature, and especially dramatic literature, are as one. With Zola, nature takes on the status of a “slice of life”[3] when performed on stage. Art and life, so often hand in hand, are now placed on the stage in an urban context. In Catalonia, the attempts that were to some extent precursors of naturalism, i.e., realism, had arrived late and debilitated, and they immediately became the costumisme (literature of local customs and manners) that we all know. However, the same thing did not happen with naturalism, which quickly took flight thanks to the insistence of Antoni Tutau, the first actor at the Tívoli, who later put on An Enemy of the People, which so dazzled our playwright, Ignasi Iglésias.

Moreover, Iglésias moves between several fields. Although he looks at reality through the eyes of a scientist, as the good naturalist author does, I include him among the earliest manifestations of regenerationist Modernisme. Furthermore, Xavier Fàbregas shows us that, at the end of his life, without disowning his ideas, he finally accepted an environmental possibilism.[4] So for all the political content that his plays had to begin with, as he grew older and – let us remember – began to take an active part in the city’s political life, he started to lose that revolutionary urge and accepted the bases of a more bourgeois theatre.

And as if it was not difficult enough to get down to business, I have to justify the title that I have chosen for my article that, to start with, does not mention nature. The title comes from some lines that he included in the presidential speech of the Jocs Florals (poetry competition) in Sabadell on 3rd August 1902 in a whirl of popularist poetry, Romantic even, in the most aesthetic sense of the word. All at once, reading this speech, Walt Whitman comes to mind; his “Oh Captain! My Captain”, that lovely prayer to the poet’s father. Or perhaps he only used these words (“Oh worker, worker poet!”) because, like Whitman, Iglésias read Emerson, and like him, he was searching for words radiating vital heat, crystallizing in the heart of the working population, among the poets of life?

His work

He was born in Sant Andreu, near Barcelona, in 1871 and died in Barcelona in 1928. This made him a citizen who only reached the age of 57. Death came for him when he was still able-bodied, like many of his characters.[5] Thus, he bid this world farewell a middle-aged man, but still young.

His father was a railway worker, for the Nord company. Although he was a proletarian, as a worker he enjoyed a privileged situation, with several promotions throughout his life. He moved with his family to Lleida, where Iglésias lived during his youth (up to the age of 17). For this reason he was a well brought up, well-educated young man, but with the blood of a proletarian. He lived “among railway workers; all the romantic and exalted dreams of proletarian demands, all the mute protests of the poorest people, all the raucousness of the anarchists, and that desire, that need shone all around, to create a new society, fairer and better, it resounded in the bottom of his heart and began shaping it, just as hammer blows do with white-hot metal”, the playwright Ambrosi Carrion told us.[6]

He studied painting, but he ended up in the theatre. From the last years of the nineteenth century onwards he produced almost one play a year. He became very popular and his work had an air of social justice about it that pleased people from all walks of life: from the proletariat, who saw themselves identified, to the well-to-do classes close to federalism, socialism and even anarchism.

In 1902 he married Emiliana Vinyes, and they had no children. This is, for the moment, virtually the most interesting aspect of his life story, as his entire oeuvre would be imbued with this tragic sense: the man who stood up for life and fair treatment for the workers, who placed nature above all else, even though he set the action in the most industrial part of the working-class neighbourhoods … it was impossible for him to conceive a child. He later devoted himself to politics, which on several occasions led him to sit on Barcelona City Council. He died at the age of 57, after spending a long holiday at his house in Vallvidrera. It was October.

From what standpoint does Iglésias write? In other words, why or for whom does Iglésias write? He was considered, as we well know, the poet of the working class. The poor people’s poet, as Joan Maragall called him.[7] One might think that this author’s creative drive lies in the idealistic wish to change the world, namely, the desire to discover the ambition of posterity in art and literature, even though it was well hidden. It may be one interpretation, but it is not enough.

Iglésias did not write lyrically, as did Guimerà, nor satirically, as did Rusiñol – borrowed from Pitarra and improved – but driven by a preconceived idea, a vocation and, finally, because he believed that he was doing his duty by going in search of the vital roots of his people and, even better, of one of its classes: the proletariat.

There is an anecdote about his life, full of pragmatism, that it is worth mentioning. As he himself said, upon seeing the difficulties he was faced with at the Llotja where he studied painting under the direction of Joaquim Vayreda, he said that he wanted to be a playwright. He did not want to be a novelist, or a poet … he wanted to write plays, and that was what he would do, and he added: “If I haven’t succeeded by the age of 25, I shall give up”.[8] He was 19. He wanted to be a playwright and he was one. Of course, the theatre then had enormous social prestige at all levels of society. But Iglésias, as Ambrosi Carrion says, did not love the theatre. He made it no offerings nor did he feel dazzled by all the paraphernalia. He wanted to be a playwright and in this decision there was something mysterious, obscure, humble. He was always aware of the dignity of being poor and having to work.

He was, then, a worker. Oh! A worker poet.

I shall take a few extracts from his lyrical work to prove the literary and social talent of our author. It is the composition entitled “Vetllant”, which begins his book of poems dedicated to Emili Guanyavents: Ofrenes (Offerings). It is, as you will see, a perfect synthesis of that proletarian lyricism that was going to change the world:

Withdrawn like an old man at home,

I spend the winter nights working.

Whether it is icy or snowing outside,

I count the hours

with my head on the table, meditating.

I work joyfully, overcoming the cold,

surrounded by the silence of the night [...]

I weave love songs while my neighbours rest,

sleeping sweetly and peacefully,

humble workers, who in their glorious dreams perhaps comment on

their destinies. [...]

And morning comes,

with the sky always dark and blackened,

the sun far, far away:

in winter it does not hurry to rise.

Even so, the workers around me

Are cheered by three knocks on the cold door,

creaking and sounding like dead wood,

like a drum beat in the distance

with an awakening sound, that, walking,

is saying in a loud voice,

what time it is, up the street, knocking, knocking...[9]

It is, as we can see, very descriptive poetry. Of course, listening to or reading this poem, the worker who gets up early and is, still, forced to work more than eight hours a day in the coldness of the factory … must necessarily feel identified with it.

However, when he writes poems in which he tries to represent nature as the opposite of work, he is not so successful.

Birds, birds!

Flowers flying and

singing!

Winged jewels,

joy of children and enchantment of the elderly!

Sighs of the world

that, in the light, are transformed

into little hearts, small and winged:

how cheerful are

your playful songs![10]

We see that it is an idealized nature, indebted to Romanticism and twee beyond measure. Of course Iglésias writes for the city people, and he uses nature to free them from the weight of culture. He is an idealist.

Therefore, in the work of Ignasi Iglésias, nature is not the reconstruction of a characteristic world that has to be contrasted with the corrupt world of the city, as in Guimerà, because one should not contrast the “highlands” of Manelic with the “lowlands” of Marta, or the mystical world of Saïd with the Christian purity of Blanca. No, because Guimerà contrasts. He creates two worlds and offers them for you to choose. Of course he takes a stance: what poet does not? But he leaves the door open for you to choose.

Iglésias starts from the social situation. You cannot choose. You are a worker and you will be for the rest of your life. And from thereon if he makes you choose anything it is whether you wish to live well or better, but working. Therefore, nature – far from the city – is a fantasy, it is a romantic world: a point of arrival. Not for nothing, in the play Les garses (The Magpies),[11] one of the characters dreams of building a cottage for himself in the mountains and withdrawing from the world, in the hypothetical and unlikely event that he wins the lottery. On the contrary, he will have to continue working and working … as is natural.

We can divide the work of Iglésias into three main sections: a large body of work for the theatre comprising 39 plays; a brief but generous body of poetry, plus one story, and a large number of essays and newspaper articles.

At the same time, Iglésias’s work for the theatre comprises three periods: an early period, that of his youth; a second period of splendour, and a third during which he writes middle-class dramas.[12]

The early period

If we listen to Ambrosi Carrion when he makes what is perhaps the first attempt at a critical study, we find that his early work ranged from the pieces written during his youth in Lleida (1886) to the drama Fructidor (1906).[13]

They are plays full of attempts, heavily influenced by Ibsen and strong on socialist essay and thesis. He would gradually cease to see himself mirrored in Ibsen on a formal level, but the backdrop would remain as his plays developed and started moving towards more mature literature.

Little is known of his time in Lleida. Scholars who include it in their respective histories of Catalan theatre say only that he lived there as a youngster, due to his father moving to Lleida to work as manager of the engine depot, that he was very happy there and that when he returned to Barcelona he was 17 years old.

He did his batxillerat (A-levels) there, but he also made some very noisy gestures. His obsession with the theatre made him even more of a firebrand. It was at the Celleret in Lleida – which as its name says, was a cellar – with stairs and a large room with a vaulted ceiling and a small stage, and at the far end, some letters that read “El Parnaso Leridano”, where Iglésias worked as an actor and director. People paid a small admission charge to enter the Celleret, and the plays that were put on there on holiday afternoons were advertised through blackboards and posters, some of which Iglésias painted himself. After that, those youngsters not much older than 15 moved to the Fonda d’Espanya and set up their theatre named “Cervantes”, obviously going up in the world, as they put on comedy in the afternoons and evenings of holidays. The most successful works were some of Pitarra’s Singlots poetics (Poetic Hiccups). On this stage he performed his first play in Castilian, La fuerza del orgullo (The Power of Pride), written in verse and in the style of Pitarra, in which he played all the parts in the story.

At the age of 17 he returned to Sant Andreu, and after trying to be a painter, he threw himself into writing plays. His first works on a social theme were: El remordiment (Remorse) and L’ocellaire (The Bird Catcher), both from 1890; L’esclau del vici (The Slave to Vice), 1891, and Sortint de l’ou (Hatching from the Egg), premiered in 1892. Els extrems de la vida (The Ends of Life), Toc d’oració (Call to Prayer), La nit de Sant Joan (St. John’s Eve), La barca del mal temps (The Bad Weather Boat) and De cos present (Funeral) were all from 1893. He performed all of them with his amateur company at the Casino Santandreuenc, and grew as a playwright, always in amateur theatre.

Ibsen had arrived on Catalan stages and had dazzled Maragall and Yxart, who offered him to the young people through their press notes. Antoni Tutau, an actor from L’Empordà, along with Carles Costa and Josep Maria Jordà (up-and-coming journalists and theatre fans), put on An Enemy of the People in Catalan.

Then, Ibsen was seen more as a philosopher and a sociologist than a dramatic poet. At that time the Scandinavian author was admired far more for his symbolic and conceptual work than for his poetry, according to Maragall: “Do not forget that Enric Ibsen is the idol of a certain kind of modern youth; and do not forget either that poets and philosophers are usually the precursors of great human movements.”[14]

However, despite being a point of reference, Iglésias was quite amazed by him and put on the play Espectres (Spectres) at the Teatre Olimpo, with his amateur theatre company and all the people from L’Avenç long before Adrià Gual’s legendary production of it. This was reflected by Gual in his memoirs, Mitja vida de teatre (Half Life Theatre):

A project prior to the Teatre Íntim company was the performance of Espectres at the Teatre Olimpo in Carrer de Mercaders, aspiring to the formation of a group designed to show up the weaknesses and terrors of our intimate theatre, and for the record I say all this benevolently and without rancour. Iglésias and I were always good companions.

It seems however, that this version of Ibsen’s classic did not go in the direction that the Norwegian author had proposed, as Adrià Gual continued:

Those Espectres were very interesting because they demonstrated that the works of the masters, when they are based on profoundly human feelings, make themselves heard, even when interpreted in a manner wholly contrary to what was intended, without this supposing a challenge or a discourtesy to the efforts of those esteemed companions.[15]

Because Iglésias, along with Jaume Brossa and Pere Coromines, was to become the forerunner of a genuine theatre of attitude and ideas, typical of the regenerationist Modernista theatre after the turn of the century with the Teatre Independent. Els conscients (the Conscious), L’escorçó (The Viper) and Fructidor are perhaps the most important works of that period. We must not forget, however, that the trilogy Els primers freds (The First Frosts, 1892-1893) was also premiered in that period.

Els conscients was first performed at the Casinet de Sant Andreu by the amateur company L’Avançada, and it later went to the Teatre Líric, then directed by his future good friend Enric Morera. To be precise, we know from a special issue devoted to the death of the author published by the magazine L’Escena Catalana, with no publication date, that these performances took place from 24th July to 22nd October 1898, but the first attempts in the hands of L’Avançada date from 1892.

What Els conscients does show us is this idolatry of Ibsen: the play is imbued with sociological themes such as the right to live one’s own life and with individualism. The characters appear in it as symbolic entities, not at all as flesh-and-blood men and women. They embody love, youth and passions in the abstract, not specifying them at all. It is a play written in four acts, typical of the realist and naturalist theatre that developed from the French pièce bien faite. The action is set in a room in a farmhouse in the mountains, converted, due to its owner’s good taste, into a stately home. With regard to the plot, Berta is a girl of 18 who served in the house of Joan and his late wife. After her death, Berta, moved by the grief that fills the widower’s heart, falls in love with him and agrees to marry him, and also to take refuge in the mountains. But Melcior, who looks after the farmhouse, secretly loves Berta. The two youngsters plot how they could manage to be together.

BERTA: Go! Leave me!

MELCIOR: Listen...

BERTA: Leave me alone, bad man! Poor Joan, he’s so good...

MELCIOR: You don’t love him.

BERTA: I do, more than myself!

MELCIOR: Let’s leave that old man.

BERTA: Leave him all alone?

MELCIOR: Don’t you see that here, by his side, we shall freeze, we shall kill the flower of our youth?

BERTA: Youth! I would like to be old with a wrinkled face and a heart frozen by time.[16]

Berta confesses to the old man her fear of not being there for him one day, as she loves Melcior, but in the third act a strange event turns the amorous triangle on its head:

JOAN: Answer me. Do you love Berta? [...] Lift your head and answer: Do you love Berta?

BERTA: Joan, for the love of God!

JOAN: Stop it, Berta. Say it, Melcior. Do you love her with a noble heart?

MELCIOR (lifting his head up in defiance): Yes!

JOAN: Why?

MELCIOR: Because I am young!

JOAN: Because you’re young...

MELCIOR: The two of us... Berta and I...

BERTA: I don’t want to love you!

MELCIOR: But don’t think, sir, that we have ever shown you a lack of respect.

JOAN: I’m not so sure about that.

MELCIOR: We’re not bad.

JOAN: But you believe you have the right to love one another.

MELCIOR: I do... But we cannot go any further!

JOAN: Why?

MELCIOR: You block our path; you tie us down.

JOAN: Then let’s remove the obstacles! (He takes their hands and joins them) Here I am the only guilty one. I cannot go on with this tyranny. Come. Come close. Look at yourselves, in love and free. I, in the name of the eternal truth, join you. I am winter, you, spring. Go and sow flowers. [...] ardent youth, burning with desire. Go far away, and let me enjoy my inner life in silence, beneath a sky that is forever blue and star-filled, in eternal night-time, surrounded by pure white snow ... leave me...

However, Melcior, the young man, answers:

MELCIOR: The love you give me I do not want, no! I do not want love to be granted, which kills my desire; I wish to win it by fighting, suffering! Fighting against everything! I want it with obstacles! I want it stolen.[17]

And as Doctor Stockmann does in An Enemy of the People, at the end of the play, old Joan prays:

Youth, I bless you. Loneliness, loneliness, never leave me![18]

In this play, as in the others from this same period, the same arguments are constantly repeated: the joy of life lies in withstanding grief, only the good are doubted, the laws of morality go against the weakest, living without loving is desecrating life.

Later, in a second period, in which the plays Els vells (The Old Ones), El cor del poble (The Heart of the People) or La mare eterna (The Eternal Mother) stand out, he deals with the same themes too, and even more so:

L’escorçó is a play set among railwaymen, people the author lived with.[19] The piece truly shows realism and great skill in capturing the atmosphere and the surroundings. Many things in the working-class home that the play depicts are true, within the fictional story.

The main character is essentially a bad man, a traitor of those old days, whereas the other characters are totally good. Once again we have the amorous triangle, but not at all successful with regard to the realistic construction of the characters. It is not like this in Fructidor, in which we have the same theme and the same constructive focus, but in this case the author achieves a knowledge of the articulations that make up the theatrical characters and which make them mirror images of men and women in the real world: two ordinary men fight over the love of a woman. This play is very useful to us from the point of view of the legacy of positivism brought to the stage.

Sebastià and Ramona love each other and have a son. But Sebastià, due to his difficult financial situation, abandons her and embarks on the Andalusian Marítima. She, sad and with a son, seeks comfort in the arms of Mateu, and marries him. Sebastià returns and she once again feels her love for him. After a long seduction scene, Ramona and Sebastià finally get together and decide to go off together, but first Mateu first gets in their way. After a hand-to-hand fight with daggers in the purest style of the slums, he falls down dead. Sebastià and Ramona run away. The interesting thing here is who loses. It is not the one who made the first mistake, but the one who goes against nature. The one who takes advantage of the mother’s weakness to be with her. It is nature itself that has won.

Likewise, Iglésias does not make a case for free love, nor does he criticize marriage as protected by the law. Ramona’s maternal instincts make her run to seek protection in the arms of the man who helped her to bring a life into the world. It is not greedy sensuality that pushes her, but, as Ambrosi Carrion tells us, the joy of returning the son to his father; it is the imperative of motherhood that recognizes first and foremost, above all else and by natural law, the rights of the father over the laws written by men.

Iglésias’s thesis, which he had already hinted at in Els conscients – at a given moment Berta says: “The feeling of motherhood will surround you with the finest delights” – is that there is no justification for love unless it produces children. It is an idea that no one had dared to put on the stage before Iglésias did so.

Finally I would like to mention L’alosa (The Skylark),[20] a work that has seldom received much attention, but which presents us with a family dispute over a young woman’s love for a hard-working, honest poet, undoubtedly our author’s alter ego. This poet, however, does not appear in the play, and the one who supplants the artist’s love is an equivalent of the worker, a businessman, cold but with a strong sense of justice. With this dialogue, Iglésias expresses the true meaning of what life is, for him:

CLAUDI: I do not believe that wounds can be healed with pity. And therefore I myself come to ask for the help of science.

DON VALENTÍ: Oh, science...

CLAUDI: The world, for me, is an immense machine... and we are one of its countless pieces. What, a worker’s foot is crushed? A piece has been damaged. What, this worker dies? Replace him with another one.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

DON VALENTÍ: That is thinking of man as a thing, as a lifeless object.

CLAUDI: I consider him, physically and spiritually, as a generating force in the work of nature.

The Skylark, II, 3.

The second period

It is a period of maturity in which he formally distances himself from the pigeonholing of the pièce bien faite in four acts, and experiments with new formats: idylls, songs, plays condensed into three acts. Not only that, but his theatre of ideas reaches its high point, and treats the characters as allegories, but without distancing them from the social content that makes them earthly and he does not remove them from the here and now.

In the play El cor del poble, Iglésias presents us with a cast of characters made up of a married couple of old workers, a boy, a relative, a lad from the neighbourhood and a man that acts as a father and a mother to the boy. The theme is once again about motherhood. The boy abandoned by the mother, a respectable lady who regards her son as a sin of her youth, is brought up by the wet nurse and her husband, who do not have children, in that clean and honest atmosphere of sensible workers. When the boy has grown up the mother remembers him and hastens to find him. The boy, however, rejects her: it is not his mother who gave him life but the humble worker who brought him up, who has moulded his spirit and has taught him love, justice and freedom.

There are no intrigues or trickery. There is no amorous conflict, and even so it could be seen as one of the most profound plays of all time in the Catalan theatre.

Love corresponds not to natural questions, but what is natural lies in the cultural: honesty, sound judgement and a love of justice.

We find the theses of admirations – to paraphrase Joan Margarit – in the first few pages, and we see how it addresses a political theatre:

XIC: Oh, and what he knows, about arguing.

MATRON: He always says the same thing. He can’t talk about anybody other than Pi i Maragall and Clavé. I don’t know what these men have given him!

XIC: Can’t you see that Passarell is a chorister and a politician all in one?

MATRON: A chorister and a politician?

XIC: A federal bird![21]

In the play El cor del poble, the characters are allegorical: Matron and Passarell, the wet nurse and her husband; Xic, the neighbour; Fidel, the young man, and Boira, who goes to look for the boy. In Iglésias’s works we do not usually find this playing with names, but as a Symbolist work, it fits perfectly.

In Fructidor or El cor del poble, it was the laws of nature that won; now, with regard to the old people, a theme of social justice will be dealt with, and the author will take the side of the laws of man against those of nature. It is a modern tragedy that attacks the foundations of the construction of society and posits a debate that has really frightening echoes in the present day: what do we do with the old people?

It is a play with a lot of old characters, and just one young man. It is an ensemble piece where we are shown the lives of Joan and Valeri, together with their wives and so many other characters of the same age, who have been marginalized by society. They decide to stand up to the system and oppose it with the revolution against those who are younger than them and who now run the factories. However, what comes out of this is always the approaching death of this part of society. The question Iglésias asks himself is why put to one side what is still useful? Nature runs its course and we remember that, for Iglésias, work is natural. So, without this, people are condemned to death.

It is a tragedy due to the cry of the revolt, because when they want to demand, acting, what they are entitled to, physical collapse makes them see the bottomless pit of their tragedy, from which there is no means of escape. It is a bitterly pessimistic piece.

Between 1904 and 1906, our author was to write several social portraits: La flor tardana (The Late Flower), La reina del cor (Queen of the Heart), La formiga (The Ant) – a nice monologue in which an eight-year-old girl, with a sheaf of wheat, stops work to tell us about her father’s death – Foc follet (Crazy Fire), Girasol (Sunflower). A work from his early period was also revived: Els primers freds. Apparently it had already been put on at the Tívoli in 1901, and some years earlier its first act had been performed in Sant Andreu.[22]

Els primers freds has to be read as a trilogy. A three-act odyssey, conceived as three associated stories, in which we are told about the escape of a young couple, Lari and Ció, from a refuge in the mountains to the village. They have had a baby out of wedlock, and have to struggle against the natural events, the cold of the mountains, in order to be able to reach the church door and get married. However, the imposition of matrimony costs the two young people dearly and, once they have complied with the patriarchal wishes, the baby’s neck is twisted and it dies in the young woman’s arms. It is thus the fault of man who makes laws and prevents nature from running its course. “Joventut” (Youth), “Camí de Neu” (The Snowy Path) and “Llops de Nadal” (Christmas Wolves) are the three parts of this story that describes the later life of Ció and Lari. All that is gained in the odyssey is lost due to the heavy imposition of the absurd laws of man.

With the first performance of Les garses, which took place in November 1906, Iglésias once again tackled a social issue. Here he lambasts ambition, the desire to enrich oneself illegally, he points out the evils that this does to the people and the family and sings, as one might expect, that work dignifies man. A small village barber’s shop has sold the winning number in the lottery. Everyone has bought a share of the number or has taken part in one way or another, and the poor barber finds himself with the sad task of dividing it up. In this conflict, all the birds of prey – the barbershop customers – will try to do their utmost to receive their share and a little more.

And finally, in this second period, I shall mention two interesting dramatic portraits, Cendres d’amor (Ashes of Love, 1900) and Cor endins (Deep at Heart, 1907).[23] They are two dramatic portraits clearly influenced by Maeterlinck and which Ambrosi Carrion does not mention in the critical study, but which I consider crucial to understanding this second mature phase.

They are two short one-act plays, and both of them show the good side and the bad side of the same problem: children and death. And I say the good and bad sides because they are two pieces without a plot, but full of moral conflict. In Cendres d’amor, an undertaker gets out of obeying the priest’s orders and, for money, he agrees to secretly bury the stillborn baby, the son of a young middle-class city gent who, despite this bourgeois man’s strong morality, was conceived in sin. As to Cor endins, we are presented with an absolutely unthinkable situation. Two nervous old people come up with a strategy to cover up the birth of their grandson. Once he has been born (in a dramatic space adjoining that of the spectator, we hear the birth pangs of Rosetta, their daughter) they will take him outside, leave him for a while in the doorway to their house, at the mercy of the cold and the animals, and when the sun comes up, they will take him in, as if someone soulless had abandoned the baby on their doorstep. By doing this they will cover up for their daughter, who has had him without being married. All the tension lies, precisely, in the harm we know they are doing to the new-born baby by leaving him outside. They want him as a grandson, but as if the sin were somebody else’s. They assume the responsibility and the danger of killing him. They are two truly magnificent plays.

Conclusions

Guimerà, Rusiñol and Iglésias are three bastions on which our theatre rests in the twentieth century who had already been influenced by Pitarra and the popular feeling of the people. Gabriel Alomar praised this in Iglésias’s work.[24]

Nature is by no means the opposite of the city. Nature is the city’s heartbeat. Thus, the natural will have to cease to be idyllic in order to become life. And for our author, life is survival, class struggle and, above all, justice towards the feeling of equality. Therefore, if between the bourgeois and the proletarian there is no valid difference, and he finds an essence in love, freedom, brotherhood – wholly revolutionary struggles in industrialized society – nor will there be any difference between the city and outside it, as the essence is, in both cases, man. Nature is seen through man’s eyes.

If Guimerà represents the verbal and poetic force, and Rusiñol the bittersweet nature of our spirit, Iglésias is the desire for the truth, a longing for improvement and redemption that an entire people must feel.

THE PEDAGOGICAL NOTEBOOKS OF ENRIC GIMÉNEZ I LLOBERAS
 The actor’s technique

Carmina Salvatierra Capdevila

Enric Giménez i Lloberas (1868-1939), an actor, director and pedagogue, was intensely active in the theatre. He is known as one of Adrià Gual’s chief collaborators in the Teatre Íntim company and at the Catalan School of Dramatic Art, where he worked as a pedagogue and teacher of declamation for over 25 years. Gual’s influence was, as we shall see, essential when defining his career in the theatre. Giménez was also associated with Margarida Xirgu’s beginnings in the theatre, as a director and actor, and with Fructuós Gelabert, in the first cinematic experiments to be made in Catalonia. The notebooks he wrote about pedagogy and drama teaching are the material that my study is based on; some of the notebooks are unpublished and are kept at the Ricard Salvat Foundation, where I have generously been allowed to consult them. The texts, written in the 1920s, include Giménez’s experience from his beginnings in the world of the theatre, in the 1890s in Enric Borràs’s company.

1914. Enric Giménez performing La comèdia extraordinària de l’home que va perdre el temps. Ricard Salvat Foundation Collection.

Sources and objectives

The objective of recovering Enric Giménez’s notebooks is to learn more about the actor’s technique in the period in which he lived – the start of important changes in the idioms of the arts – with a century’s hindsight. One part of the study is devoted to Enric Giménez as a person and the other to the notebooks.

Firstly, I wanted to know who he was: his life story, the main events in his life in the theatre. Who did he work with? What plays did he perform in and direct?[1] As I have already noted, here the relationship with Gual is fundamental. A most important document for discovering his personality are the pages that Gual dedicated to him in Mitja vida en teatre (Half Life Theatre). In this respect I have found no better testimony to show us what made him tick. The catalogue of the Barcelona Theatre Institute’s library mentions a “typewritten text” 123 pages long – which is “missing” – written by his son Enric Giménez i Miquel, entitled “Enric Giménez, a Biographical Essay”. It is a pity, because it would have provided us with a more intimate portrait. We know nothing about his personal life. I hope that it will appear by chance one day in some corner of the library. We gradually discover Giménez by reading the texts that he wrote. His comments and his observations reveal a man who was demanding and thorough with his art, methodical, and who had a great passion, consideration and affection for what he did. I hope to find more information about the way his work was received in newspaper archives.

Another reference book is Adrià Gual. Mitja vida de modernisme (Adrià Gual: Half Life Modernisme),[2] by Carles Batlle, Isidre Bravo and Jordi Coca. His name is mentioned in it twice. The first time as a “‘true’ founder of the Íntim with Josep Pujol i Brull”, and the second when, by then a teacher at the Catalan School of Dramatic Art, Gual decided to begin a second phase of the Íntim. We should also take into account the contributions of Hermann Bonnín, Adrià Gual i l’Escola Catalana d’Art Dramàtic (Adrià Gual and the Catalan School of Dramatic Art, 1913-1923),[3] and of Enric Ciurans, Adrià Gual.[4] Antonina Rodrigo’s biography of Margarida Xirgu mentions him a dozen times as an “important director”, and it has provided data about the work he did.[5] The online page Tombant de segle (The turn of the century) has also given us information about his life in the theatre.[6]

Another source of information was the Adrià Gual Symposium, held on 27th and 28th November 2013, to commemorate the centenary of the founding of the Theatre Institute, the institution whose origins lie in the Catalan School of Dramatic Art that Gual founded with Giménez. Even though they were very interesting and informative for this author, none of the themes dealt with drama teaching and pedagogy.

Consulting the Theatre Institute’s Adrià Gual collection has also been a source of important and inexhaustible first-hand information, through manuscripts by Gual on a great variety of subjects and newspaper articles of the time. Among the latter I found “El Teatre de Naturalesa” (The Theatre of Nature), in which Gual criticizes the commercial nature of these performances. According to him, there was nothing “natural” about them, and he considered that it would be better to call them “open-air theatre” full stop.[7]

Enric Giménez as seen by Adrià Gual

In Mitja vida de teatre, Gual paints a picture of Giménez and their relationship from their youth. He talks about how they met, their joining the Teatre Íntim, and life in the world of the theatre where they both lived. The first time he mentions him is in connection with the play Iphigenia in Tauris, by Goethe, in which Giménez played King Thoas. The play was first performed, in a version by Joan Maragall, in the Horta Maze gardens in October 1898. That same year the Teatre Íntim had been founded with the premiere of Silenci (Silence) on 15th January at the Teatre Líric. A short while earlier, Gual tells us, he had seen him acting as “first second” in the company directed by Antoni Tutau at the Teatre Principal,[8] and it was through him that he approached Giménez:

Giménez was a young man half dedicated the theatre like most of our actors, still fairly unknown, almost completely unknown by intellectual audiences, and with no theatrical aspirations, which I would pass onto him.

[…] Besides being an actor, Giménez drew for embroiderers, behind the windows of a certain doorway in Carrer del Pi where I often went to see him, encouraged by the spare time I had when I would leave the stained glass windows of the lithography business my father owned, larger stained glass windows but which also held life’s essentials.

In that actor I found a good follower of my projects. Obedient with the points of view upheld by me, which on the other hand he liked, because in a certain way he had sensed how liberating they were, he agreed with my view in everything, and he even inherited, at least on that occasion, the contempt for certain awkward trifles, typical of theatrical circles, where I lived if you please out of necessity.

[…] Enric Giménez was one of so many intuitive actors who have travelled around our country, whose beginnings, rather than a conscious vocation, have arisen from an unconscious desire to be seen in public.

The talent has since been refined, and a certain mastery of the craft, as much or more than the professed art, has made them a useful element, which has been constantly due to determining factors, to intermittences, of their worth or lack of it.

This fellow was fortunate to fall into my hands, although his childlike perspicacity has never allowed him to acknowledge it.

I said childlike perspicacity because deep down in Giménez there was a rather spoilt and stubborn child fighting to get out, only correctible by the path of good friendship.

[…] I needed a resilient actor, and it seemed to me that his young man could provide me with one.

[…] In another country where the theatre is invested with deep-rooted origins, Giménez would have expurgated defects and extolled qualities and reached the place shown to him by his mission. Here, between you and me, his merits and his true talent were ignored and very often badly administered by him.[9]

Gual found in the young Giménez a loyal follower, an accomplice and an enthusiast of his Teatre Íntim project. In short, a priceless collaborator, with the qualities he was looking for and needed. He certainly had a peculiar personality – rebellious, childish, and so on – but above all he was this “resilient actor” that he needed, and who he defended. It would seem that this intuitive actor was not always fully appreciated, and in different circumstances he might have developed all his acting talent.

Giménez, for his part, discovered with Gual, among other things, the liberating dimension of the theatre that he would not have discovered by himself, and the latter passed on to him his passion for it. He placed himself at the service of a set of ideas to dignify both popular and artistic theatre, due to the “drowsiness of our theatre”, as Gual says. Gual offered him the post of under-manager of the Teatre Íntim, and also the stage “directorship” for the first performance of La culpable (The Guilty Woman), on 18th December 1899. In 1913, Gual invited him to take part in the foundation of the Catalan School of Dramatic Art.

Gual went to Paris that year and returned to Barcelona when war was declared. Paris was, for him, Antoine’s Théâtre-Libre and Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, and that of the innovator Gémier; and also, the institutional theatre of the Comédie Française and the Odéon. It is also the year when Jacques Copeau created the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, where he put on some plays for a few months before leaving for the United States with his troupe. We do not know for sure whether Gual met him personally, but we do know his ideas. In a 1924 newspaper article, Gual praises the work of “Monsieur Copeau”, at a time of financial difficulties that forced him to give up – although it was not the only reason – and he criticizes the “theatrical merchant”.[10]

Acting lessons. Ricard Salvat Foundation Collection.

The origins and content of the notebooks

I learned about the existence of the texts from the speech that Ricard Salvat gave about the innovation in the performing arts language in Catalonia to mark his admission to the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi, on 21st April 2004. In his speech he quoted at length from a text by Giménez, and suggested the suitability of devoting a study or a doctoral thesis “to the contributions of Enric Giménez, this great pedagogue and theorist, because they might help to complete Gual’s work, among many other contributions […] The lessons that he used in order to give the classes at the Catalan School of Dramatic Art are wholly unusual in their modernity and intellectual seriousness”.[11] For Salvat, Gual’s most important contribution at that time, the early years of the century, is the creation of the Catalan School of Dramatic Art, in 1913, with which “Catalonia attains true modernity and achieves the normalization that it needed. If one wanted to put on a different kind of theatre, one had to train a different actor. An actor with broad technical skills and with a far more extensive education than was usual in the performers of that time.”[12] I would like to point out how aware these pioneers, and others in European theatre, were of the importance of training in the search for new methods of performing. Gual knew how important the pedagogical work was. And he investigated. He directed the actors with musical instructions that corresponded better to his aesthetic needs – the link between art, spirituality and subjectivity in the intimate knowledge of the world. He thus displaced the declamatory technique as a basis for acting, which prevailed in the teaching of the period, and had a long history in western theatre. The stillness and silence with which he worked are two pre-expressive principles in the origins of the language. Moreover, they develop perceptive skill, sensibility and imagination, the basis of many of the forms of expression which at that time were breaking with old models, making room for spontaneous and free impulses, closer to the authenticity of nature. But … could it be translated into teaching principles? Did it have repercussions? What path did it take? How far did it get? Carles Batlle attributes to one of his collaborators, who he thinks could be Enric Giménez, the following remarks about Gual directing actors:

Gual is not worried about translating in his art the reality of actual life. He pursues states of the soul, syntheses of found emotions, specificities of fine psychological penetration. His tendency is quietism. He wants to suggest rather than represent. His aesthetic is metaphysical. The incoercible exceeds the determined and the concrete. The mystery has more charm than what is revealed.[13]

This is a subject I would like to study, and be able to compare it also with the experiences of Jacques Copeau. Both of them started their investigations in 1913, one with the creation of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, the other with the Catalan School of Dramatic Art. Connecting the two experiences could supply some very significant considerations about the investigation of a model in the training of actors, a terrain less visible than that of staging, but no less important. A study of the CSDA would also be necessary. Salvat’s speech is a very valuable study, with which he moreover wanted to “pay tribute and at the same time rescue from oblivion a number of incomparable creators, great innovators who endeavoured to modernize the Catalan and Spanish theatre”.[14] I see in those experiences an unprecedented opportunity for Catalan theatre.

His son Enric Giménez i Miquel gave the notebooks to the Adrià Gual School of Declamation in 1965, as it states in a letter dated 26th November: “I am pleased to donate to the Adrià Gual School of Declamation some programmes of the studies that were followed in the old Catalan School of Dramatic Art founded by the unforgettable innovator of the theatre, whose name you so rightly honour.”[15] The notebooks, handwritten and typed texts, were accompanied by photographs and drawings done by Giménez himself. Between 1999 and 2002, some of the texts were published randomly in the journal Assaig de Teatre.[16] The material passed to the Association of Theatrical Investigation and Experimentation in the 1990s and is now in the Ricard Salvat i Ferré Foundation.

The texts I have been able to see are the eight lessons or “exercises”, as Giménez calls them, corresponding to the first year at the school. They are not practical and specific exercises as one might expect, but reflections, teachings and studies addressed to the students, based on specific themes, and on which he theorizes in the manner of small essays. They were written to be read aloud, to be listened to and not to be published. Throughout these lessons he expresses rigorously and forcefully, but also pleasantly, what he considers necessary for an actor’s training, the conditions he must have and also the demands made on him. He clearly wishes to dignify the theatre, to understand it as an art form, and the actor as an artist. The eight lessons are hand-bound very simply and very carefully in seven separate notebooks, written in Catalan on pages typed on one side and corrected by hand; four of the notebooks are unpublished. In the same folder I found 13 photographs of different works in which he took part; I also found 19 “pen and pencil drawings depicting different full-body poses” (seven), “appearances of different characters” (nine), plus “various studies of beards and moustaches” (three). This series of drawings shows precision and ability when specifying defined characters and personalities.

The texts are undated and one supposes that they were written in the 1920s. During the investigation I found the paper he presented for the Third International Theatre Congress that was held in Barcelona from 23rd to 29th June 1929. The paper is entitled “Teaching the actor at the National Theatre Institute in Barcelona”,[17] and was published in the proceedings of the congress. The text, in Castilian, summarizes the first- and second-year programme of “the teaching of declamation and, in general, of the profession of actor”. When I compared it with the notebooks I saw that they coincide exactly with the clearly stated subjects. This therefore enables us to date the texts better and also identify the purpose for which Giménez most surely wrote them.

Here is the programme of the two years of studies taking as a reference the notebooks, for the first-year course, and the principles of the 1929 paper for the second-year course:

First-year course (8 exercises / 7 notebooks)[18]

1st Exercise: “Reading-Recitation-Declamation” (9 pages)

2nd Exercise: “Rudimentary knowledge of various sciences” (15 pages)

3rd Exercise: “The nature of the artist. Physical and moral conditions that he needs” (8 pages)

4th Exercise: “Names and types of different feelings” (8 pages)

5th and 6th Exercises: “Aesthetics” (24 pages)

7th Exercise: “Projection and emission of the voice” (6 pages)

8th Exercise: “The gesture” (6 pages)

Second-year course[19]

I. “Definition of the feelings that are outwardly expressed”

II. “Sobriety, ductility, naturalness”

III. “Makeup”

IV. “The way of creating and interpreting a character”

V and VI. “General exercises of the gesture. Reproduction of pathological cases on stage”

VII. “Complete performances”

VIII. “General notions of directing”

This would be the programme in 1929. When the school first started, in 1913, there were two hours of class, three days a week. The programme consisted of three subjects: declamation, the history of the theatre and rhythmic gymnastics. The latter was particularly important, with the incorporation of the Jacques-Dalcroze method in the training, by Joan Llongueras; it would also be interesting to look at this subject. From 1913 to 1929 acting lessons were associated with declamation, that is, the text, in which the body adapted to the word. Only in the 1930s did declamation become known as diction.

I have made a study of the lessons that I hope to publish in the future because to do so now would exceed the space available to me and the purely introductory nature of this article. I would just like to draw your attention to the fact that the first “exercise” or lesson is devoted to distinguishing between the notions of “reading”, “recitation” and “declamation”, making the word and the text the basis of the technique that Giménez presents and develops throughout the notebooks. Declamation is “the way of speaking when acting”, and therefore “acting” eventually becomes a synonym of “declaiming”. The head, the face, the facial expression are the noble, privileged part of the body, where the mouth is, the emitter of sound; the face, the symbol of our identity, is the expressive part par excellence. The body is next, accompanying the word. This technique that separates the head from the body has a long history in western theatre, from Latin oratory via baroque theatre to the present day. For example, tragedy needs to be said and pronounced in an emphatic tone of voice. Among other principles there is the one that the positions of the body can never be symmetrical – which is observed in the poses in Giménez’s photos – or also, that the body only exists in relation to a superior reality that is the word; it is called commedia sostenuta. In contrast to this theatre there appeared, in the sixteenth century, a theatrical culture based on action and movement, which erudite theatre would call commedia all’improviso to distinguish it from the comedy recited according to the classical rules. The theatrical technique that Giménez defines is based on the tradition of the recitative word, and we see this due to the lack of the notion of “action and movement” in the technique he describes. In Giménez’s day a break with this tradition was beginning to take place. The return to the free expression of the body and nature is seen better in dance than in the theatre because it was still subject to these conventions. The anecdote told by Isadora Duncan during a speech she gave in Berlin in 1903 sums up the change of sensibility that was taking place very well:

A lady once asked me why I dance barefoot and I answered: “Madam, I believe in the religion of the beauty of the human foot.” The lady replied, “But I do not,” and I said, “Well Madam, you should, because the expression and intelligence of the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of mankind.” “But,” said the lady, “I do not believe in the evolution of mankind.” To which I replied, “My task has reached its end. I refer you to my most admired masters: Mister Charles Darwin and Mister Ernst Haeckel.” “But,” said the lady, “I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel.” At this point I could think of nothing else to say. So you can see that I am not much use at convincing people and in fact I should not speak.[20]

The meaning of “biology” in the artist’s training

The texts by Enric Giménez are an exceptional gateway for considering the changes that were brewing in the practice and theory of the languages of the performing arts. Now we begin to see the challenges, the difficulties and the struggle that they represented, and at the same time the great intuition of these first steps. These manifestations were still very much in the minority but they were beginning to make themselves felt on the continent of Europe. Risky attempts, at times unclassifiable due to the novelty, surprising or rejected out of hand because they were an attack on good manners, morality, and so on, or simply misunderstood. They are experiences that questioned the established reference points of acting, as Romanticism had once done, and now they were finally being put into practice. This transformation is linked to the desire for social change and a new society’s aspirations for freedom and a qualitative change in the lives of human beings.

During the last decade of the nineteenth century we see Alfred Jarry scandalizing the audience with a character using crude language and with the shape of his body; Stanislavski’s Moscow Theatre of Art seeking a truth distanced from false artifice; Lugné-Poe and Paul Fort’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre finds truth in mystery and Loïe Fuller amazes people by making her body disappear in the excitement of the pure movement of the veils. Each of them has a new way of seeing and understanding reality, showing a particular sensibility with respect to the act of creation that transgresses the forms in use, revealing new aesthetic sensations. Perhaps it is this that best explains what is happening. Looking, feeling as if it were the first time, inventing, means rediscovering nature and recreating the human being’s relationship with the world in a new way. The awareness of the origins of art is expressed very clearly and profoundly in all the reflections that Giménez makes. He talks about looking and feeling, learning and appropriating life:

There is a part in man that despite all the spiritual mastery functions mechanically and is tied by it to the vulgar laws of any artefact. And like a set of gears, a crankshaft, a piston arranged in one way or another, they will always give a different result, just as nature is pleased to mark the internal functions of that body through unmistakable signs.

Despite everything, it is not absolutely, because nature sometimes creates beings that do not keep to those laws. They take delight in deception, showing an exterior that indicates the opposite of what they have inside; and if any signal could indicate it they are equipped with one or another quality to hide it, discovering it is very hard work for the finest perspicacity. It is almost always due to chance: these living lies, these aberrations, these monsters of nature, are for an artist cases of vivid interest and brilliance if he ever overcomes the difficulties that for natural reasons he must encounter.

BIOLOGY: It is the science that could well be called a treatise on life in general, because it includes everything. The process of different cases, all manner of triumphs and failures, sorrows and glories that make up life as a whole … that is biology. Someone might think: what about life? Everyone sees life, we all know about it! A crass error: we do everything that goes on around us so superficially and so badly that it does not even deserve that name, and at other times we do not even want to see or hear them, out of selfishness. There are many people who at the end of their lives know as little as they did at the start; they have not even taken one experience from it, they have not been taught anything. Therefore, even though it may be very superficial, if we do not make a valuation, a general judgment, of everything that goes on around us, nor do we practise biology, not even living is much use.

Q. [Question] Is it necessary to study completely all the sciences that you have just named?

No. One has to know what they are, the value of each of them in general. And to study in them the parts the artist needs to apply in each case that which corresponds to him, and makes up for what he lacks with a great spirit of observation of life in general, for the artist should never forget that above all, his mission is to live life. He has therefore to necessarily be a biologist, he cannot dispense with biology.

This is an extract that corresponds to the end of the second exercise, “Rudimentary knowledge of the various sciences”, a 15-page text in which Giménez expounds the usefulness of philosophy, anthropology, medicine, biology and biography in the creation of a character. For him they are “the group of doctrines” that are studied at university and it is necessary for “the artist” to know of their existence and have notions of them in case the time comes when he has to use them. Of all of them, biology is the most important one: “a treatise on life in general, because it covers everything”. In this respect Giménez refers to the knowledge that comes from experience of what is lived that affects awareness and perception. In this extract he also mentions the mechanical function of the body and the correspondences between inside and outside, but also about when this agreement is perverted if in life one expresses that which one does not feel, for instance when one lies. It is a faculty of human nature that for an artist, writes Giménez, is of vital interest.

If we read the text of this theory class carefully, we see that he says that the artist has to be very close to “effective life” in order to learn his art directly from experience, and to live it consciously because it is the material with which he will work. Biology is the group of these experiences and teachings about life that shape him; one can only be oneself, on stage too, especially on stage. And the quality of the actor’s art consists in exercising one’s own ability to learn, which is like saying to transform oneself – which is the essence of his art. This is truly when selfishness is transcended. Therefore life may be of some use or find a meaning.

The lesson ends with a question that simulates one asked by a student: “Is all this scientific knowledge necessary?” and Giménez says “no”, short and to the point. He says it is only necessary in a general sense. That it is good to know that it is there and to use it when necessary. And he places the emphasis of the lesson on the “spirit of observation”, and living life as a “mission” typical of a biologist, as a “biologist” because it is the only one of the sciences that the artist cannot dispense with. With “biology” understood as the term that during the nineteenth century replaced the word “nature”. Because it is also understood that the knowledge it gives him belongs to the intuitive perception that “includes”, as opposed to the scientific language that “defines”. Giménez demands the practice of observation, learning to look, something that is not as obvious as it may seem.

To end with

Below is a brief list of themes that I have dealt with throughout this introduction to the person of Enric Giménez and his theatre notebooks: I began with a brief biographical sketch marked by his collaboration with Adrià Gual in the Teatre Íntim and at the Catalan School of Dramatic Art, and also with Margarida Xirgu and Fructuós Gelabert. I commented on the different sources that I have used in my study. I offered a brief profile of his personality and the relationship with Gual based on the latter’s memoirs. I explained how Ricard Salvat discovered for us the notebooks and their value. I described the course that the notebooks have taken since they were donated by his son Enric Giménez i Miquel in 1965. I described in detail the programme of studies published in the paper by Enric Giménez “Third International Theatre Congress” in Barcelona in 1929. I situated the technique that he describes in the tradition of declamatory theatre. I commented on the lesson “Rudimentary knowledge of the various sciences”, in which he considers biology as the most important life science for the artist. Finally, we saw the great intuition and the modernity of his way of considering the nature of the actor’s work.

I hope that my study has contributed to reinstating the figure and the teachings of Enric Giménez.

I end the article with the answer that Giménez gave to the writer Tomàs Roig when, in 1933, the latter asked him, “Will the cinema do away with the theatre?” and he quickly retorted, “No one will do away with the theatre, not even the cinema. Authentic theatre, I mean, not the show-business industry establishments. The real theatre is immortal!”[21]

Enric Giménez i Lloberas

Chronology[22]

1868 Enric Manel Agustí Giménez i Lloberas is born in Barcelona on 2 January to Manuel Giménez i Iroz (Barcelona, 1840) and Josefa Lloberas

i Cabot (Barcelona, 1841).

1894 He joins Enric Borràs’s company at the Teatre Novetats (October). Premiere of L’arlesiana, an adaptation of Alphonse Daudet’s novel L’Arlésienne. Premiere of Maria Rosa, by Àngel Guimerà (24 November).

1895 Premiere of Jesus of Nazareth and The Monks of Sant Aimant, both by Guimerà (April).

1897 In the autumn he joins the Catalan theatre company at the Teatre Principal.

1898 Foundation of the Teatre Íntim with the premiere of Silence, by Adrià Gual, at the Teatre Líric (15 January). He takes part as an actor in Iphigenia in Tauris, by J. W. Goethe, in a version by Joan Maragall (character, King Thoas), in the gardens of the Horta Maze (October).

1899 Teatre Íntim. Silence, by Gual; The Joy that Passes, by Rusiñol; Iphigenia in Tauris, by Goethe; Interior, by Maeterlinck, and Blancaflor, by Gual. Premiere of The Guilty Woman (18 December). First public performance by the Teatre Íntim at the Teatre Líric.

Giménez introduces the set designer Salvador Alarma to Adrià Gual, with whom he begins a long collaboration.

At the end of the 1899-1900 season he sets up a company with Jaume Martí. They put on a couple of performances at the Ateneu de Sants. A short summer season at the Teatre Progrés in Sant Andreu de Palomar.

1900 He acts in The Death Penalty and Don’t Let her Husband Find Out, at the Teatre Progrés (June). The Recluse, by Ignasi Iglésias (5 July). Teatre Íntim. Spectres, by Henrik Ibsen (character, Pastor Manders), Teatre Líric (December).

1901 From autumn 1900 to spring 1901, he acts in the Teatre Principal’s Catalan company. He premieres On the Right Track, a political drama by the Majorcan Joan Torrendell (27 April).

1902 Teatre Íntim. Oedipus the King, by Sophocles (character, Oedipus), and The Forced Marriage, by Molière, Teatre Novetats (March).

1903 Teatre Íntim. Teatre de les Arts: The Barber of Seville, by Beaumarchais (character, Figaro); Gretchen (scenes from Faust), by Goethe (character, Mephisto); The Miser, by Molière; John Gabriel Borkman, by Henrik Ibsen (lead); The Forced Marriage, by Molière; The House of Happiness, by Jacinto Benavente; Eridon and Amina, by Goethe; Drayman Henschel, by Gerhart Hauptmann; Cassius and Helen, by Eusebi Güell; Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus (character, Prometheus); Master Oleguer, by Àngel Guimerà; Torquemada in the Fire, by Benito Pérez Galdós.

1904 Teatre Íntim. Teatre de les Arts: Twelfth Night or What you Will, by Shakespeare (15 January); Mystery of Pain, by Gual (character, Sylvester) (18 January); La Baldirona, by Guimerà, and The Weavers, by Gerhart Hauptmann (up to 3 February).

Gual puts Giménez’s name forward as an actor at Lluís Graner’s Auditions (autumn).

A season of melodrama at the Circ Barcelonès theatre.

1905 Circ Barcelonès. Premiere of The Lower Depths, a play by Gorki translated from French by Gual. Giménez added to it The Joy that Passes, by Rusiñol, with music by Morera, a huge box-office success.

Premiere of The End of Tomàs Reynald, by Adrià Gual, at the Romea (17 May).

1906 Season opens at the Teatre Apolo (15 September).

Premiere of Sherlock Holmes, by Pierre Decourcelle, based on the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, translated into Catalan by Salvador Vilaregut (late April). The actor Firmin Gémier had played him in Paris a few months earlier.

1907 Teatre Íntim. Margarida Xirgu joins. Barratry, by André de Lorde and Masson Forestier (13 December); Sad Loves, by Giuseppe Giacosa, in a Catalan translation by Narcís Oller at the Romea (20 December); Carrot Head, by Jules Renard, and The Monkey’s Paw, by W. Jacobs. Outside the programme: The Wise Men of Vilatrista, by Santiago Rusiñol and Gregorio Martínez Sierra.

1908 Teatre Íntim. Premiere of The Torch Under the Bushel, by Gabriele d’Annunzio (10 January); The Triumph of the Philistines, by Henry Arthur Jones (31 January); The Sunken Bell, by Gerhart Hauptmann, illustrated musically by Jaume Pahissa (28 February).

He plays the character of Manelic in the film that Fructuós Gelabert is making of some scenes from Guimerà’s Lowlands. Enric Borràs had done it on stage; Concepció Llorente plays Marta, the same role she had played on stage.

He directs The Old Queen, a story in three scenes and in prose, premiered at the Principal, with music by Enric Morera (18 April).

Artistic director and leading man at the Principal. He works with Margarida Xirgu. He directs the drama The Polish Jew, by Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, translated into Catalan by Salvador Vilaregut, with Xirgu, Maria Morera and Josep Santpere (19 September); On a Rainy Day, by Louis Forest; Mister Perrichon’s Trip, by Eugène Labiche (30 September).

He replaces Víctor Codina in The Student Prince, in the role of Prince Karl Heinrich, an adaptation of the novel by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster, which had been very successful in Germany, England and France (10 October).

1909 Films Barcelona hires him to star in the film Guzmán the Good, based on the play of the same name by Antonio Gil de Zárate and directed by Fructuós Gelabert, to which he contributes his experience as stage director and which he ends up co-directing (April). Great technical contribution in the film’s set design with sets by Joan Morales. It is Xirgu’s first role in the cinema, in which Miquel Ortín, Ferran Bozzo and Enric Guitart also acted. A huge success in Portugal, France, South America, and also the USA.

He debuts with his company at the Coliseum Imperial in Girona (4 July).

He directs the charity performance organized by the students in the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Pharmacy, to raise money to buy Christmas food for the soldiers stationed in Melilla. He recites the monologue The Stationmaster, by Eduard Coca i Vallmajor (29 November).

A leading character in the film Dolores, based on the play of the same name by Josep Feliu i Codina (character, Melchior), co-directing with Fructuós Gelabert.

5th International Esperanto Congress in Paris; performance in Esperanto of Gual’s Mystery of Pain and Molière’s George Dandin (14 August).

With Xirgu he premieres the comedy The Liars, by Henry Arthur Jones, translated by Alejandro P. Maristany and Salvador Vilaregut (9 January), and Henry of Auë, by Gerhart Hauptmann, translated by Marcos Jesús Bertrán, with sets by Ros i Güell, Gracia, and Brunet i Pous (13 March).

1910 A brief sojourn in Madrid as a hired actor. Acts again at the Principal in spring of the following year.

Acts with Xirgu in the film Violante, the Coquette, codirected with Narcís Cuyàs and produced by Iris Films.

1911 Directs Xirgu in The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas junior (22 March), and in The Gypsies, by Juli Vallmitjana; premieres The Young Queen, by Guimerà, two hits of the season, at the Principal (15 April).

Creation of the Xirgu-Giménez-Nolla Company. The season opens with the tribute to Frederic Soler, “Pitarra”, with Cura de moro (The Moorish Cure) and L’hereuet (The Young Heir).

Performances of Zaza, by Pierre Berton and Charles Simon; The Young Queen, by Guimerà, and The Gypsies, by Juli Vallmitjana, at the Teatre del Bosc in Gràcia (5 June). Summer tour around different places in Catalonia and return to the Teatre Zorrilla in Badalona (12 July).

Teatre Principal. Directs Xirgu in The Pyrenees, a poem with dialogue by Víctor Balaguer (30 September); Magda, by Hermann Sudermann (6 November); he premieres White Mountains, the first long work by Juli Vallmitjana (9 December).

An evening of recitals at the Ateneu Barcelonès, with Xirgu, of extracts from Joan Maragall’s Nausica, to mark the poet’s death.

1912 Xirgu-Giménez-Nolla Company. Teatre Principal. Premiere of Frou Frou, by Milhay and Halévy (8 January); premiere of Cliff-top Flowers, by Ignasi Iglésias (24 February); premieres and acts as lead in Theodora, by Sardou (13 April); Elektra, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, translated by Joaquim Pena (26 April); acts with Enric Guitart in The Son of Christ, by Ambrosi Carrion (8 May).

Teatre Íntim. Directs and premieres in Madrid The Genius of Comedy, by Gual (May).

1913 Creation of the Catalan School of Dramatic Art (CSDA). He takes charge of declamation.

1914 Teatre Íntim. Premieres and leads in The Extraordinary Comedy of the Man who Lost Time, by Gual, at the Teatre Auditòrium (1 February).

A member of Barcinógrafo, a stable group of actors and technicians created by Gual to make several films: The Mayor of Zalamea, by Lope de Vega (August), and Gual’s Mystery of Pain, adapted for the cinema (1-7 September).

1919 Directs Madam Marieta, by Ignasi Iglésias (30 November).

1921 Collaborates with Gual in the lectures of the CSDA for the 1921-1922 academic year.

1923 Lecture by Adrià Gual “Towards a New Theatre” at the Ateneu de Madrid.

1924 A new phase of the Teatre Íntim until 1928.

1927 2nd International Theatre Congress in Paris.

1928 His father dies at the age of 88.

1929 3rd International Theatre Congress in Barcelona, from 23 to 29 June.

Paper “Teaching the Actor”.

1935 2 May, the Generalitat de Catalunya issues a decree according to which the Barcelona Theatre Institution returns to its original name, the Catalan School of Dramatic Art.

Giménez is appointed teacher of declamation and recitation at the centre, Joaquim Montero, the teacher of lyric performance, and Enric de la Fuente, an assistant teacher of the classes for theatre actors.

1939 Dies in Barcelona on 25 May.

1962 A street is named after him in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Sarrià (23 January).

1965 His son Enric Giménez i Miquel donates the notebooks to the Adrià Gual School of Declamation. They are now in the Ricard Salvat i Ferré Foundation.

1968 On the initiative of his son Enric Giménez i Miquel, a tribute is paid in Barcelona to mark the centenary of his birth.

PLANTS AND ANIMALS

Picarol, “Apeles Mestres, Master in the Art of Poetry”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa (Barcelona, 1908).

METHODS OF APPLICATION AND CATALOGUES FOR MODERNISTA FLORAL DECORATION

Fàtima López Pérez

Les fleurs, en effet, ont toujours su l’inspirer;

et, aux belles époques de l’art, elles

ont été envisagées au point de vue emblématique,

en même temps que sous le rapport de leurs

combinaisons géométriques infinies et du magnifique

élément décoratif qu’elles présentent.[1]

V. RUPRICH-ROBERT, Flore ornamentale.

Essai sur la composition

de l’ornement (1866)

Ornamental methods of application are essential work tools that were addressed to decorative artists, ornamentalists, designers, sculptors and architects. As part of their role as guides to decorative composition, a series of theoretical approaches is presented accompanied by illustrations, understood as catalogues, that give examples of the concepts in order to offer a methodical and practical character. On several occasions, these ornamental treatises were produced by the decorative artists themselves and they corresponded to academic teaching materials. The fact that methods and catalogues began to proliferate in the middle of the nineteenth century has to do with the first Great Exhibition, held in London in 1851. The exhibition clearly showed the need to study ornamentation as a principal utility of the industrial arts, and this consequently gave rise to a large number of catalogues compiled in grammars of ornamentation.[2]

Focusing my text on the methods of application and the Modernista floral ornamentation catalogues in Barcelona, and without wishing to be exhaustive, I shall offer as complete a view as possible. Chronologically, they chiefly begin from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards and I limit the research to the early years of the twentieth century in order to keep to the timeframe.[3]

The proliferation of floral methods and catalogues from abroad

One of the first observations that we have to make is the almost non-existent production of ornamental floral methods and catalogues published in Barcelona. An exceptional case, and which therefore merits special consideration, is the third notebook dedicated to plants in the Colección de modelos para la enseñanza del dibujo. Aplicable a las Artes, Oficios e Industrias (A collection of models for the teaching of drawing. Applicable to the Arts, Crafts and Industries, c. 1869), produced by Jaume Serra i Gibert, a teacher of line drawing and adornment at the Llotja Fine Art School in Barcelona between 1860 and 1877. The aim of the notebook was to show the students the main plant forms in art, especially their decorative applications. The theoretical concepts are accompanied by twelve plates that each have their own notes.

Leaves in the third notebook about plants by Jaume Serra i Gibert, Colección de modelos para la enseñanza del dibujo. Aplicable a las Artes, Oficios e Industrias, Barcelona, c. 1869.

The lack of production in Barcelona is justified in the face of the proliferation of foreign floral methods and catalogues, basically published in France, chiefly in Paris, that were acquired in Barcelona. The first of these works is Flore ornamentale. Essai sur la composition de l’ornement. Éléments tirés de la Nature et principes de leur application (Essay on the composition of the ornament: elements taken from Nature and principles of their application), by Victor Ruprich-Robert, a pupil of Viollet-le-Duc. It is in two volumes, the first from 1866 and the second 10 years later, both published in Paris. Ruprich-Robert was a teacher of composition and the history of ornamentation at the École Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin in Paris. It is a textbook devoted to floral ornamentation that includes a large number of plates accompanied by the references in an alphabetical list. Henri Despois de Folleville, a sculptor who had contributed to several architectural publications, published Botanique de l’ornemaniste. L’ornement par la nature. Première partie. Dessins d’après nature. Deuxième partie- Interprétations.- Compositions (An Ornamentalist’s Botany. Ornament for Nature. Part one – Designs Taken from Nature. Part two – Interpretations. Compositions, 1882), also in Paris. The title of this catalogue is implicit enough due to the detailed work on the plants and flowers. Just a few years later another graphic compilation appeared, Les plantes dans leurs applications à l’art et à l’industrie (Plants in their Applications to Art and Industry, 1887), by Martin Gerlach. The author tries to fill a double gap, firstly to give plants decorative value in artistic development and secondly to present some copies of ancient motifs with floral elements, but which have been interpreted and adapted to the new forms and to the tastes of the period. A while later one of the major works appeared, La plante et ses applications ornementales (The Plant and its Ornamental Applications, 1896) by Eugène Grasset, published in Paris by the Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts.[4] This work was the result of Grasset’s teaching work at the École Guérin in Paris. It includes the best work by his pupils; these include Maurice Pillard Verneuil, Georges Bourgeot, Marcelle Gaudin, Augusto Giacometti, Emma Herwegh, Marcelle Mangin, Juliette Milési and Camille Gabriel Schlumberger.

In the new century, the study of plants was paid more attention in two of the most complete methods focusing on industrial applications. On one hand, Le décor par la plante. L’ornement et la végétation. Théorie décorative et applications industrielles. 685 croquis ou dessins exécutés par l’auteur (Décor for the plant. Ornamentation and plants. Decorative theory and industrial applications: 685 sketches or designs done by the author) by Alfred Keller, published in Paris in 1904. On the other, Étude de la Plante. Son application aux industries d’art: pochoir. Papier peint. Étoffes. Céramique. Marqueterie. Tapis. Ferronnerie. Reliure. Dentelles. Broderies. Vitrail. Mosaïque. Bijouterie. Bronze. Orfévrerie (A Study of Plants. Its application in the art industries: stencilling. Wallpaper. Fabrics. Ceramics. Marquetry. Carpets. Wrought ironwork. Bookbinding. Lacework. Embroidery. Stained glass. Mosaic. Jewellery. Bronze. Precious metalwork, 1908), by Maurice Pillard Verneuil, one of Grasset’s pupils, also published in Paris. In the 1910s, the focus shifted to decorative compositions, such as Traité de composition décorative (Treatise on Decorative Composition, 1911), based on the study of flora, by Joseph Gauthier and Louis Capelle, published in Paris. Gauthier was a teacher of decorative composition and Capelle of architecture, both at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes.

As well as the marked French provenance there is also the English. It should be mentioned that they are decorative models that circulate around Europe and it is more obvious that due to geographical proximity they should have arrived mainly from France and England. In the twentieth century the figure of Lewis Foreman Day stood out, who published works about decorative design at the end of the Victorian period. An enthusiastic scholar of nature, he was also a consummate botanical draughtsman. His works included Nature and Ornament, composed of two volumes, the first Nature, the Raw Material of Design (1908) and the second Ornament, the Finished Product of Design (1909), published in London.

I thought that in order to carry out an analysis of methods and catalogues it would be necessary to divide the content into different sub-sections. These range from the general to the specific view, from the different ways of studying plants to depicting them, and to applying it until we reach their symbolic connotation.

The presence of plants in the history of decoration and ornamental historicism

In some methods and catalogues the prominence that plants achieved in ornamentation from the very beginnings of mankind was noted, as Maurice Pillard Verneuil said in Étude de la Plante (1908): “Un simple coup d’oeil jeté sur l’art ornemental de toutes les époques suffira pour nous convaincre que de tout temps la plante fut employée en art decorative”.[5]

From the mid nineteenth century, decorative composition was given considerable importance, similar to that of the earlier artistic periods of different civilizations. Hence the appearance of the repertoires Grammar of Ornament (1856), by Owen Jones, or Handbook of Ornament. A Grammar of Industrial Art and Architectural Design in all its Branches for Practical as well as Theoretical Use, from the late nineteenth century, by Franz Sales Meyer. This material gave the decorator a historicist range of reference sources, placed at the service of new compositions that set the guidelines of eclecticism. Some of the methods of floral ornamentation include a large number of plates of catalogues that adopt a chronological classification of the preceding artistic styles. It is not their intention simply to make a copy; rather, an interpretative effort is required by the craftsman. The guidelines are given for the reinterpretation of historical styles from a modern point of view. As an example, in Flore ornamentale. Essai sur la composition de l’ornement (1866), Ruprich-Robert incorporated the history of the representation of plants in Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages. Despois de Folleville, in Botanique de l’ornemantiste (1882), offered a historicist catalogue of decorative floral compositions from Antiquity to the eighteenth century in the last section. They include Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Etruscan, Byzantine, Japanese, Arab and Roman works, among others, with the representation of the French, Italian and German schools. Keller, in Le décor par la plante (1904), dedicated a section in the chapter “Ornamentation in Styles” to the development of the artistic representation of plants. Day, in Ornament: The Finished Product of Design (1909), focused basically on historicist explanations of the evolution of the forms of nature throughout the centuries and in different civilizations based on the simplification, the production and the consistent modification of natural forms in the history of the ornament.

In these publications we have a record of the presence of plants and flowers as a natural source that makes multiple decorative interpretations possible throughout history. Flora is considered the basis of the ornament and of all artistic composition, and thus flowers become an endless source of inspiration. This concept has to be understood in the context of flora being rooted in the importance that nature acquires in the decoration of the period. The importance of the plant world in ornamentation has been crucial since the origins of art, and it gradually gains a higher degree until it is considered the natural source that will make possible the development of fin-de-siècle artistic expression. The historicist representations of flora are considered points of reference that drive the development of the search for new designs. In other words, the past is no longer interesting within the historicist context of the nineteenth century; rather, it becomes a resource to develop a new line based on the search for a new art.

Studying from life

Sometimes, in contrast to the prevailing historicism and others as a result of the need for the new concepts in floral ornamentation to evolve, it becomes an exaltation of studying from life, what the French call après nature. The aim was to obtain new compositions along with the creation of a first naturalistic style based on the presentation of equally new approaches that would determine floral ornamental innovation.

Knowledge of plants becomes an essential requirement for the production of innovative designs. In this respect, in Le décor par la plante (1904) Keller assigned a remarkable role to botanical study, indispensable for his design, which he called “organography”. He studied aspects such as nutrition, branching, buds, the stalk, the fruit and reproduction with the plant’s fertilization organs. From his point of view, in Étude de la Plante (1908), Verneuil devoted the first sections – entitled “Concerning plants in general” and “A study of plants” – to the constituent features of the plant. Without going into a botanical and scientific study he does look closely at the classification and the anatomy of plants in order to learn about their formation. Their chief members are the root, the stem and the leaf, followed by the flowers, the fruits and the seeds.

The sources that the decorator has to use are a compilation of images configured from the direct observation of nature. The best place to be able to make sketches from life is the botanical garden, a unique place that includes a diversity of species. The result is a herbarium that should not be understood in a scientific sense but an artistic one. Based on this acquired knowledge, the craftsman interprets botany but he cannot copy nature exactly; it is necessarily a personal interpretation. The craftsman must not impose limits on the artistic process of his creation in order to produce something new.

The methods and the catalogues, functioning as ornamental guides, offered a variety of examples of studying natural plants. In a didactic sense, Ruprich-Robert, as a teacher at the École Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin in Paris, needed to create new plant models for the students so that they could study nature in all its variations. The material obtained was presented in the volume Flore ornamentale (1866-1876), with the aim not just of becoming a practical textbook for artists and industrialists – with designs they could imitate – but of setting the guidelines of plant models for young artists still being trained. Therefore, Ruprich-Robert proposed the script for the development of floral creativity and as a result each artist enlarged his own repertoire, which he called the herbier. Another case is that of Grasset who, as editor of La plante et ses applications ornementales (1896), presented a study from life of plants and flowers with plates signed by his pupils at the École Guérin in Paris. Grasset’s teaching allowed for freedom of expression and perfect mastery of the art of life drawing. Grasset upheld the return to the origins of nature, breaking with the past and creating a modern up-to-date work. Verneuil, one of his pupils and collaborators, developed the same concept in his own work Étude de la Plante (1908), as we saw above. It is interesting to note that in the plates of flowers and plants he makes a thorough study of each of their parts, arranged as individual sections: open and closed flower, fruit, leaves and stem. The results are not formulated in a strictly academic sense of patterns to copy, but to foster the creative motivation of each artist within the concept of personal and, therefore, unique works.

Composite ways of representing flora

After studying the life drawing of the plant and the flower, the craftsmen proceeds to its compositional representation. In Le décor par la plante (1904), Keller considered that just as the botanical study of the plant was necessary, one also had to know the laws of decorative composition, and he devoted several chapters to the rules of composition, which he understood as ornamental laws: symmetry, splendour, repetition, alternation, gradation and accident. All of them are based on geometry, called the basis of the regularization of nature. Geometry develops the linear elements and the coup de fouet curve, characteristic of Art Nouveau, which was called “sentiment” by Keller.

We see that the forms of compositional representation of the plant world are based on parameters that range from the simulated model of nature to the disfiguration that stylization entails. In a first compositional process, the craftsman performs the exercise of drawing the model from life. He approaches the natural element from several perspectives that offer different views of the plant and the flower. In a second process, which I have wished to define as geometricized nature, the natural elements, in which the curved line predominates, are governed by the symmetry that it is hoped to adapt to geometrical parameters. Ruprich-Robert, in Flore ornamentale. Essai sur la composition de l’ornement (1866), understood geometry as a condition of beauty integrated in nature and which is imitated in artistic compositions. The procedure leads to stylization as a structural synthesis. The process of synthesizing the forms is followed by the stylization of the structure until it delimits the natural element to precise and illustrative patterns of nature.

The two ways of depicting floral ornamentation were eventually understood as two contrasting extremes. Meier-Graefe, director of the journal Art Décoratif, expressed it that way in the article “Floral ornament, linear ornament”, in 1899, in which he gave a view of the fin-de-siècle conflict.[6] On one hand, the realistic defined as floral, and on the other, the stylized, called linear. Stylization taken to extremes could be interpreted with negative connotations and, in this respect, in the work Éléments de composition decorative (1912), Quénioux mentioned the criticisms of Ruskin, who viewed stylization as a procedure that is a danger to the truth.

Floral applications in the decorative and industrial arts

Flora as a source of inspiration expanded through the decorative and industrial arts of the period, becoming one of the repertoires par excellence. Some general methods of ornamentation dealt with the application of floral depictions in the decorative arts, in response to the needs generated by the art industry. Álbum enciclopédico-pintoresco de los artes industriales (Encyclopaedic-Picturesque Album of the Industrial Arts, 1857), by Lluís Rigalt; Chefs-d’oeuvre des arts industriels. Céramique-verrerie et vitraux-métaux-orfèvrerie et bijouterie tapisserie (Masterpieces of the Industrial Arts. Ceramics-Glassware and Stained glass-metal-precious stones and Jewellery Carpets, 1866), by Philippe Burty; Principles of Decorative Design (1873), by Christopher Dresser; La composition décorative (Decorative Composition, 1885), by Henri Mayeux, or Composiciones decorativas: álbum de arte suntuario (Decorative Compositions: an Album of Sumptuary Art, 1893), by Ginés Codina, are just a few examples.

With regard to the explicit methods and catalogues of floral ornamentation, Despois’s Botanique de l’ornemaniste (1882) presented a large number of illustrations with examples of the adaptation of the plant from its life drawing to possible designs to be applied to the different materials of the decorative arts. The work is organized in two parts, the botany of the ornamentalist and imaginative interpretations. With regard to the former, drawings are incorporated done directly from life. The second part would correspond to the decorative compositions that can be made from the elements presented in the former. In Le décor par la plante (1904) Keller includes the application of nature to the destination of its design, dealing with the different technical applications such as paper, fabric, wood, stone, glass, metal, porcelain and iron. Verneuil devoted his work Étude de la Plante (1908) to the study of the application of flora to the art industries. The title itself specifies this, Son application aux industries d’art: pochoir. Papier peint. Étoffes. Céramique. Marqueterie. Tapis. Ferronnerie. Reliure. Dentelles. Broderies. Vitrail. Mosaïque. Bijouterie. Bronze. Orfévrerie. In the work Traité de composition décorative (1911) Gauthier and Capelle study, one by one, a series of applied arts such as stone, marble, wrought iron, metal, ceramics, glass, stained glass, mosaic, leather, wood, wallpaper, decorative painting, fabrics, upholstery, lacework, embroidery and marquetry.

The decorative and industrial arts chosen correspond to those that are considered the principal industries, each of them with its demands that are known when the different techniques are studied. The designs, based on presented floral motifs, are examples of applications that allowed for massive expansion on an industrial scale and which, therefore, contributed to the proliferation of the floral repertoire.

Floral symbolism in ornamentation

Beyond the formal elements of the depiction of plants, the selection could be linked to the symbolic connotations that they represented.

Ruprich-Robert began his work Flore ornamentale. Essai sur la composition de l’ornement (1866) with the symbolic and emblematic connotations of flora. He posited a symbolic historicism, that is, the symbolism of plants throughout history and the symbolic connotations attributed from the beginnings of their depiction. The author devoted a chapter to the subject of the floral symbol, paying special attention to the lotus, the emblematic plant of ancient Egypt, basically focused on Greco-Roman mythology and Christianity. Symbolic historicism also appears in the volume Le décor par la plante (1904) by Keller, who considered that a study of the ornamental plant would be incomplete if he did not include the emblematic meaning to be introduced in appropriate decoration. For this reason, he devoted a chapter to the emblematic plant, in relation to the ancient and modern traditions with their historical meanings.

Germanic iris in Joseph Gauthier and Louis Capelle, Traité de composition décorative, Paris, 1911.

I would like to point out that, of the ornamental methods, the one that contributes the most precise information on the emblem corresponding to the plant is the flora notebook of Serra’s Colección de modelos para la enseñanza del dibujo. Aplicable a las Artes, Oficios e Industrias (c. 1869). The last section is given over to the symbolic meaning that plants enjoy in the art world. The author made a compendium of the plants that are most represented, which has become a very valuable source, enabling us to have a precise group of plants that were interesting due to the way they were shown in Barcelona. The symbolic meaning is included next to the name of the plant and the flower that is illustrated, an association between representation and symbolism.

Special attention must be given to the case of Maurice Pillard Verneuil with the Dictionnaire des symboles, emblèmes & attributs (1897), published in Paris.[7] Some years before creating Étude de la plante (1908), Verneuil provided contemporary artists with a series of symbolic meanings of the motifs that they could apply to their works. More than half the concepts corresponded to the theme of plants; the contemporary languages of flowers were the chief source for learning their meaning.[8] Verneuil produced a specific book of symbols, emblems and attributes with a direct relationship between symbol and decoration. Up to that point only a few ornamental methods had alluded to symbolic floral historicism, but without studying it in depth, and Verneuil therefore helped to bridge the gap in this knowledge.

The methods of application and the repertoires for floral ornamentation spread the idea of a symbolic meaning associated with flowers and plants that conditioned the choice of plant motifs to be represented. Therefore, symbolism could be intrinsically incorporated into ornamental flora with a deliberate selection.

THE STUDY OF THE MODERNISTA BESTIARY
 Notes for a first approach

Teresa-M. Sala

Our generation feels fatigued by the immediate study of nature

in which it was educated and, rejecting analyses and experiments,

aspires to brilliant syntheses, to harmonious ensembles,

which only incidentally originate in external reality.

RAIMON CASELLAS (1893)

The artistic and architectural thinking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is like a large diverse laboratory of experiences that aspires to synthesis and modernity. At the end of the century, the creative activity that takes its inspiration from nature becomes the vehicle for feeling and transcribing the dynamism, the flow and the productiveness of natura naturante. The artists truly wish to know the mysterious place where creation originates, beneath the surface of visible reality. In this respect, the words of Raimon Casellas at the head of this article[1] allude to the return to the pantheist sanctuary, to an essential spirituality, which has to do with a vital unitary idea of creation that belongs at one and the same time to the Symbolist world and to the imagery of evolution.[2] Moreover, in contrast to the creations of nature in constant transformation, of which mankind is a part – there is the evocative potential of those created by the human unconscious,[3] which generate universal myths or symbols. The inter-reaction between nature and art places us at a junction that is the symbol.[4]

Images of animals – the theme we are looking at here – have been used in the world of the arts since the beginning of time. We find the curiosity and the fascination that the animal world has always inspired in civilizations such as the Egyptian, in which animals were used as a source of inspiration for the symbols of their writing, and they were the attribute of a deity.[5] In the works of Aristotle that deal with zoological knowledge,[6] Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History,[7] the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, the versions of the Physiologus[8] or the medieval bestiaries,[9] we find nature described in the manner of natural histories or of allegorical stories that illustrate a more profound significance, which in turn links up with a metaphysical meaning of the natural world.

We must also point out, as it was published in the Modernista period by L’Avenç,[10] the Llibre de les meravelles (Book of Wonders, 1287-1289) by Ramon Llull, which includes the popular Llibre de les bèsties (Book of Animals), a didactic novel structured through examples. In this work, the author, instead of studying and describing the animals, makes them play the part of people and in this way he tells us about the vices and virtues of the society of his day.

If the invention of the printing press, in the middle of the fifteenth century, produced a change in the development and the advancement of knowledge of nature, no less important was the invention of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century. Galleries and natural history cabinets had been building up iconographical collections of plants and animals whilst draughtsmen, and later photographers too, were showing new species in the publication of catalogues of flora and fauna. Naturphilosophie, associated with German Romanticism, is the germ of an organic concept of science. Nevertheless, when the natural sciences and biology were developed as a discipline in the second half of the century, especially with the formulation of the theory of evolution, with the contributions of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, and also Ernst Haeckel who disseminated it, on an aesthetic level naturalism evolved into Symbolism.

The way of interpreting the significance of the animal in art may be metaphorical or merely correspond to the preponderant desire to decorate at that time. On one hand, artists revived a type of fauna that comes from popular tradition, full of legends and fantastic visions, which combines syncretically with new images coming from other traditions; meanwhile, on the other hand, there were those who stylized the natural forms as purely ornamental motifs. Because, “by keeping our eyes open, we shall find this interaction between decoration and symbolism in many places”.[11] During the nineteenth century, more than ever before, nature was seen as an inexhaustible source, a provider of countless decorative motifs.[12] One of the pioneers in consulting the book of nature was George Phillips, who around 1830 proposed taking inspiration from insects. Also, with the phenomenon of neo-Gothic, a way of interpreting the law of nature was rediscovered that would serve as a model and the possibility of change away from eighteenth-century bad taste. The Middle Ages became a topoi (commonplace) for poetry, the theatre, painting and architecture with widespread fascination for emblems and heraldic motifs, and also for naturalistic or fantastic motifs. To all this we have to add the cult of Japan, which signified a profound aesthetic shift in all spheres of artistic creation. An amalgam of names of reference or shared interpretations – such as Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, Morris, Viollet-le-Duc, Wagner, Poe and Baudelaire – became the beacons that lit up the aesthetic ideas of the time. With regard to the evocation of strange anatomies, La tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of St Anthony), written by Gustave Flaubert in 1874, was one of the literary sources for Symbolist artists. The mystic episode of the Evil One’s temptations takes the form of female temptresses or devils, in which crocodiles’ heads with goat’s feet or owls with a serpent’s tail have the appearance of an imaginary bestiary. It is a case of hybridism, recovered from the mediaeval spirit and inspired on the world of dreams and the fantasy of the wondrous.

On a different level, Haeckel’s drawings, many of them done with the aid of a microscope, held great fascination in many artistic circles. With the publication of Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature, 1899-1904), his illustrations of plants, jellyfish and animals markedly influenced the sphere of the arts. This artist-cum-scientist drew the radiolaria (underwater single-cell organisms) that were a link between the organic and inorganic worlds. In the illustrated publications of the time articles appeared on how decoration could be based on living forms (studies of beetles, flies, etc.).

In 1897, Maurice Pillard Verneuil published the Dictionnaire des symboles, emblèmes & attributs (Dictionary of Symbols, Emblems & Attributes),[13] a collection of traditions at the service of art that, together with L’animal dans la decoration (The Use of Animals in Decoration),[14] became, respectively, a guide and method of application for the decorative and industrial arts. The two basic pillars for the renewal of the repertoires of Art Nouveau were unquestionably inspiration in Japanese art and nature.[15]

In this brief article I am only able to offer an interpretative sequence of symbolic figures, the beginnings of a far larger study. They are examples that refer to a universe of metamorphoses, a torrent of real or fabulous images of animals, which make up a fundamental part of the symbolic and decorative repertoire when La Renaixença gave way to Modernisme.

The high point of La Renaixença

If we look closely at the 1870s and 80s, the last years of the cultural movement known as the Catalan Renaixença, we see heterogeneous elements being mixed up, a “feeling of tradition versus an intense wish to be different”.[16] The revival of a historical period to hold up as a mirror to oneself, the Middle Ages, becomes an original source in which it is possible to discover a mythical-legendary world that helps to define the origins of the identity of Catalonia and which gets mixed up with the fascination for faraway or exotic cultures: a stimulating vision in which disparate elements shaping a free eclecticism converged. Architects, artists and men of letters rubbed shoulders in this complex and often paradoxical context of the construction of an urban and European Catalonia, at the service of certain elite patrons who made it possible.[17] Indeed, every project corresponds to a poetic and symbolic relationship according to its social function. Thus, the poet Jacint Verdaguer and the architect Antoni Gaudí found themselves at the service of the López-Güell family and worked for the symbolic output of the two patrons. Almost in the manner of a manifesto about the function of ornamentation, Antoni Gaudí wrote in the following terms:

[…] to be interesting, it has to represent objects that remind us of poetic ideas, that constitute motifs. The motifs are historical, legendary, of action, emblematic, collections of fables about man and his life, actions and passion. And with respect to nature, they can be representative of the animal and plant – and the topographic or mineral – kingdoms.[18]

The phoenix

The phoenix is a sacred firebird that in ancient Egypt was one of the symbols of the city of Heliopolis (the ‘city of the sun’ in Greek). According to Herodotus, its wings were part golden and part red, similar to the eagle.[19] In Book XV of the Metamorphoses, Ovid mentions its unique ability to regenerate itself:

[…] There is one bird which reproduces and renews itself: the Assyrians gave this bird his name – the Phoenix. He does not live either on grain or herbs, but only on small drops of frankincense and juices of amomum. When this bird completes a full five centuries of life straightway with talons and with shining beak he builds a nest among palm branches, where they join to form the palm tree’s waving top. As soon as he has strewn in this new nest the cassia bark and ears of sweet spikenard, and some bruised cinnamon with yellow myrrh, he lies down on it and refuses life among those dreamful odours. And they say that from the body of the dying bird is reproduced a little Phoenix which is destined to live just as many years.[20]

The idea of the phoenix’s resurrection was adopted by Christianity and we find regeneration in other areas of biological, political or social life, understood as a form of reparation or a process of purification. Indeed, we find some examples of this dual symbolic path of resurrection / regeneration recorded in the history of Barcelona. Thus, in 1530 Lo fénix tot sol (the phoenix alone) appears in the Corpus Christi processions as a symbol of Christian resurrection, whilst in the seventeenth century the Fènix de Catalunya[21] is associated with a political, economic and social regeneration movement. Nevertheless, it was in the 1870s and 80s when it was undoubtedly revived as a symbol of the Catalan Renaixença, and the Catalanists adopted it. It appears on the masthead of the newspaper La Renaixensa and the magazine La Reinaxença (1881-1905), drawn by Lluís Domènech i Montaner. We can also find it on other mastheads of publications of the day, some of them drawn by Apel·les Mestres or other illustrators, in which the coat of arms of Catalonia and the five-pointed star, or the mountains of Montserrat, accompany it; for example in the magazine Renaixement, adhering to the Unió Catalanista, or in the series of stamps “Catalunya”.

Architects such as Domènech and Vilaseca adopted the phoenix as a motif for extraordinary buildings in the so-called “Renaixença style”. For example, we see it stylized in the wrought-iron railings on the front of the Montaner i Simon publisher’s building and at the psychiatric hospital in Reus, where it appears in allusion to the mentally ill: the image of the firebird that is reborn from the ashes with the legend renascitur is accompanied by some flors de pensament (pansies) with the legend es refaran.[22]

An important phoenix appears on the front of a singular urban mansion: the Palau Güell. The presence of the phoenix, located on a sort of helmet above the four bars, like a crest of the Catalan dynasty, refers explicitly to the renaixentista mission of Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi, which we can follow in the building’s other emblems and symbols.[23]

The Palau’s symbolic and decorative programme corresponds to the aristocratic aspirations of a Renaissance prince.[24] In the stained-glass windows of the bedroom gallery there are neo-medieval designs, influenced by William Morris, with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth. In the dining room and the sala de confiança, the carved wooden reliefs on the wainscoting are decorated with birds, dragons, fishes and fantastic animals with Anglo-Japanese touches.[25] On the dining-room chimneypiece, by Camil Oliveras in collaboration with the cabinetmaker Francesc Vidal, there are cats and reptiles.

It is a mansion representative of the ideal of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, vibrant with music, and with constant allusions to the figure of Eusebi Güell, who was to be made Count Güell in 1910. The symbolism of the coat of arms designed by Gaudí is very interesting.[26] It is inspired by the Barcelona of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; above the royal crest, there was a dragon – which in the nineteenth century was changed for a bat – and which in this case features a phoenix. On the inside of the coat of arms there is the crowned pennant in the form of a cross from the Palau Güell, accompanied on either side by two emblematic allusions with a drawing underneath: on the right, ahir pastor (yesterday a shepherd) – with a dove symbolizing the spirit above a cogwheel of industry – and on the left, avui senyor (today a lord) – an owl above a half moon, as the symbol of wisdom and knowledge that accompanied Athena when she guarded the Acropolis by night.

Thus, the day and the night, the work of the shepherd and the contemplative life of the lord, symbolize the activity and the social rank achieved, with a mysterious trilogy of birds that illuminates the process of transformation of Eusebi Güell into Count Güell.

This rebirth of traditional symbols and myths is the memory and history of the past that were renewed with Modernisme with a vocation to be universal.

Orpheus and Circe

The poets and artists of Modernisme evoke the ancient prophets and make poetry a religion. The return to the myth of Orpheus represents and expresses the alliance of the arts as a whole, revealing human skills, as the creator of a universe of forms of the resonant world. This “father of songs”, as Pindar called him, embodies the myth of the Greek singer-songwriter and poet who had the power to tame the wild beasts with the sound of music and he is shown playing the lyre, surrounded by numerous animals. The ideal of Orpheus meant a way back to the essence of things, to the harmony that transforms the instincts through music. Men gathered to listen to Orpheus and let their souls rest.

With regard to the registers of iconographical representation, Symbolist artists choose different moments of the mythical story, above all the death of Orpheus. Thus, Gustave Moreau paints a young Thracian melancholically gazing upon the head of Orpheus on his attribute, the lyre.

What are significantly called orfeons are choral societies in which the voices fraternize; they were created in France after the French Revolution, and later in Catalonia with the Clavé choirs. From then on, the choral movement was one of the cornerstones of the Catalan cultural revival. The foundation of the choral society called the Orfeó Català dates from 1891, with Lluís Millet i Pagès and Amadeu Vives directing. Llaverias did two drawings entitled La música amanseix les feres (Music Tames the Wild Beasts), alluding to the Orfeó Català’s journey to Madrid, in which Orpheus was the maestro Millet who played the lyre in hell, surrounded by an auditorium formed by the bear on the coat of arms of Madrid and a group of small symbolic animals: reptiles, the sabrefish and rats.[27] The Catalanist allusions are very clear and expressive. The other sketch dates from 1922, when to mark his visit to the Orfeó Català Antoni Gaudí dedicated an allegorical drawing of his assistant Francesc de P. Quintana, with the motto referring to the Barcelona choir: “Al cel tots en serem, d’orfeonistes…” (In heaven we will all be Orfeó singers).

On the contrary, Circe was the great poisoner in the Odyssey who could turn men into animals. Josep Triadó depicted her on an ex-libris of Josep Fabregat, in which she appears poisoning the sea, with a serpent representing evil.

Lizards, imaginary and allegorical animals

Lizards are scaly reptiles that include the small lizards, the dragons, the chameleons, the iguanas and the varanidae, among others. They are land animals, living in hot zones, where they stay out in the sun for a long time.

With regard to the imaginary animals related to the lizards, we find the vibra or víbria (viper), which is a poisonous snake or griffin, of the same species as the dragon. This unusual animal took part in the popular processions for the celebration of Corpus Christi in Barcelona. Moreover, in the books and in the popular imagination of the nineteenth century, we see that the dragon and the Barcelona víbria were confused, seeing as the animals that embody evil end up crystallizing in the dragon. The iconography of these creatures, of the different dragons, is extensive and notable. In 1399 it is mentioned that, upon the coronation of King Martin the Humane, Barcelona sent the Eagle and the Vibre to the Aragonese city (Zaragoza).[28] In this context, the allusions on the crest of the Royal House of Barcelona to the Drac Pennat (víbria or winged dragon) appear at the entrance to the Town Hall, which would be reproduced in Modernisme on the medals and sculptures of Eusebi Arnau. The vibra on the royal crest of King Peter III the Ceremonious was a dragon that crowned important cities in the Mediterranean, and over time it became identified with a bat and took its form. The bat is very much in evidence in the territories of the old Crown of Aragon. There is a legend that says that James I avoided a defeat that allowed him to conquer Valencia … or as in Majorca, which says that a bat protected the king when he was in a mosque, later consecrated as a church. For this reason it appears on the coats of arms of the cities of Barcelona, Palma and Valencia.

The dragon is a fantastic animal with an earthly nature, which lives in caves and on underground paths, and also guards hidden treasures and secrets. Due to its characteristics it contains the four elements of nature: fire for the breath, air for the wings, water for the scales of its body and earth for the morphology of the lizard. Dragons are imaginary beasts that have a very distant and universal past, and they constitute an archetype of the collective unconscious that means the feeling of fear that man experiences before the unknown.

The dragon Ladon had 100 heads and never slept because it guarded the Garden of the Hesperides, which was one of the twelve labours of Hercules. The wrought-iron gate that Antoni Gaudí designed with a ferocious draco as guardian of the entrance to the stables of the Güell family’s Torre Satalia represents a protection of the fruits of the Garden, the golden apples that granted immortality. Also, as a kind of Arcadian symbolism, the serpent on the coat of arms of Catalonia and the lizard or salamander on the staircase in the Park Güell have been considered by some authors as symbols of transformation. The Christian symbolism of the salamander, which could live among the flames fanning the good fire while it put out the bad fire, personifies an emblem of love.

As to the symbolism of the dragon, from Genesis to Revelation Satan was identified with this fantastic animal, and the same demoniacal value has endured over time in our culture. The symbolic image par excellence of Modernisme is that of the knight Saint George slaying the Dragon. The patron saint of Catalonia fighting against evil symbolizes the people’s struggle against the beast / the monster represented by Castile. There are a host of depictions of the knight Saint George, sometimes with only a sword – as we see in some beautiful inlays by Gaspar Homar – or fighting against the dragon, which in the majority of the buildings by the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch becomes the architect’s own badge, his signature. On top of the Casa de les Punxes (or Casa Terrades) we see him represented with the Catalanist motto: “Sant patró de Catalunya, torneu-nos la llibertat” (Patron saint of Catalonia, give us our freedom back).

We could make an extensive study of the Modernista iconography of Saint George in the decorative arts: jewellery, marquetry, painted tapestries, applied sculpture, and so on. I shall merely point to two further beautiful examples, that of Saint George slaying the dragon next to the maiden, a sculpture by Eusebi Arnau on one of the friezes in the main corridor of Casa Lleó Morera, and that of the knight Saint George keeping the Catalan people safe that crowns the sculptural group by Miquel Blay, located on one corner of the front of the Palau de la Música Catalana. Both represent the hero’s confrontation of the ferocious beast and that of the knight who is the patron saint of Catalonia.

Besides the dragon, we often see the presence of the griffin, a sort of hybrid animal, widely depicted in the Middle Ages, with an eagle’s head and a lion’s body, legs and claws. We can see it on the sculpted arms of the sillons de respecte (decorated seats), done by Francesc Vidal or Joan Busquets, and also decorating some buildings. The elemental forces of nature are represented in different ways in decorative programmes. For example, the one in Lluís Domènech i Montaner’s Palau Montaner stands out for its hybrid nature: the power of a gallery of monsters that are like a petrified cry of nature. At the entrance there is the imposing presence of a winged horse, Pegasus, symbolizing the upward power of nature, which Domènech reused at the Palau de la Música Catalana some years later. On the ground floor we find depicted a struggle between putti and the forces of evil, with two hunting scenes in which they appear playing with a wild boar or in the form of Pan playing with some birds. The counterpoint is another relief in which the sun has come out and the boy is represented in it with a faithful dog caressing a nest of nightingales. On the first floor, we can see a flock of winged monsters, perfectly carved in wood, among them a winged mermaid, which are combined with friezes where one sees an allegory of the arts and modern inventions. They are the monsters that in medieval times were depicted above all on the gargoyles of cathedrals and which we find on some Modernista buildings, such as the Casa Vídua Marfà.[29] Or others with an oriental air, like those that Josep Pascó placed on the chimneypiece in the home of the painter Ramon Casas.

One of the most mysterious beasts in the fantastic imagery, whose mission is to guard wealth and make sure no one steals it, is the basilisk, capable of killing with a glance. The escritoire that Casa Busquets presented at the Fine Art and Artistic Industries Exhibition in 1898, and which won the competition’s gold medal, excelled for its profuse symbolic ornamentation. As the casket protected a treasure chest, it must have seemed like a good idea to place a basilisk there to guard it.[30]

Santiago Rusiñol, “Caps de brot”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa (Barcelona, 23 February 1889). “He is a Nightingale (Rusiñol) that paints | and although he is not a bird | he knows the forests so well | that no one paints them like he does”.

We can also say that the wrought-iron monsters in Santiago Rusiñol’s collection have a revived life of their own; he used the image of one of the old pieces of iron from his own collection as the badge of his personality (painter, writer and collector). It appears as a monogram, with the attributes of the palette and the inkwell with the pen. Thus, “He is a Nightingale (Rusiñol) that paints | and although he is not a bird, | he knows the forests so well, | that no one paints them like he does.”[31]

In the ornamentation of Modernista facades we can find symbolic allusions that refer to the owners. Worthy of mention is the façade of Casa Amatller, where three allegories allusive to industry, the arts and collecting are related to the activities of the owner, Antoni Amatller, an industrialist, chocolate maker, photographer and a glass and ceramics collector. It is a group of animals, by Eusebi Arnau, that represents them: a shield with a pair of compasses, a hammer, a knife and a slide gauge, along with some rabbits casting iron and some monkeys forging it on the anvil. In the middle, some donkeys writing and some dogs taking photographs, and on the right, some frogs blowing glass and some piglets making pottery. “In this way, Antoni Amatller is presented to us as an example of the enlightened Catalan bourgeoisie that emerged from the Renaixença; among other things, they made Modernisme possible thanks to their patronage.”[32]

Modernista animals

Apel·les Mestres draws himself writing in his study surrounded by cats, butterflies and snails. And he also paints the watercolour Monsieur et Madame of himself and his wife, Laura Radenez, a Parisian lady. As Masferrer points out, “Apel·les has studied nature through the eyes of both the naturalist and the artist. He has folders full of drawings of animals and plants …”[33] He envies the men who have spent their lives in contact with nature and mentions “Buffon, Cuvier, Linnaeus, Reamur, Darwin.”[34] In 1889 he shows himself in one of the llibres verds (green books): “All the animals of the house. I’m the one in the middle”.[35]

Mestres’ animal universe has a very personal stamp: “One of his typical notes are animals, not only for having studied their movements and details separately, but also because he has loved them a lot. Apel·les was once the only Spanish animal painter.”[36] Besides the studies he made of hydrangeas he also closely observed insects, and especially spiders, for which he felt real admiration: “On his rooftop he cultivates those large cross spiders in our woods, about which he tells us wonderful things.”[37] In fact, one of his ex-libris is a spider.[38]

In this way of seeing the world and living in it, the drawings in Mestres’ book Microcosmos are a labour of love dedicated to the small beings, insects and flowers that he observes and describes, firstly in great detail, then in an imaginative way. Without doubt, La non-non dels papallons (The Butterflies Lullaby) is one of his songs that became, as Alexandre Cirici said, a veritable Modernista hymn: “papallons d’or, dormiu, dormiu… | Dormiu pensant que el cel és blau, | l’estiu etern, | i que les flors no moren…” (sleep golden butterflies, sleep, | Sleep thinking that the sky is blue, | the summer endless, | and that the flowers do not die…).[39] They are the golden butterflies asleep among the flowers of Liliana, the lady-butterfly-flower in the illustrated poem, in which he meditates poetically about the relationship with nature. The butterfly is, for its fragility and process of metamorphosis, the representation of psyche – which in Greek means soul and also butterfly – that prefigures death, resurrection and health. She is like that winged nymph before the sun that, in 1887, Alexandre de Riquer had painted in tempera for the decoration of Casa Bofill.[40] Butterflies and flamingos on the screen painted by Lluís Masriera in 1891, with a marked Japanese influence,[41] or sinuous golden butterflies in the form of women that blend in with the landscape, which he painted in 1903. For his part, the architect Josep Graner placed one made of trencadís on the cresting of Casa Fajol, a house commonly known as the Casa de la Papallona. During those years, the lady butterfly was popular all over Europe in the sinuous dancing of Loïe Fuller or the Japanese butterflies that Segon de Chomon filmed.[42]

Moreover, a lady dragonfly becomes a translucent jewel in the hands of René Lalique in Paris and Lluís Masriera in Barcelona. The dragonfly is one of the most admired animals in ladies’ jewellery, even though it is an insect considered a species of fly; it stands out for its mystery and the iridescent colours, which make it one of the recurring symbols of Art Nouveau. A poetry of objects that corresponds to the poetic view, like the one included in the poem by Maria Antònia Salvà: “Flor viva de l’aire, libèl·lula atzur, | volares rondinaire | per sobre el mur.” (Living flower of the air, blue dragonfly, | you fly grumbling | over the wall). There are two notable examples in the decorative arts, such as the dragonflies’ lamp by Gaspar Homar and the “magnolias and dragonflies” vase by Antoni Serra. The latter made a series of small porcelain animals in collaboration with Alexandre Bigot that are yet another example of the wave of Japanese-style art.

Another animal to be evoked that is associated with the idea of industriousness is the bee. It was the emblem that, in 1874, Gaudí used for the Cooperativa Mataronense.[43] Later, at the height of Modernisme, it appeared on the front of Casa Berenguer in Carrer de la Diputació, where it refers to the world of textiles. Other insects, for example the fly, are assimilated, as in the ex-libris drawn by Joaquim Renart for J. Ayné, with “la pau i el treball” (peace and work).[44]

In another order of things, the popular fable of the ant and the grasshopper takes us to the representation of the contrasting idea of industriousness and forethought versus the sloth and laziness of one who does nothing but sing in the heat of the summer. At Casa Thomas we discover a magnificent grasshopper sculpted on the balcony that seems to be singing in the heat of the summer.

Photograph of the Grasshopper on Casa Thomas (a building by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, 1895-1898, Carrer Mallorca, 293). Private collection.

Joan Llimona and Alexandre de Riquer drew for the blue ceramic shields in the Café-Restaurant in the Park. There we can see beverages and spirit drinks accompanied by a whole host of animals, among them a beetle, a scorpion, a salamander, a dragonfly, a mantis, a protozoon, a snail, an anthropomorphic monkey, an eel, a starfish, an octopus, a grey heron, a snake, a seahorse and a lizard.

It is the same type of anthropomorphic monkey that appeared on the labels of bottles of Anís del Mono (anisette) and caused a controversy due to its close resemblance to Darwin. In 1898 a poster competition was announced and the winner was Mono y Mona, by Ramon Casas, with its blue background.

The decorative ensemble of La Peixera in the Cercle del Liceu, designed by Josep Pascó, has as its essential nucleus a chimneypiece with stained-glass in which a caravel is depicted with standards of Aragon, Valencia, Majorca, Sicily and Roussillon, accompanied by a proverb by Ramon Llull.[45] The floor is of white marble, combined with Venetian mosaic tiles, and in it stylized animal motifs stand out: a monkey, a lizard, a cockerel and, among other fantastic ones, a phoenix and a dragon.

Fauna appears in the artificial gardens of Modernista interiors, in stained-glass windows, on floors or wall coverings of mosaics, ceramics or sgraffiti, and on furniture and artistic woodwork too (reliefs, carved sculptures or marquetry). White swans that accompany ladies, peacocks where we see the full body or a detail of the plumage, cockerels, ducks or birds. We should point out the sketches of birds that Alexandre de Riquer drew to make jewellery, fabrics or Escofet paving tiles. In the sphere of the graphic arts we could make a longer list of this bestiary. I just wish to point out that bookplates contain some symbolic beasts that can be interpreted in relation to the owners. Also, Víctor Oliva uses the cockerel and the lion, motifs taken from common ceramics. Another interesting subject is the use of animals in paper watermarks, which was published in 1910.[46] Cranes or storks in flight are a motif that encloses the texts of Modernisme in beautiful covers, as in the book Boires baixes (Low Mists) by J. M. Roviralta.

The inspiration for the animals on the seabed sgraffitoed in the Saló de les Sirenes in the Fonda España, drawn by Ramon Casas, comes from the Japanese albums that the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner had in his library.[47] Also, Gaudí’s seabed on the floors of Casa Milà or in the vestibule of Casa Sayrach is derived from the morphology of the organisms that live in the sea.

To bring this study to a close, we see how Gaudí uses nature on the Nativity doorway of the Sagrada Família. At the bottom of this façade, a tortoise and a turtle hold it up. On top of the central pillar, representing the Faith, there is the depiction of the Epiphany, the Child Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph, with the ass and the ox accompanying the manger. The common animals, traditionally linked with evil – the grass snake, the gecko, the toad and the lizard, among other Mediterranean reptiles – appear like medieval gargoyles, as well as a series of domestic birds and plants that refer to the Christmas feasts.

Above the monogram IHS, two angels who are carrying the holy spices necessary for salvation flank a depiction of a pelican, the mystic bird that feeds its young with its own blood. It is a medieval allegory of Jesus Christ, but which Gaudí transforms with a glorious meaning because its nest is a crown, associated with the one received by the Virgin. From the pelican emerges the trunk of the Tree of Life, while from in between the angels flanking it two staircases emerge. The vertical continues superimposing symbols of good tidings. The tree of life, in the form of a cypress (a symbol of immortality), is the one that was in the middle of Paradise and which the first parents lost due to the fall, and it is seen here once again thanks to the coming of the Saviour. Made in ceramic to celebrate with colour and light the Nativity of the Baby Jesus, it rises majestic and leafy with the doves. And on top of the tree, a double cross allows the holy dove, the Holy Ghost, to perch sublimely on this hymn to life.

Thus, in this article I have attempted to restore, to fauna, part of the characteristic significance that it has in the Modernista imagination.

ANIMALS IN MODERNISTA SGRAFFITI

Daniel Pifarré Yañez

It is a fact that the theme of plants and flowers is the one most used in the decorative programmes of Modernisme, and this can be seen on facades, in interiors and with objects of all kinds from this period. But in a world as large as that of nature the theme of animals, with the great number of possibilities it offers, also represents a fairly important source that we should bear in mind. And of the different arts applied to architecture that we find in Modernisme, I propose sgraffito to show that the animal kingdom can actually filter onto the facades and the interiors that surround us. Thus, the pairing flora-fauna is shown to us through an artistic technique that was quite important in Modernista Barcelona, with multiple technical and aesthetic possibilities.

By way of a brief introduction, I will mention that the sgraffito technique of mural decoration enjoyed great popularity in Catalonia in the eighteenth century,[1] and especially in Baroque and Neoclassical Barcelona. After a period of almost a century in which rather scant use of it was made, it revived with Modernisme. It was brought up to date technically, and a number of craftsmen and workshops devoted to the application of this ornamental technique appeared.[2]

Generally speaking, the sgraffito technique consists in tracing a drawing on an area of wall covered with two or more layers of different coloured stucco, and chipping off the surface layer or layers with a punch following the previously stencilled drawing. The play between two inks or the various colours of the different layers in this mural decoration gives a very interesting decorative effect, and it is more resistant than paint.[3]

Often, the artists who do the sgraffiti are the same ones who do the stuccoing on the interior walls. These are found above all in the entrance halls of houses and are based on the same technique, but over a coating of a paste made of lime, plaster or powdered marble.[4]

During Modernisme, sgraffitoed decorations were applied to both exterior and interior walls, unlike what had been the case in the eighteenth century, when it was only applied to main façades. In the case of Barcelona, if we look at the sgraffiti in the interiors of houses, we find that the majority of the spaces where they are applied are the entrance halls of residential buildings. It is precisely in this type of building where sgraffito is most frequently used.[5]

When talking about the sgraffiti with animals, first it is necessary to explain that in most cases these motifs do not represent the most important part of the piece. They are parts of a whole, in which there is not usually one single predominant motif. The programmes that are sgraffitoed usually depict standardized forms of nature, in which what we see is merely meant to be decorative. So, the animal motifs may be anecdotic, or subordinated to the surroundings in which they are placed.

As for the species depicted, in sgraffiti we seldom find the figures that were habitual in the imagery of the period, the Modernista bestiary[6] – very visible especially in applied sculpture. Rather, the animal motifs we find are those linked unequivocally to flora, namely, the beings that live in the countryside, the woods or the garden. It is another type of bestiary, equally recurrent in the repertiores of artistic representations, in which the particular world of insects and other small wild animals is the example most used. Once again, the pairing flora-fauna is highlighted for us on the façades and interiors of Modernista Barcelona.

The examples of sgraffiti that include animal motifs, despite not being excessively numerous, are interesting to comment on, and we find them in Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia. If we focus on Barcelona, a very beautiful example, and a good illustration of the relationship between flora and the species that live in it, is the façade of Casa Manuel Llopis Bofill (1902-1903),[7] designed by Antoni M. Gallissà. The designs that are sgraffitoed are by Josep M. Jujol and one can see how the ornamental motif of a fly is integrated in the rest of the decorative ensemble, chiefly recreations of plants based on emphatic sinuous forms. The fact that a fly is depicted is quite original, and it catches our eye, as its image is usually associated with something negative – evil, corrupt, weak or insignificant. Moreover, in the sgraffiti on Casa Manuel Llopis Bofill, the fly motif is quite large and can be seen with the naked eye.

Of examples of sgraffiti with animals in a more everyday – or domestic – setting we can mention Casa Jaume Petit (1907-1908),[8] designed by the architect Joan Bruguera Rogent. On the crown of the façade, among floral recreations, we see the amusing figure of a cat. It is drawn with long whiskers and smiling slightly, and although it is an animal associated with various meanings, such as cunning, intelligence or mystery, here it can only be considered a purely anecdotal element.

Within the same parameters, the figure of the peacock is one of the protagonists of the magnificent set of sgraffiti in the open inner courtyard of the Fonda España,[9] remodelled by Lluís Domènech i Montaner. Framed inside rectangular panels, we see two different images of peacocks. On one hand, there is a depiction of two animals, in profile, facing one another symmetrically. In it one observes great detail in the drawing, and the characteristic features of the peacock are marked with the incisions that the technique allows, such as the crown-shaped crest or the sumptuous tail feathers, closed in this case. With a similar degree of detail, on the other panel the animal is facing front and there is a big difference: it is shown with its tail feathers fanning out. It is a very beautiful image in which the peacock and the very sinuous plants produce a very intriguing and highly elegant formal unity. In this same set of sgraffiti at the Fonda España we see another animal, placed in the fanlights of some windows in the form of a mixtilinear arch. It is a large butterfly shown frontally, with its wings outspread, amid a floral recreation based on Saint John’s pines. It is a very careful design full of details, especially with regard to the underside of the wings. It is important to remember that both the peacock and the butterfly are figures that symbolize beauty and elegance, among other attributes.

Lastly it should be mentioned that sgraffito is present in other interior parts of the Fonda España in which the bestiary is also used as ornamental sources.[10] This is the case with the guests’ staircase, whose walls are covered with a sgraffitoed composition based on a single decorative motif: the historical badge of the royal house of Castile, one of the parts of what later became the kingdom of Spain, the establishment’s name.[11] Thus, along with the symbol of a castle, we find a lion. The figure follows virtually the same compositional scheme as the one found in the official coat of arms of Castile and León: a lion rampant, that is, in profile, standing up on its hind legs, and in a threatening position, showing one ear and one eye. In a clear allusion to what it represents, this figure symbolizes earthly power and hegemony over all else.

Of course, in this case this animal does not belong to the everyday sphere or to a realistic environment, but to the realm of the fantastic and solemn bestiary, a theme dealt with in detail by Teresa-M. Sala in the previous chapter.

Cat sgraffitoed on the front of Casa Miquel Call Millàs, designed by Joan Marsant Solà, 1893.

These beings constitute a group of animals little depicted in Modernista sgraffiti, and yet we can find the odd isolated case that is worth mentioning. On the crown of the façade of the house at Carrer de Bailèn, 107 (1898), set inside a medallion, we find a peculiar imaginary figure. It is hybrid beast, with a horse’s body, a dragon’s head – with a long tongue – and wings in the form of plants. Could this beast, from its privileged position, be responsible for guarding the building and keeping bad omens at bay, as the gargoyles used to do in Gothic cathedrals?

A second case of a fantastic figure is the one on the façade of Casa Joan Casals (1897), where inside a panel we find the sgraffitoed image of a basilisk.[12] It is an impressive and enigmatic depiction, a hybrid with a giant serpent’s body, thick and scaly, standing upright on two feet with talons, gigantic wings, with a crown of spikes and a hen’s beak, which occasionally breathes fire, a characteristic typical of and exclusive to dragons.[13] The drawing is very detailed and thorough, and the figure is shown frontally – although with its head turned, as if observing something flying overhead. The beast’s wings are striking, as their shapes are absolutely impossible.

Basilisk sgraffitoed on the façade of Casa Joan Casals, by the architect Modest Fossas Pi, 1897.

But without doubt, the most outstanding example of sgraffitoed animals in Modernisme is the one we find on the front of Casa Miquel Call Millàs (1893), in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Gràcia.[14] It is an isolated case, as the decorative programme features ordinary everyday animals. In fact they are the only decorative motifs we find there, and they are not associated with any floral surroundings. The front of the house, on a corner and hard to observe in perspective, contains a series of square-shaped panels in between the many balcony openings that look onto the two streets. Inside each of these panels, in a double circular outline, there is a sgraffitoed animal. Analysing each and every one of the panels, there are a total of 19 different animals or species. The façade of Casa Miquel Call Millàs thus represents a veritable catalogue of common everyday animals, as if it were a gallery of traditional fauna. Some of the animals are repeated according to which floor they are on, and there are also panels in which the circular medallion is empty. The identification of these figures, without counting when they are repeated, from the left-hand side of the first floor to the right-hand side of the third floor – the fourth has no decorative panels – is as follows: eagle, cat, butterfly, frog, bee, parrot, ducks, swans, spider, beetle, fly, fish, mouse, eel, tortoise, rabbits, grey heron, manta ray and moonfish. With this wide range of species and subspecies, the three habitats of fauna are well reflected: earth, air and water.[15] The different species are depicted as realistically as possible, and their physical details are very meticulously captured. Technically, the relief of the sgraffito is very flat, so that at first sight it may seem that the mural painting technique has been used.

These are some of the examples of sgraffitoed fauna that we can find in Modernista Barcelona.[16] Fauna as varied as it is curious, anecdotal if you will. It is a quite peculiar universe, that of the animals, that deserves not to go unnoticed.

NATURE IN MINIATURE
 From Noah’s Ark to the Teddy Bear

Pere Capellà Simó

The Bristol bear

In January 2012 a toy bear was found at Bristol airport in a lost travel bag. It was a bear made of plush, one-eyed and frayed; not for nothing was it 100 years old. The bag contained just two items: the bear and a photograph. The picture was of two children accompanied by a bear identical to the one found; on the back, a birthday greeting to their father revealed the names of the two children: Dora and Glyn. Finally a date: 1918.

A feeling of curiosity mixed with tenderness came over the workers at Bristol Airport. How could it be that, 94 years after that photograph was taken, the picture and the bear had been lost in an airport? Whatever the case might be, they had to find the owners. Therefore they got a campaign underway through the social networks that very soon made it to the news agencies and the traditional media.[1]

The Bristol bear became the airport’s mascot. It generated discussions and controversy about its authenticity and it even received numerous offers of “adoption”. Finally, in December 2013, almost two years after it had been found, the owner, an English ex-policemen living in Cyprus, heard about the news and contacted the airport, clearly moved. He was the son of Glyn, the younger of the two children in the photograph, who in a rush in order not to miss his flight had lost one of the family heirlooms with most sentimental value.[2]

Needless to say the intention of this article is not to go too deeply into the peculiar story of the Bristol bear.[3] Rather, the anecdote invites us to reveal the enigma that hides behind this toy, the teddy bear, which more than 100 years after it was invented is still being manufactured and manages to generate reactions – so markedly human – like those of the airport workers when they found one. In line with this objective, then, let us take a succinct look at different types of zoomorphic toys that begins with the miniatures of the Ancien Régime and culminates in 1902, the year the first teddy bears were placed on the market.

The origins and versatility of miniatures

Despite the fact that both Greek and Roman children amused themselves with zoomorphic toys, often mounted on wheels, it is not until the early modern period that we find in Europe the continuous manufacture of miniature beings and objects. During the seventeenth century, coinciding with the splendour of the Dutch dolls’ houses and the Neapolitan nativity scenes, Comenius pointed out, for the first time in history, the advisability of surrounding children with miniatures, so that they would not feel upset by the natural largeness of humans and things. And, thanks to the diary of Jean Héroard, Louis XIII’s paediatrician, we know that the dauphin amused himself with ceramic, glass and wooden animals, as did many children at the time.[4]

Moreover, it is important to point out that, although the games of the young Louis XIII described by Héroard did not differ much from those of a modern child, the contexts in which toys are used differ markedly. During the Ancien Régime, miniatures were often integrated in representations of Biblical scenes, set inside display cases, which decorated homes according to the liturgical calendar and indirectly served to amuse the children of the house. The most representative vestige of these panoramas is the Nativity scene. But also, to mark the feast day of Saint Martha, patron saint of cooks, many homes in the Iberian Peninsula maintained the custom of exhibiting a miniature laid table, a recreation of the supper in Bethany, which is one of the origins of miniature pots and pans and other pretend cooking games.[5] English-speaking countries followed this tradition with a toy for Sundays: Noah’s Ark.

The toy ark

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, wooden Noah’s Arks were manufactured industrially on a large scale. The city of Nuremberg became an important financial and exporting city, due to the different producing centres scattered around the country.

Symbolically, Noah’s Ark is the Biblical image that contains all the elements necessary for cyclical restoration. It sails on the waters of the Great Flood and, carrying the previous knowledge, it becomes the embryo of the world. For all these reasons the toy ark was a devotional and play artefact that was given to children as a symbol of regeneration and wisdom, a homage to nature – or to the power of birth –[6] of which children were the most venerable fruit.

Noah’s Ark was virtually the only toy reserved for Sundays, always accompanied by the relevant doctrine. A large number of testimonies, both literary and iconographical, tell us about this. In an illustration published around 1880 in Le Magasin des petits enfants[7] three children appear playing with an ark on the table in a small room. The image suggests that the game consisted in lining the figures up in pairs on a table and then placing them properly inside the ark. In the short story “A Christmas Tree”, Charles Dickens specifically says that the animals’ procession was arranged according to an established order. The wolf was left till last, because it was “a monster who was to be degraded”.[8]

These descriptions are completed with a print by Paul César Helleu, Mère brodant avec un petit garcon (A Mother Embroidering With a Small Boy).[9] It is a scene in which the two people, a mother and her son, are concentrating on their respective activities. The mother embroiders and the boy has laid out his collection of animals on a round table and is marching them round the edge. Helleu appeals to the suspended time of the symbolic game: circular time with a space under constant construction.

Furthermore, in the picture the boy’s game duplicates the metaphor and thus it becomes a symbol of domestic happiness.

The artists recreate the symbolism of the toy. This is the case with a Pre-Raphaelite, John Everett Millais. The work Peace Concluded[10] seems at first sight to be a family scene, with realistic details typical of the English middle classes. However, it is actually a family’s celebration of the end of the Crimean War. The father, a wounded officer, is reading about the end of the war in the newspaper. One of his daughters is holding his service medal. On his wife’s lap, we see four animals from Noah’s Ark representing the four powers in the war: the lion (Great Britain), the bear (Russia), the turkey (the Ottoman Empire) and the cockerel (France). The girl on the left has picked up the dove with the olive branch, the symbol of peace that comes from the Bible story of Noah’s Ark.

Noah’s Ark advertised in the sales catalogue El Siglo. Summer season 1894. Barcelona, Henrich y C.ª

In Barcelona, we find this toy advertised in the El Siglo department store at Christmas 1886. At the end of the century, the same establishment was still advertising “Noah’s Arks in white wood”.[11] An example similar to the one advertised in El Siglo is conserved in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and has 10 pairs of animals: camels, giraffes, horses, elephants, antelopes, cows, pigs, dogs, tigers and bears. Another example in the same museum, on the other hand, conserves the figures of Noah and his wife, as well as a collection of 33 pairs of mammals and 26 pairs of birds.[12] What’s more, between one model and the other one, we observe an obvious difference: whilst the former has kept the shape of a boat, the latter has taken on the shape of a house.

As is well known, the Holy Scriptures do not give a very precise description of the characteristics of the boat that God ordered Noah to build.[13] This circumstance made it possible for the ark to become an iconographic motif that, throughout history, has given artists great interpretative freedom. Thus, some nineteenth-century arks kept the shape of a boat whilst others were mounted on wheels or contained music boxes. Some were decorated with Gothic-style windows; others had Japanese-style ones. And others gradually took the form of a house or a stable.[14] It was all the result of a process of secularization that took hold throughout the nineteenth century and which led to the ark splitting into two toys that are still made and sold today: the farm and the zoo.

A painted boy’s meadow

Noah’s Arks were first made in Barcelona in 1894, by the company Lehmann & Co., the name under which the Franco-German company Fleischmann & Bloedel traded in Spain. Between 1897 and 1900 the company applied for three invention patents relative to the manufacture of miniature animals in wood paste. Thanks to the Lehmann & Co. inventories that have been conserved we know that these animals were sold loose and also distributed in “arks” or in cardboard boxes called “wild animals” or “farms”.[15] Lehmann & Co.’s biggest customer was the department store El Siglo. In a 1910 catalogue, we also observe that the Noah’s Arks that the establishment had been advertising during the previous decade had been replaced by “farm boxes”,[16] which contained a stable, a tree, a farmer, a horse, a cow, a donkey, two sheep, a goat, two piglets, a goose and a cockerel.

On top of this, we know that one of these farm boxes belonged to a boy in Barcelona, the only child of the literary historian Manuel de Montoliu and the violinist Júlia Vidal. We deduce the affection that little Marcel felt for this box of animals because his aunt, the painter Lluïsa Vidal, decided to include it in the portrait she painted of him around 1906.[17] Marcel, about five years old, has spread the game out on a table and is making a red horse advance with his hand, whilst another grazing animal stands on the lid of the box, next to two trees. It is quite an unusual portrait for two reasons. The first is that it is one of the few portraits of children in which the artist decides not to place the point of view higher up, looking down on the sitter. Lluïsa Vidal, who liked to paint standing up, in this case had to crouch down in order to frame her nephew in a triangular composition, almost sacred, that places the viewer at the same level as the animals. The second reason that leads me to stress the interest of this work is the little boy’s pose. Marcel is not looking at us. What is more, his blonde fringe covers much of his face, so it was not the boy’s facial features that the painter wanted to reflect. Marcel has lowered his almost closed eyes, which light up, in the manner of a lighthouse, the box of toys that Lluïsa Vidal partially shows us. Reminiscent of the Symbolist movement, Vidal shows a boy painted at an adult-sized scale who, with his inner gaze, bears witness to the existence of an invisible world that lies behind the image of peace and quiet. Because Lluïsa Vidal knew very well that play is for the most part invisible and that toys are the point of departure towards other levels of reality. In this way, nature in miniature evoked in a box of toys is recreated in a painted boy’s invisible meadow. When all is said and done, the nature-as-toy that filters into Marcel’s meadow is a vitalist entity that seeps into childhood and includes the symbolism of Noah’s Ark: nature as an offering of regeneration, the bearer of the book of life.

A bestiary made for children

Toy makers designed miniature bestiaries that lived in invisible universes. Likewise, we find other animals manufactured at a larger scale: that of children, with whom they share physical and symbolic space. They are often the inseparable companions of children, and so they are not always put away after being played with; rather, they decorate the child’s bedroom.

They also go with the child to the photographer’s studio, as in the case of the Bristol bear. However, it goes without saying that in many cases the toy belongs to the studio. In many portraits by the Napoleon photographic studio, taken during the 1860s, we find a lamb.[18] Long before the appearance of photography, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the lamb had already transcended Christian iconography to become a distinctive attribute of children’s portraits. It is the symbol of innocence, but also of the unknown and the periodic renewal of the world.[19] Thus, the toy lamb includes the symbolism of the ark in the change of scale that marks the change from the miniature to child-size.

The Napoleon photographic studio’s lamb consisted of a fur-covered papier-mâché figure.[20] This is thus a direct precursor of the furry animals that would see the light in the wake of the commercial success of the teddy bear after 1902. Moreover, the body of the lamb in the photograph was not flexible – and therefore easy to manipulate – but stiff, in order to make sure that the figure was properly balanced on four metal wheels attached to the legs. The Napoleon photographic studio’s lamb was, therefore, a push and pull toy.

At the end of the century, as an expression of the new emotional ties that saw the animal taking over as a child’s companion, the toy lamb was recast in new push and pull toys that took the form of dogs and cats, probably made in Barcelona.[21] At the same time, a remarkable number of breeds both canine and feline came from Paris that abandoned the form of push and pull toys with the aim of imitating nature. Roullet-Décamps gave toy animals movement and sound. The company’s “animaux sauteurs” appear in El Siglo catalogues from 1894 onwards.[22]

Going back to push and pull toys, the only animal that questions the pre-eminence of the lamb is the horse. In fact, in the child’s mind, both animals get mixed up. Throughout the nineteenth century there are many images, from chromo-lithographs to postcards, of small carts with children in them being pulled by lambs. More subtly, Joaquim Vayreda reveals to us the analogy between both animals in La terrassa (The Terrace).[23] The light from the buildings that are seen in the distance harmonizes rhythmically with the clear short brushstrokes that construct, in the middle of the terrace, a child toddling alongside a four-legged toy of an indeterminate species. For his part, Apel·les Mestres dedicates one of his famous Cançons per mainada (Children’s songs) to the papier-mâché horse, the first verse of which culminates with an explicit comparison between both animals: “When I tug on its bridle | it remains as docile as a lamb”.[24]

By becoming a horse, the lamb links innocence with the inexorable passage of time. For the horse is the unconscious, but also war or change. For Gabriel Alomar the papier-mâché horse awakens in the child “a promise of spring-like virility, and an illusory memory of the wars that also accompanied the unknown awakening of the race”.[25] This, at least, was the interpretation that nineteenth-century photographers made of the toy horse, reserving it for boys’ portraits, while a doll was given to girls. The horse, therefore, was an almost indispensable element in photographer’s studios. This was the case with the Fotografía Universal studio in Ronda de Sant Antoni, where the poet Joan Salvat Papasseit was photographed around 1900, in an image that he would remember in his verses.[26]

Joan Salvat Papasseit’s horse resembles one of the models advertised by Antoni Penas’s factory, which in 1908 moved to Sant Gervasi after more than a decade of activity in Gràcia. At a time when there were about 60 toy factories in Barcelona, Penas stood out for the look of its products. Moreover, the cheapness of the materials made it possible to sell the product at fairly reasonable prices. This was not so with the horse tricycles, introduced to Barcelona in about 1877 and which, by the end of the century, had become the most characteristic product of Valls y Compañía. Whilst a family could buy a papier-mâché horse for 2 rals, the horse tricycle could cost more than 30 pesetas.[27]

This forerunner of the velocipede consisted of a wooden horse set on a structure with three iron wheels. Heavily influenced by the English rocking horses of the Victorian period, horse tricycles usually had glass eyes, natural manes and in many cases a leather-covered wooden body.[28] The sumptuous nature of this toy attracted a cabinet such as the Napoleon photographic studio, which in the last third of the century replaced the little lamb with a horse tricycle on which a generation of Barcelona boys had their photographs taken.[29]

As the name indicates, the horse tricycle is the representation of a hybrid being, very much in keeping with the sensibilities of a century that, in the words of Luciano García del Real, was of iron “because iron has arrived to invade everything, from the most grandiose constructions to boy’s toys.”[30] Horse tricycles marked the beginning of a flood of velocipedes for children that, observed in photographs, appear as an icon of those “dizzy years”[31] that culminated in the First World War. The last stage in the evolution of the horse – or the lamb – towards the machine was the children’s automobile. Some that were made in Barcelona had pedals, but others had a real engine, for which the company Roca Farriols, a medal winner at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900, registered the trademark Hispania in 1907.[32]

In another order of things, and despite the name, the horse tricycle stresses the overcoming, in the nineteenth century, of the Cartesians’ understanding of the animal-as-machine and other forms of conduct that had preceded it. Because this toy does not define the hybridization between animals and machines exactly, it is more a case of the gradual replacement of the former with the latter. In actual fact the development of farming and factory machinery and the appearance of the modern means of transport that took over from horse-drawn vehicles removed animals from of the world of work. In response to this, animals became part of the world of leisure. The growing prominence of the pet was followed by the ever more frequent appearance of wild animals in circus shows. They also filtered, as is known, into literature, thanks particularly to Rudyard Kipling’s stories. However, it is perhaps with the appearance of zoos – the one in Barcelona was opened in 1892 – that wild animals took root in the realm of the emotions for the first time, and for good.

Toys are an invaluable source when researching the changes in how people thought. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the French automata makers had excelled in designing animals – preferably dogs, bears and apes – that adopted human attitudes, emulating their counterparts in the circus.[33] Nevertheless, automata were toys designed to be looked at: shows to make people laugh or to fascinate. During the nineteenth century, the only wild animals suitable for being handled were never made to accompany children: they were miniatures that were placed in Noah’s Ark or, later, in boxes of wild animals. The turn of the century saw big changes. In the story “Els reis del Marianet” (Little Mariano’s Kings’ Day), Carme Karr describes how the main character buys his son “a big elephant, with a purple rug on its back, decked out with gold”,[34] which was no longer a miniature, but a push and pull toy. In those years, Frederic Ballell’s camera lens captured children feeding the elephants at Barcelona zoo;[35] an anonymous photographer snapped a keeper who was feeding a tiger cub with a bottle.[36] It would not be surprising if the publication of this photo had inspired the modest manufacturer of a papier-mâché tiger, about 50 centimetres long, which is still conserved today on a wheeled platform.[37] A push and pull toy in the form of a tiger was something unusual in the nineteenth century. A new century was beginning however that, among many other changes, set about humanizing wild animals.

The bear’s mask

Of all the wild animals that, for the first time around 1900, were manufactured for children, the teddy bear is unquestionably the one that became most deeply rooted in the collective consciousness, even today generating reactions as unexpected as those of the workers at Bristol Airport. In Europe, the first plush bears were seen at the Leipzig fair in 1903. The exhibitor was Margarete Steiff’s firm, from Geingen. The design was based on the drawings of bears done from life at Stuttgart zoo by her nephew Richard Steiff, who shortly afterwards took over the company. Although to begin with German traders were reticent with regard to the new product, Steiff came away from the Leipzig fair having taken a considerable order from an American commission agent.[38]

Teddy bear made by Steiff. c. 1914. Collection of Ton Boig Clar (Palma).

On the other side of the Atlantic, the bear had also ceased to be a wild animal, especially after an anecdote involving the then president of the USA, Theodore Roosevelt. In November 1902, Roosevelt was taking part in a few days’ hunting in the Mississippi Delta. Despite his enormous fondness for this activity, this time the president did not manage to kill anything, something that, in the opinion of his advisers, might generate a negative view of the most important person in the Union. As a result of this, one of the White House aides decided to capture a bear cub, tie it discreetly to a tree and attract the president’s attention. However, according to the most widely reported version, Roosevelt saw through such a reprehensible ruse and did not shoot. The press immediately started spreading the anecdote. In particular, the well-known newspaper The Washington Star published a comic strip by Clifford Berryman in which Roosevelt appeared sparing the chained bear cub’s life. At Christmas that year a trader from Brooklyn, Morris Michtom, launched plush bears made by his wife Rose, identical to the one in Berryman’s caricature. They were an immediate commercial success.[39]

In April 1904, a year after the success of the plush bears at the Leipzig fair, the Saint Louis Universal Exhibition opened in the United States, at which Steiff scored a major success.[40] In November Roosevelt won the presidential election. Clifford Berryman’s bear had become the campaign mascot, and Morris Michtom asked the White House for permission to use the president’s pet name Teddy as a trademark. From that moment onwards, the little bear became known as the Teddy Bear on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1907 the huge sales enabled Michtom to turn his old shop into a big business, the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company.[41] For its part, in 1903 Steiff had begun building a model factory, whose façade had a curtain wall, a foretaste of the buildings of Walter Gropius in the 1920s.[42]

In the United Kingdom the fashion of the teddy bear soon caught on, from 1906 onwards, with the factory of J.K. Farnell & Co.[43] leading the way. In France, in the 1920s teddy bears were manufactured chiefly by Pintel. In Catalonia, the manufacture of cloth animals began in 1917. In that year a total of four patents were applied for in Barcelona by Comas y Cia., Lehmann y Cia., Manuel Millet and Frederic Barceló Aguilera.[44] In 1915 the latter[45] founded Miria in Barcelona, making cuddly toys. Following publicity about the company, Miria became the representative in Spain of many foreign firms, including Steiff.[46]

Just before the First World War, the Spanish press had already been talking about the successes of Margarete Steiff’s firm.[47] And there are many postcards, published in Germany and written in Catalonia,[48] that show children playing with teddy bears, something that would contribute to spreading the fashion for this new object that in the 1920s consolidated its position as the number-one toy. Of the examples of teddy bears conserved in Catalonia, the one that the Dalí-Domènech family purchased in Paris in 1910 to give to its children Salvador and Anna Maria is particularly interesting.[49] The latter donated it to the Museu del Joguet de Catalunya in 1988, installed shortly before in Figueres, the Dalí family’s hometown. Like the owner of the Bristol bear, Anna Maria left the bear next to a photograph. She and Salvador appear in it, accompanied by the toy. It was the period when the letters that they received from Federico García Lorca always ended with cordial wishes for the bear.[50]

By interpreting both the Bristol bear and the one belonging to the Dalí children, I see that the puzzle I set out to solve at the beginning of the article slips into the iconography and gets hidden in the strictly morphological aspect. Unlike the toy bears made in the nineteenth century, the teddy bear is not a miniature to put in the ark or an automaton representing a fairground animal. Anatomically, it has lost its fangs; the glass eyes give it a pleasant though enigmatic look. The back has been transformed into a pair of shoulders. The hind legs – so small, in the animal, in relation to the trunk – have taken on almost human proportions. All in all it represented a real novelty in the history of toys. Because never before had a toymaker – not even in the cases that showed animals dressed or playing musical instruments – made use of the human form to represent an animal.

This new look stretched to the eve of the First World War in the wake of the codification of a form of drawing adapted to childhood, whose roots can be traced to the art of caricature.[51] After this change of mentality, during the interwar years firms of renowned prestige such as Steiff had to launch cuddly toys inspired on anthropomorphic animals that became popular thanks to American cartoons, for example Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse or Ub Iwerks’s Flip the Frog.[52] The anatomy of the teddy bear had pointed the way forward. All in all, it is a strong candidate to be regarded, at least from the strictly plastic point of view, as the first toy of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, from the perspective of the history of private life, the mystery of the teddy bear goes beyond the morphological, and even the iconographical. Without playing down the cultural importance of the bear’s symbolism, it would no surprise if we were to wonder what history of toys we would be writing today if Roosevelt’s unfortunate advisers had got hold of a different animal on that sad day of hunting. However, it is not the intention of this article to judge the part played by chance in the forging of sensibilities, but to solve a puzzle that toy makers have sustained for over a century.

We have seen how the teddy bear marks the definite entry of animals in the realm of the emotions, a process that had been developing during the nineteenth century. Finally, we note that, in the toy, the bear is reduced to a mask that conceals an anthropomorphic creature. In 1911, Butler Brothers department store in Chicago advertised, as a novelty, “Teddy Bear Dolls”.[53] They were teddy bears without a face, given that the head was reduced to the hood that surrounded the facial features of a china doll. They discovered that the “Teddy Bear” was just a doll that assumed the iconography of the new times. Moreover, in the plush the bear was a throwback to the essence of the dummy – or doll – that had accompanied the baby for ages and, in time, became the apple of its eye: a beautiful metaphor that we reserve for our loved ones or the toy with the most time-honoured tradition.[54]

PAPIER-MÂCHÉ ANIMALS, POPULAR PAGEANTRY
 A tribute to Xavier Fàbregas

Enric Ciurans

Any researcher in Catalonia who intends to study in depth the pageantry of popular culture must, in one way or another, read, consult and use the many contributions that Xavier Fàbregas made to Catalan popular culture. My study of the traditional bestiary begins unquestionably with what he wrote on the subject, especially El llibre de les Bèsties. Zoologia fantàstica catalana (The Book of Beasts: Catalan Fantastic Zoology), a magnificent volume illustrated with the photographs of Jordi Gumí, which appeared in 1983, just two years before his death. This extraordinary volume won the Serra d’Or Critics’ Essay Prize, which crowned his interest in Catalan popular culture and gave rise to books and cuttings from articles as important as Cavallers, dracs i dimonis (Knights, Dragons and Devils)[1] and Viatge a la Catalunya fantàstica (A Journey to Fantastic Catalonia).[2] To this literature, especially valuable for my current research, one has to add El fons ritual de la vida quotidiana (The Ritual Backdrop to Everyday Life), which contains reflections that run through this article from start to finish.[3]

Xavier Fàbregas’s premature death has deprived us of a unique personality in the field of theatre studies. His contributions include criticism, history, biography, folklore, theory, and much more, all expounded in a very extensive bibliography that has yet to be studied in all its complexity and richness. The Theatre Institute’s creation of the Xavier Fàbregas Chair to mark the centenary of the Catalan School of Dramatic Art, founded by Adrià Gual, is not only a case of justice being done but also a necessary fillip to the popular theatre studies that the great researcher loved so much, and an opportunity to study his legacy in depth. My intention is to modestly join in this tribute, but also with the aim of defending his memory before the new generations of artists, researchers and teachers that endeavour to develop popular culture.

An overview of “papier-mâché animals”

In this brief contribution I shall attempt to consider two questions that I think are fundamental in the context of the research project, bearing in mind the temporal and spatial limit that it imposes, Barcelona in the nineteenth century. On one hand, a more general look at the realm of the symbolic animal and what it tells us about the basics of the presence of groups with representations of animals in popular festivals; on the other, to observe how the presence of papier-mâché animals in popular processions and festivals in Barcelona has characteristics of its own that distance it from what is habitual in other parts of the country. These for example include the consolidation of La Mercè as the city’s Festa Major (big annual festival) and the new floats that paraded in it at the beginning of the twentieth century, which culminated in a transformation of the citizens’ collective imagination. What we observe generally in this period is how these papier-mâché animals go from referring to sacred myths to being considered secular myths, and I believe that this is when the historical dimension appears of the papier-mâché animals that have survived to the present day, totally decontextualized with respect to their origins.

It was in this period when the scientific gaze penetrated society as a whole, and in this case it took the form of the interest in zoology in Barcelona, where the zoo was created in 1894 and, a decade earlier, in 1882, the Museum of Zoology. This interest was not free of resistance and controversy, such as the one featuring Odón de Buen y del Cos (1863-1945), appointed a professor at the University of Barcelona in 1900, who was forced to resign 10 years later owing to pressure from the Church over the Darwinist slant of his work.[4] The clash with religion constitutes a stellar moment in the way animals were thought of: the change from considering animals as different to humans and the acceptance of mankind as the result of natural evolution.

Furthermore, the notion of the popular festival also underwent a profound transformation at that time. The appearance of leisure culture as a way of planning one’s own amusement subterraneously modified, one might say, the essence of the festa that until then had been based on the fact that it was essentially collective and communal.[5] A demonstration of what I mean can be found in the introduction – in the parades and floats of the festivals – of consumer elements, whose point of departure would be the famous historical and civic-industrial cavalcade that took place during La Mercè in 1902. The popular festival and the presence of symbolic elements of nature were suddenly rubbing shoulders with aspects of industrial and consumer society.

The symbolic animal

In his book El llibre de les bèsties. Zoologia fantàstica catalana, Xavier Fàbregas considers two parallel approaches to the animal as a symbol in Catalan society: on one hand, mankind’s relationship with animals and on the other, the development of the concept of the animal in Catalonia. I find his thoughts about the concept of totemism particularly interesting. To define this concept he turns to the Swedish ethnologist Åke Hultkranz, according to whom totemism establishes: “a mystical bond between, on one hand, an animal or plant species, or a kind of natural phenomena and, on the other, a more or less fictitious family group (a clan or a ‘gens’, depending on whether the matrilineal or patrilineal system prevails)”.[6] In theory, the identification between the clan and the animal would be complete, as if it were part of it as a natural descendant, as the anthropologist James George Frazer said in his legendary The Golden Bough.[7]

Two approaches are contrasted when considering totemism. On one hand, the champions of an idea in this respect that strove to safeguard everything that was being lost in nature, establishing as a corollary of this term the taboo, the prohibition to eat or kill certain animals. Then there are those who, with Claude Lévi-Strauss leading the way, cast doubt on the very existence of totemism as a separate and different entity, denouncing it as an illusion of late nineteenth-century sociologists.[8]

We find the footprints of this totemism everywhere in our culture – in the images of sports clubs, trademarks, political parties, and in Catalonia’s most dearly held traditions such as carn d’olla.[9] Oblivious to this academic dispute, the popular bestiary took part in popular festivals despite the frequent inquisitorial prohibitions throughout the eighteenth century. It is with regard to this that Fàbregas stated: “In any case, the Catalan-speaking countries offer us numerous examples of a corporeal bestiary that is today still extraordinarily operative, the bestiary that in the form of a carcass participates more and more enthusiastically in the boom in street festivals”.[10]

There is a fairly significant tradition of bestiaries in Catalonia. Of the Catalan bestiaries presently conserved – written between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries – there are five that come from the Bestiario toscano, another one has uncertain origins, and the seventh refers to the Livre dou Tresor, translated by Guillem de Copons by order of King John I. These texts are based on granting animals a symbolic dimension, always based on being part of a divine order that planned everything in the world. As a literary formula emerging in the avant-garde period, essentially different to the medieval bestiary, human personages are characterized through the description of animals, with a satirical or simply descriptive intention. As a model we have Le bestiaire (1911) by Guillaume Apollinaire and, in Catalonia, the bestiaries of the poets Pere Quart (1937) and Josep Carner (1963).

What we are interested in here, the appearance of the beasts that make up the corporeal festive bestiary,[11] did not materialize until the fourteenth century, with the Corpus Christi procession, first inside the church and later in the streets of the different towns. Agustí Duran i Sanpere accurately described this procession that gave rise to the symbolic papier-mâché animals that have survived to the present day.[12] The procession was divided into three parts, and the dancing animals appeared at the back of the second part. The animals accompanied the apostles, after angels and devils had paraded through the streets of Barcelona, and a whole series of floats with Biblical scenes that served the Church’s propaganda fide and, in short, contributed to the ideological significance to be found in the origins of the Corpus Christi festival.

We know that throughout history men and women have dressed up as animals to take part in rituals and celebrations. Animals have co-existed with mankind and all kinds of legends bear witness to this, whether to demonstrate the struggle between good and evil, as in the legend of Saint George and the dragon, or the many legends that personify their ferocity and irrationality, for example those included by Joan Amades among popular Catalan fairy tales: The Frog Princess, The Three Bears, and especially, The Lion, the Lioness, the Ox, the Hen and the Fox, where beneath the logic of the strong eating the weak we find a deeply human lesson, which by the way is the case with the others, as fairy tales express a relationship between nature and mankind very close to that of the bestiary.[13]

The corporeal animals that survived until 1900 in Barcelona still had a religious dimension, but at the same time they were in the process of transforming into the festive dimension that we currently grant them, far removed from any religious symbolism, above all thanks to their participation in civic festivals such as La Mercè, which gave a new meaning to their appearance. It is logical to see how the corporeal beasts of Corpus Christi reach us having undergone a change in their symbolic form also derived from their new role in the festive structure. When they appear in the medieval context they are identified with the nature that must be tamed, that has to be placed at the service of the Church and mankind. The gradual development of science and culture means that, from the inquisitorial perspective of the struggle to maintain the values of the Christian religion, animals are prohibited and their unique status in processions is reborn in other festive contexts.

The festive bestiary of Barcelona

It will be necessary, then, to take a close look at the principal figures in the bestiary that have survived and which appear in the popular pageantry of Barcelona, all of them originating in the Corpus Christi procession, which are as follows: the eagle, the lion, the dragon, the large mule, the ox, the tarasque, the hobby horses, the víbria (viper) and the dragon. As well as these there are the three pairs of giants and the dwarves that accompany them as a festive group. A general description by Francesc Curet will help us to familiarize ourselves with them:[14]

The legendary and symbolic animals that were part of the representations that had disappeared were forced to survive, to create for themselves a personality that they had lacked when they accompanied the celestial figures that showed them off as if they were pedigree dogs that they were talking for a walk. […] The lion, the dragon and the brívia had, it is true, well-established reputations, and it was only necessary to add a heavy dose of spectacle and malice in their exhibition. But the other animals, such as the ox and the ass, which had always had a passive attitude in the Nativity story, and also the first companion of the Evangelist Saint Luke, were forced to be mischievous, in the case of the ox, or to demonstrate a certain devilish perversity, in that of the mule. This was the animal that underwent the most complex transformation in its nature, because from being so peaceful to begin with it became, in its metamorphosis, a monster, more so outside Barcelona than in the city. I am not talking here of the eagle, because since time immemorial the queen of the birds has been a well-defined and immutable character, as we shall see when we turn to this egregious animal.

Francesc Curet includes the history of the celebration of Corpus Christi in Barcelona, and offers fundamental data for my research.[15] Devils and all kinds of allegories filled the streets of medieval and Renaissance Barcelona. Later on the beasts that filled the streets with their cheerful antics were set apart, until the prohibitions were on the verge of making them disappear.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Corpus Christi became a massive popular parade in which everybody showed off, the powerful and the ordinary people, wearing new clothes and their best finery. There were as many as 22 processions during the week when the celebrations were held. From 1760 onwards the number was reduced to half. That year, letters patent published by King Charles III prohibited the appearance of any element of popular imagery. The bestiary would never again play an important part in religious processions.

Later, in 1790, the displays were prohibited by the governor Jerónimo Girón and after that the exhibition of the popular bestiary was restricted for decades. In 1833, when Barcelona paid homage to the regent Maria Cristina and her daughter the future Queen Isabella II, one of the playwrights most fervently opposed to the absolutism that Carlism represented, Josep Robrenyo, wrote the comedy La Unión o la tía Secallona en las fiestas de Barcelona (The Union or old Aunt Secallona in the fiestas of Barcelona), in which the old crone was forced to dance in the festivities that celebrated the liberal regency, just when the civil war was beginning that established the “Two Spains”. One of the characters, Sagimon, was arguing with the old woman, who remembered the coronation festivals of the Bourbons, and he lambasted her as follows: “You really are the one who knows; […] you remembered when in Barcelona they brought out the lion, the eagle, the ox, the mule…”, and she retorted: “Fool!”, and Sagimon concluded: “the dragon and the bribia”, to which the old woman replied, “That’s rich! Go on man, it suits you!”, and he said to her, “You even remember when Judas was a boy”.[16] The scene refers us to the consideration of the popular bestiary as something old and partly left behind like Secallona herself. This impression is reinforced with the comments made a few years later by the Baron of Maldà. After the First Carlist War, in 1839 the animals were reintroduced to the procession, but their pitiful state of preservation made him exclaim:[17] “And there are those who say that it would be better to get rid of the ponies and the lion that go in the processions as something ridiculous and in depraved taste […] it is disgusting to see a lion with three buttocks and human legs dressed in woollen trousers and horses that have no legs but feet and a man’s at that.” Thus, for example, the hobby horses were replaced by stick dancers more or less for good.

We see that the festive bestiary of the city of Barcelona practically disappeared from the Corpus Christi procession and all other civic celebrations, as we are told in El Libro Verde de Barcelona 1848 (The Green Book of Barcelona 1848), where we read:

Let us talk about Corpus Christi, beginning with the eve, because the particular customs of the period began with it, with the giants and the tarasque coming out, and the lion, and the eagle; in a word, all the rag dolls in the municipality. It is a fact that for some years now many of them have been disappearing, so that nowadays we must only leave the giants in the custom.

A step forward, the civic-industrial cavalcade

As I said earlier, in order to study the popular bestiary of Barcelona it is necessary to understand how Barcelona’s big festival, La Mercè, concentrated the revival of these popular displays. Over the years, and especially from the middle years of the nineteenth century onwards, Barcelona became a federal city, a defender of liberal values against the absolutists. The different riots and disturbances were the result of this tension, and they repeatedly led to social uprisings that were severely put down by the army. As a result of the 1868 revolt the Festa Major of La Mercè was introduced in 1871, as a symbol of federalism, and it ushered in a new way of understanding the festival and the parading groups that were part of it. Carnestoltes (Carnival) was also an especially important time for the presence of these groups, but the animal figures have not been sufficiently researched, and the festive bestiary did not participate significantly in those celebrations. It is necessary, however, to mention the celebrations promoted by Sebastià Junyent and the Societat del Born, especially brilliant in 1859 and 1860.[18]

The history of the popular festival in Barcelona was changing, and these changes were quite profound. In the last decade of the nineteenth century there was a huge commemoration to mark the Fourth Centenary of Columbus, with high levels of participation, but the most significant thing was that the commemorations of the Eleventh of September began, which from 1901 were celebrated illegally. Thus the Diada was born, and in 1906 it inaugurated the model based on the floral offering at the foot of the statue of Rafael de Casanova.[19] The religious festival, although it remained pre-eminent, was not the only popular celebration; the festa major and the national holiday were gaining ground, as were the practices and the very idea of occupying the street, the veritable epicentre of popular commemorations.

The researcher Jordi Pablo i Grau has made a huge effort to clarify how the festa major of Barcelona signified an extraordinary change with regard to the festive and popular essence of the Catalan capital.[20] One of the tasks that take up most of his time is reconstructing the great civic-industrial cavalcade that took place in 1902, under the direction of Josep Puig i Cadafalch, a city councillor at the time. The cavalcade was divided into two parts: the first, historical, had floats showing how Mediterranean cultures had developed since prehistoric times via the Carthaginians, Romans and Greeks, culminating with two floats dedicated to Saint George and the dragon, the latter on a float paid for by La Veu de Catalunya. It was a very big dragon, defeated by Saint George, designed by the architect Cunill and which was moved by a vehicle underneath:[21] “It is a grandiose and fantastic monster 35 metres long and 2 metres high. It is pulled along the ground, dragged and chained by an armed warrior dressed up to the nines, with the helmet of King James I, waving a flag. It has on the front a Gothic doorway with the freed Princess”. The director of this first part was Miquel Utrillo, who a few years earlier had opened Els Quatre Gats. He became one of the greatest exponents of Modernisme and a collaborator of Adrià Gual’s Teatre Íntim. The second part of the procession was the civic-industrial cavalcade proper, in which many of the floats represented commercial trademarks such as Anís del Mono, Unió Mercantil or Champán Mercier, along with public bodies or guilds, such as the confectioners’ guild, Foment del Treball or Barcelona City Council. But the most important thing for us is that among the many events, which it is believed drew a crowd of about 150,000 people in the city, a competition was announced for giants and the papier-mâché beasts that had once been part of the country’s popular festive traditions. And so La Mercè became a sort of festa major of all Catalonia.[22] The presence of the Barcelona bestiary was limited to the pair of giants that were restored for the occasion, under the direction of Josep Puig i Cadafalch; we must also mention that the city councillor in charge of the organization of the parade and the giants’ competition was Francesc Cambó, elected in 1901 along with Puig. Despite everything, the only things remaining of that cavalcade are a series of photographs and accounts that Jordi Pablo is reconstructing to show us its true dimension.[23]

Conclusions

The presence of nature in the popular festivals of Barcelona is expressed through the so-called festive bestiary that we can document from the fourteenth century onwards. This group of papier-mâché animals emerged in a religious context, the festivity of Corpus Christi, they developed differently, and they have survived to the present day totally decontextualized in relation to their origins.

In Barcelona 1900 was a particularly crucial moment in the development of these figures. In the context of the appearance of interest in popular culture, scholars such as Rossend Serra i Pagès or Sebastià Farnés Badó[24] observed the study of the presence of nature in popular traditions, principally through popular literature, especially fairy tales and nursery rhymes, but without introducing the study of the festive bestiary that in those years had virtually disappeared from the city of Barcelona. This is demonstrated by the fact that the oldest figure in the modern festive bestiary of Barcelona is the Ciutat Vella dragon built in 1927. It was not until the years of the Second Republic, when Joan Amades published his study of the giants and the dwarves, that a successful approach was made to the popular bestiary.[25]

As I have argued, it is precisely through the change in the idea of the popular festival that the symbolic bestiary has adapted to a new reality and interpretation. This change is the result of the many political, social and economic upheavals that have taken place since the proclamation of the First Republic, and the introduction of the holiday of the Virgin of La Mercè, patron saint of Barcelona and the city’s Festa Major, in 1871. The consolidation of the annual festival with a totally fresh new meaning gave the festive bestiary, the papier-mâché beasts, a new lease of life, we might say. The 1902 competition represented a revival, a new consideration of the papier-mâché figures, such as giants, dwarves and animals, that were brought out for festivals in the country’s main towns and which had virtually disappeared in Barcelona.

Let us remember, to end with, a final reflection by Xavier Fàbregas, very relevant to my thoughts on the presence of animals in culture, given that the ox is one of the papier-mâché animals in our popular and festive imagery:[26]

The three aspects that we have considered of our relationship with the animal – the myth, the fable and, strictly speaking, zoology – are an expositive resource, a way of arranging the conceptual material to make it understandable, but none of the three would be understood without the interference of the other two. When we are about to cut a nice piece of steak with our knife and fork we are confronting, unaware of it though we may be, the mystery of Apis the ox, La Fontaine’s fable that tells us about the ox and the frogs, and the food that the particular ox we are cutting up into pieces has had available. If any of these ingredients is missing, our intellectual and alimentary relationship with the ox will remain incomplete. That’s how things are, so simple and, at the same time, so complicated.

THE MAETERLINCK OF THE FLOWERS AND THE BEES

Jordi Coca

In the first place I would like to thank the organizers of this symposium for inviting me to take part in it, and very especially my friends Doctors Teresa-M. Sala and Enric Ciurans. For me it is a pleasure to be part of their studies, always on the prior understanding that I am no expert in anything or in Maeterlinck, and that, in fact, I am no researcher either. I increasingly feel like a mere novelist, that is, someone who, full of curiosity, invents what he does not know. However, it is true that the plays and the personality of the Belgian author have attracted me for some time. It must have been at the end of the 1970s or at the very beginning of the 1980s when I discovered him. Before then he was just a name that I had not read. In any case, I was fascinated by his early plays, which even now seem to me the most interesting things that he wrote. I translated some of these titles (Intruder, Interior, The Blind, The Death of Tintagiles) and they were published. Two of these plays were performed in 1984, along with a series of promotional events that the press covered at the time, in the days when the daily press took an interest in culture and gave space to an unfashionable author.

In the foreword of the volume that presented the plays I had translated, I made some points that have already been dealt with in this book. For example, that one cannot talk about a single Symbolist form of theatre; that the tendencies rooted in Wagner have very little to do with Maeterlinck’s first pieces, with their false appearances of realism, to which I referred; that the Symbolist influence detected in Scandinavian theatre at the end of the nineteenth century is also far removed from the productions that the young poet Paul Fort must have put on in Paris; that the so widely supposed and at the very least paradoxical contrast between naturalism and symbolism is more than relative. In relation to this last point there is an amusing anecdote: Maeterlinck, who was from a good family and moreover earned a lot of money, purchased the castle of Médan, a village where Zola had a house, famous for the meetings held there by naturalists. Maeterlinck, comparing Zola’s modest house with his castle, was reported to have said, “At least we Symbolists win here this time.”

Joking apart, with regard to Symbolism I feel that we would agree on the fact that, beyond the stereotypes, it is hugely difficult to define the limits of this movement, which rather than a school was a mood, a tsunami that became evident at the end of the nineteenth century, a century that, as Jonathan Sperber says,[1] “from time to time […] suddenly bursts in on the present with horrific clarity and familiarity”. And perhaps because of this we now have to ask ourselves some questions: are the Pre-Raphaelites one of the origins of Symbolism? Can we go back to the Romantic Victor Hugo of the Odes who in 1822 said: “Beneath the real world there is another ideal world that appears resplendent in the eyes of those who are used to seeing more in things than just the things”? Can we consider Symbolism a precursory movement of the historical avant-gardes because, for example, Alfred Jarry only published in the same journals? How can one say that the Symbolists were not concerned with social problems, no matter how little one has read Verhaeren and Maeterlinck himself? It is not true that the latter comes out of nowhere in Belgium, is it? One only has to review the studies of Paul Gorceix[2] on the Belgian fin de siècle. Gorceix clearly shows us the literary outpouring of the last three decades of the nineteenth century in that country, an outpouring that exemplifies the path from Baudelaire to Symbolism and which, in passing, apart from the best-known names such as Émile Verhaeren, whom I have just mentioned, Charles van Lerberghe or George Rodenbach, resurrects for us authors now almost forgotten such as Max Elskamp, Albert Mockel and others who, as they were not assimilated in France, barely exist. In the opposite direction there is the precursor unacknowledged in Belgium, Charles de Coster, but we already know what is meant by the curse of all the John the Baptists: you cannot arrive too early …

That aside too, when Maeterlinck is mentioned today, at the very least one aspect of his personality that was essential from all points of view, and perhaps as important as the theatre, is usually overlooked. I am referring to his books of essays, which began in 1898 with La sagesse et la destine (Wisdom and Destiny), in which he talked about injustice and poverty as social ills, the interaction between wisdom and destiny, inner strength, the ability not to let oneself be trapped by events, the fact that only the hero-wise man can perceive heroic moments and those of wisdom, and how inner life shapes the soul, this being an aspect that to a certain extent places him close to Nietzsche (if you will forgive my boutade). This volume was published simultaneously in Paris, London and New York, and sold over 100,000 copies, a figure that was then absolutely extraordinary. “We only have a small influence on a certain number of external events,” wrote Maeterlinck, “but we have a great ability to control what these events mean for us.” There are those who say that this book is based on the letters of Georgette Leblanc – his regular partner from 1895 to 1918, with many mutual infidelities – and particularly the relationship that the promiscuous and bisexual Georgette had with Maurice Barrès, the nationalist writer and politician of the “cult of the self”. Maeterlinck dedicated this book to Leblanc in very clear terms: “I dedicate this book to you, for it is your work …”, but with the couple splitting up the dedication disappeared after 1918.

After this essay, alternating the theatrical production that was a success everywhere with poetry, we have to wait three years until 1901, when Maeterlinck published The Life of the Bee. This book, and later The Intelligence of Flowers (1907) and the volumes dedicated to termites (The Life of Termites, 1926) and his age-old enemies, ants (The Life of Ants, 1930), makes up the facet of Maeterlinck the essayist that we are going to look at here. But before beginning, it must be made clear that Maeterlinck the essayist – far inferior to Bergson, whose work is deeper, more systematic and more thorough – materializes in a series of volumes that deal with Death (published in 1911 in English) and what he calls The Unknown Guest. This volume, written before the First World War, includes five different essays and, despite the war, 20,000 copies of it were published in a first French edition in 1917. It had already appeared in England in 1914 and was published in Germany in 1919. In it he dealt once again with knowledge of the future, spiritual power and especially the case of Wilhelm von Osten, a German obsessed by the intelligence of animals and who in 1912 had been studied in a book by Karl Krall, who had inherited Osten’s trained animals, which included horses with surprising calculating skills. In short, now it is just a case of pointing out in which circle of interests Maeterlinck the essayist moved; he was influential in the whole of Europe, and particularly in Austria and Germany, very especially in Poland through the Young Poland movement,[3] and also in the USA, where in 1920 he was welcomed as a living legend.

With the Nobel Prize to his name – Maeterlinck was very careful about money, and among other things he was an expert at buying and selling houses and palaces – excommunicated by the Catholic Church in 1914, a huge success in theatres, with a more than considerable number of musical adaptations of his works, selling thousands and thousands of copies of his essays on the subjects we have just mentioned, talking about space (1928), the great silence (1934), the other world (1942) or Joan of Arc (1948), and a long list of let us say strange, or different, questions, the truth is that with these works Maeterlinck aroused an admiration that it is hard to imagine today. He travelled all over the world, gave lectures, wrote scripts for Hollywood, was honoured, lived with his two wives, one of whom, Renée Dahon, was 31 years younger than him, and had fantastic palaces built for himself such as the folly of Orlamonde, which he purchased in 1935.[4] Many of these curiosities have become anecdotes all of which have helped to shape a profile of the Belgian author that does not fully correspond to reality.

After the premiere of Princess Maleine (1889), and after the article by Mirabeau in Le Figaro that established him as one of the greats – by the way, Mirabeau was not the first to talk about him: the first was Adolphe Retté, a year earlier – in no time Maeterlinck produced a series of plays that, as Paul Valéry and André Gide said, had a touch of the Nordic about them, and for that reason he was exotic in Paris. We do not have to go into it here: it is a theatre of the soul, a theatre of the pure inner being, a theatre of the transcendent “self”. Many descriptions have been made of it, using a thousand adjectives, but especially with The Blind he seems to be a precursor of Beckett. It is a theatre in which, unlike naturalism, there is no description of the environment, a theatre with characters with no psychological weight or past, a theatre of non-action, static, situational, of quietism, which as Maeterlinck himself said sets out to “show what is surprising about the mere fact of living”. He is seeking the tragic everyday world, underground action, the presence of fate. To a certain extent he rejects the theatre itself, understood in the conventional sense, and he therefore tends towards the modernity of the second half of the twentieth century, as Peter Szondi says.[5] He even finds actors a nuisance, and there is a predominance of the sublime character, the third character, the faceless stranger, omnipresent in this poetry of silence.

This world of intuition, of senses and feelings, overwhelmed or at least governed by the force of what we do not know, in which everybody is highly vulnerable, refers us to the clichés of Symbolism, which, while true, have turned this movement into a caricature of itself. According to this, Symbolism would be an evasive movement, which escapes from reality and proposes living in a world of fantasy, a platonic world since ideas are more important than material reality. Let me put it this way: as opposed to the naturalists, who are scientists, serious, causal, logical, and who seek to tell us “the truth”, the Symbolists seem to take refuge in the fear of death and they amuse themselves with legendary princesses with long flowing locks.

But of course, Symbolism is not that; we only have to pay a moment’s attention to artists such as the Belgian Fernand Khnopff, the Swiss and precursor Arnold Böcklin, or the German Franz Stuck, to realize that there is another possible interpretation of Symbolism, an interpretation that is not at all evasive. It is actually just the opposite, as its figurations are based on the Heimlich that Freud talks about,[6] an ambivalent term that on one hand has the positive meaning of the familiar and intimate, the everyday, what is certain; but on the other hand, Heimlich, precisely for being familiar, also refers to what is hidden, secret and strange, intimate in the sense of hidden. If we repress the Heimlich, it ends up flourishing transformed into Unheimlich, that is, the familiar and yet suspicious, terrifying, which ought not to come out. It is close to us but unknown, and we feel that it is connected to aspects of ourselves that are atavistic, ancestral, savage, sinister, abominable and animal. According to this, beneath the harmless appearance of the everyday, less evasive Symbolism would brutally show us the disturbing horror of what the morality of the well-to-do classes would rather keep hidden. And to complete the idea of the highly significant ambivalence of certain words, we can give the example of the term deinon that Steiner talks about in relation to the first stasimon in Sophocles’ Antigone,[7] something I do due to the obvious influence that the classical tragedy has on Maeterlinck’s plays. Deinon is usually translated only as “wonderful” when in actual fact in Greek deinon refers simultaneously to what is terrifying and awe-inspiring, especially in relation to nature and the gods: there are not many “wonderful” things in creation, of which humans would be the greatest, but many “terrifying and awe-inspiring” things, the logical conclusion of which are human beings. The meaning of this stasimon thus changes completely.

Let us remember that Zola was interested in convincing us that naturalism had to be understood as a development of the Enlightenment and that for him the continuity between the eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century was obvious. In this tendency, reason explains everything, it always has answers and, if it does not have them, it is because it is seeking them, certain that it will eventually find them. Positivism, the philosophical system based on experience and empirical knowledge of natural phenomena, thus contains a blind optimism – to use a term typical of Maeterlinck, but in the opposite sense – that makes humans live in the false certainty that everything is known or can be known. This leads us to see ourselves always sheltered from uncertainty. For the Positivists there is an explicable and logical determinism and causality, and the job of humans is to discover these mechanisms. Perhaps it is, but the problem lies not in the attitude of searching but in the certainties that we acquire and the conviction that there is an eventual explanation.

Zola seems to forget Baudelaire. In the work of Baudelaire, Romanticism goes into a crisis and the doors are flung open to modernity, to what we will later call the avant-garde; a new man is born and the doubts and the contradictions are raised that will break out during the twentieth century, many of which, it must be admitted, were already present in the great galaxy of Romanticism itself. The Symbolists, and therefore the Belgian Maeterlinck, are the children of this spirit, and it does not seem that directing our gaze towards that which we do not see is avoiding reality. Perhaps it is looking at it more deeply and without the blindness of believing that we know.

From the point of view of conventional Symbolism it certainly seems strange that Maeterlinck should have devoted himself to writing essays on topics that seem more typical of a naturalist, that he almost became a physiologist, an entomologist and that he was a keen beekeeper. But in actual fact, when we now reread these works, often Pascalian in tone, if you will naive and at times dangerously “poetic”, we realize that Maeterlinck sees this world of insects not too differently from how he sees the lives of humans. Beehives and termites’ and ants’ nests are miniature worlds, class-based societies in which individuals have no rights. Therefore, when he observes the social organization of insects and their physical characteristics, or when he describes the sexual strategies of plants – and when he talks to us about illness and death, about ghosts or angels – he strives to treat the whole of creation as a unit, as a whole that is governed by laws that up to now have been concealed from us – for example the fourth dimension – by a spirit or spirits that we should not confuse with any religious entity and which are not necessarily pleasant. Maeterlinck refers to this “spirit” in many ways; he calls it the spirit of the beehive when referring to bees, or of the nest in relation to termites or ants, or he talks of an occult power. In fact, in relation to termites, he specifically proposes that we see the nest as a single being, as an indissoluble unit in which each insect would be a sort of cell. A being, a unit, governed by a kind of hard life, apparently senseless, dominated by horror and by the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the species.

This idea brought him an accusation of plagiarism that I cannot go into here, but which in hindsight seems disproportionate, as Maeterlinck was careful about the researching of his sources and always presented himself as a disseminator of subjects in which he admitted to being not much more than a keen amateur, although his dedication to bees made him far more than that. In any case, in the introduction of The Life of Termites he clearly explains his working method to us, basically informative as I said. He states that he never adds anything “wonderful” to the truth, that the truth is already wonderful / terrifying in itself, that he has taken into account studies by professional entomologists devoted to scientific observation, that he only reports information by illustrious explorers such as Livingstone precisely in order to avoid fantasies. We know that in order to write the book on bees he read 77 different volumes on this subject, and to do the book on ants he collected 128 volumes in his library. Moreover, he carried cards full of notes on which he built up data and ideas. The conclusions are what they are, but it is interesting to point out that in 1930, precisely when his work suddenly fell out of favour with the public, Maeterlinck was already pointing out to us that “the future will not belong to the men of letters, or to the naturalists, but to the chemists.”

This leads me to wonder what Maeterlinck is for us today. On one hand, his plays have ceased to be successful as they once were – at least in the way they are performed – and they have become dated; on the other, I have also said that after Bergson his essays on different subjects such as time, duration, the culture of dreams or matter and memory seem more lyrical than scientific, so that reading this Maeterlinck the thinker might appear to be a rather puerile exercise. However, if I were a publisher I would try to relaunch him, as he never ceases to surprise when he tells us about, for example, the apparent misuse of matter in the universe: uninhabited worlds, wasted energy, stars of all kinds whose existence does not seem to make any sense.

Moreover, the works devoted to insects and flowers, basically Darwinian and which took into account the research of the finest scientists of the time – some of Maeterlinck’s thoughts about bees were scientifically valid until the 1970s – are still useful to us in many ways. They are valid in themselves insofar as they show thoroughly and with suggestive prose how all living beings deploy intelligence strategies or survival instincts that range from physical adaptation to social organization. I do not think it necessary to go into all the details here, but there is the description of the enormous variety of termites, between 1,200 and 1,500 species, the majority of them blind and incapable of digesting any food without the help of parasites; there is a look at the habitats they choose: trees, underground dens, heaps of accumulated matter, and the surprising skills they have as architects and planners, for example in everything related to ventilation systems and temperature control. Maeterlinck also records the speed of these insects in an emergency or when repairing damage, the exact distribution of functions between the soldiers, the workers, the royal couple, the epic of the sorties from the nest even though they cannot see, the elimination of surplus individuals by procedures at times horrifying, radical, with a sort of regulation of the species that makes no concessions.

And we could say the same about flowers, their condemnation to immobility and the strategies of sexual seduction that they use to guarantee their existence, an essential existence as without them there would be no animal world or, logically, us, the humans. Through colours, perfumes and movements, plants attract insects and spread seeds and pollen via other animals or the wind. The boundaries between plant and animal are not clear, and through a thousand technical precisions and a host of examples, Maeterlinck shows us that talking about the intelligence of flowers is not literary license. He describes for us the solutions of the plant world to improve or guarantee its survival by comparing it with our advances in medicine or technology, and he seeks to describe the “general intelligence” from which everything that happens on Earth derives.

It would be long-winded to go into more detail. Especially in the book about bees, Maeterlinck is precise, poetic and philosophical, and I would add thoroughly scientific in everything related to the social organization of these Apis. We see him wondering over and again about who makes the key decisions in this world in which the bees seem to communicate with one another through movement, and he describes in detail that it is not the queen or the royal consort that decides the essential affairs of the community, nor is it the workers, nor the males of the colony, nor are the mechanisms of consultation, that we do not know, any form of perfect democracy. Beyond all that, what decides on life and death is, as we have said, the spirit of the beehive, the hidden power, but Maeterlinck immediately admits that these expressions only disguise the unknown.

I repeat that the Belgian playwright speaks of the anthill as a single individual, just as our body is a conglomerate of trillions of cells. He records the advances in scientific knowledge and admits that the way living organisms function is thus better explained, and he gives the example of what the discoveries of the endocrine glands or the thyroids meant then. But he also wonders what regulates these glands. He ends by giving us a summary of some explanations that we humans have given ourselves, pointing out, however, that no response is satisfactory. He refers to a form of intelligence unknown to us, he mentions the Anima Mundi – the underlying spirit in nature according to certain philosophers and religions – and he also comments on Leibnitz’s harmony, Schopenhauer’s will, Claude Bernard’s guiding idea, Providence, God, chance…

When he refers to the human animal, Maeterlinck describes us as virtually defenceless beings. The skeleton that holds us up is covered with soft flesh and, what’s more, from the point of view of the senses we are limited if compared to other living beings: we have poorer senses of smell, hearing and sight, we run less, we jump less, we are born more defenceless, we have less strength, we are vulnerable, we learn slowly, we have only been on planet Earth for a short while. Indeed there is a stubborn refusal to see ourselves as animals, or rather at the very least we tend to see ourselves as a sort of other animal, touched by some grace that we sense is divine. What we call intelligence would also distinguish us from the rest, but here Maeterlinck denies that our supposed intelligence differs much from that of the termites, the bees and the flowers. And he denies that we may confuse this general intelligence with the reason that Positivism tends to see as omnipotent. Living is all about survival, and that alone forces us to develop a series of instinctive, intelligent tactics and strategies, for reasons equally unknown to us.

I have already said that this Maeterlinck the essayist considers science vital insofar as it helps us to learn about how life works, but under no circumstances should we see it as a way of obtaining definite certainties. At least to date, he tells us, after each answer there are always more questions. Each step forward deepens our ignorance. As we learn, what we do not know about the world and ourselves grows. The world is a whole that must be preserved, and he reiterates that intelligence is also evident in plants, bees, termites and ants, no matter how much we might like to call it instinct in these spheres, basically to set ourselves apart. At a given moment he tells us that if we were bees observing humans, we would be unpleasantly surprised by the scant logic and the injustice of our organization of labour and the distribution of wealth, and also how we fail to fully exploit the Earth’s resources. However, it must be admitted that our reduced physical and sensorial faculties, compared to those of other animals, are made up for by the ability to think logically, which in the end would be a strategy like any other. In the mysterious context of our ignorance, what the author of The Blind calls spiritual potency seems to push us towards an obvious conclusion: if in the end nothing has a reasonable and sufficient explanation, it seems obvious that we must continue the search in the conviction that the meaning is not in the answers we get, but in the unanswered questions.

Maeterlinck was a paradoxical being: he was in “awe” of the most insignificant manifestation of life and he was passionate about boxing and riding his motorcycle fast. He wrote magnificent plays on the subject of death but when he tackled this inevitable passage directly he strove to differentiate it perfectly from life. He was profoundly Flemish, but a French speaker, and he put up stern resistance to the Flemishization of Ghent University. He lived a relaxed life, worked few hours, he was shy and sensitive, and he worried about his properties and property transactions.

His scientific and apparently Positivist dedication to the description of the lives of insects and flowers might seem another of these paradoxes. But in actual fact it is just the opposite. The Maeterlinck of the flowers and the bees – and also of space, dreams and the animals’ ability to learn and the long list of subjects he dealt with – helps us to understand that Symbolism is not an escapist movement. Maeterlinck transcends scientific and empirical method because he applies it to an environment impossible to reach: everything we see and believe in its entirety. Zola wanted to explain how a family, a small group of human beings, behaves in a society and how it develops giving rise to the birth of 10 or 20 individuals that at first sight seem profoundly different, but which analysis shows us are closely bonded to one another;[8] this environment was reachable. On the other hand, Maeterlinck sees living beings, humans included, lost in the whole and stubbornly devoted to surviving: lost in the physical world, many of whose laws we do not know or we misinterpret; we could be bacteria, insects of all kinds, flowers, wild animals, people … We are part of what we call space, the universe, but we sense that there is a fourth dimension – or thousands of unknown dimensions, Maeterlinck insinuates – and we could even add the possibility that in the distant future we might voluntarily separate our material life from the non-material. He is referring to time travel, relations with beings from other planets, beliefs and superstitions, fears and, without mentioning it, he also deals with the Unheimlich that I was talking about a while ago. This is the great environment in which we are born and where we develop until we die, Maeterlinck says, and ignoring it is being wrong about the supposedly scientific premises.

Put that way, through science Maeterlinck reaches the conclusion that we do not know much about creation or the reasons why we are here and why things are the way they are. Life, survival, is a wonderful and apparently meaningless horror that refers us to the most profound perplexities. Seen close up, life is marvellous but frightening too: it is frightening because of the sacrifices that it demands of individuals for the good of the species, and it is frightening because of how fleeting it is from the individual point of view, and because of how horrifying it is to go through all this without obtaining from it any satisfactory answers. Creation is the great mystery that we try to explain without understanding it. In any case, for Maeterlinck the objective of research and investigation is the unknown, and therefore if we confuse what we learn with certainties, we become blind to the most essential. We can describe the immediate environment that determines us, but we know virtually nothing about the Great Determination. The Positivist attitude – complex and which at the very least we have to refer to Condorcet, via Auguste Comte – would be a perversion when he claims that only knowledge of the facts gives results.

For Maeterlinck, reason is useful, perhaps it even characterizes us in relation to other living beings, but we cannot ignore that it conceals primitive, animal, instinctive, hidden and secret aspects that also make us the way we are. Freud is a good example of what I am saying. If in the everyday we deny these underlying truths, we unleash the horror and the abominable to which I also referred. Life is more complex than we can know, and precisely because of that the acquisition of knowledge must not limit the scope of the questions. “Despair is based on what we know, which is virtually nothing, and hope on what we do not know, which is everything,” says the Belgian author. Or, and this is written by a non-believer: “If mankind were a hundred times more intelligent, a hundred times better, God would be at the same time a hundred times more intelligent, a hundred times better than mankind.” Symbolism does not propose escape for us by talking about mysterious fountains and castles; Symbolism, especially when it studies the flowers and the bees, tells us to what extent we are fragile, vulnerable, defenceless, short-lived animals that fight desperately to live in ignorance, whether we are in a well-off household and we are waiting for our daughter to return – she will not because she has been drowned in the river – or blind people lost in a clearing in the woods, or beautiful legendary princesses with long flowing locks.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

Concerning the relationship between the arts and nature

1 LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura, translation and introduction by Joaquim Balcells, Barcelona, Fundació Bernat Metge, 1923, XIV.

2 “Invocació a Venus”, Book one, Ibid., p. 3.

3 Max MüLLER, “Lectures on the Science of Language”, second series, 1864, p. 566 (I take the quote from Gillian BEER, Darwin’s Plots, Cambridge University Press, 1983).

4 Aristotle says: “Besides this, animals are divided into sanguineous ones, for example, man, the horse and all the animals that when they are reached fully developed are apodal, bipedal or quadrupedal, and non-sanguineous ones, for example, the bee, the wasp, and of the marine animals, the cuttlefish, the lobster and all the animals that have more than four legs”. ARISTOTLE, Investigación sobre los animales, Madrid, Gredos, 1992, p. 51.

5 Aristotle, in fact, speaks of the Indian ass, which he has wished to identify with the rhinoceros. ARISTOTLE, Investigación..., op. cit., p. 91.

6 Xavier FÀBREGAS, El llibre de les bèsties: zoologia fantàstica catalana. Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1983, p. 80.

7 In his Historia serpentum et draconum Aldrovandi defines the epigraphs of the word entitled “Concerning the snake in general”. Quoted by Michel FOUCAULT, Las palabras y las cosas, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1968, p. 47.

8 With regard to this step Michel Foucault writes: “And in this region we encounter natural history, the science of the characters that structure the continuity of nature and its confusion. In this region we also encounter the theory of money and of value – the science of the signs that authorize change and make it possible to establish equivalences between the needs and the desires of men. There, lastly, is housed general grammar, the science of signs through which men regroup the singularity of their perceptions and reduce the continual movement of their thoughts. [...] In any case, it is possible to define the classical episteme, in its more general arrangement, by the articulated system of a mathesis, of a taxonomy and of a genetic analysis”. Ibid., pp. 79-80.

9 Foucault writes: “One day, in the late 18th century, Cuvier will lay his hands on the exquisite things in a museum, he will break them, and he will dissect all the classical conserve of animal visibility. [...] It is... a mutation of the natural space of western culture: the end of history, in the sense of Tournefort, Linnaeus, Buffon, Adanson, and also in the sense that was understood by Boissier de Sauvages when contrasting the philosophical of the invisible, of the occult and of the causes with the historical knowledge of the visible, and it will also be the beginning of what makes it possible, by replacing classification with anatomy, the structure with the organism, the visible nature with internal subordination, the painting with the series, to precipitate around the old flat world, engraved in black and white, the animals and the plants, a profound mass of time which will be given the renewed name of history”. Ibid., p. 138.

10 Ibid., pp. 303-304. The translation into English is ours.

11 Patrícia GABANCHO mentions it, “La ciència com a precursora de la Renaixença”, in Il·luminacions. Catalunya visionària, Barcelona, CCCB, 2009, pp. 69-70.

12 Jean CLAIR, Paradis perdus: l’Europe symboliste, Montreal, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1995.

13 Raimon Casellas uses this title in an article of his on Catalan painting in “Tercera Exposición General de Bellas artes. III: Pinturas simbólico-decorativas”, La Veu de Catalunya, Barcelona, 12 May 1896.

14 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Al lector”, Oracions, Barcelona, L’Avenç, 1897. It is a sort of foreword that he addresses to readers and which has been considered a manifesto of Modernisme.

15 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “A la bellesa”. Ibid.

16 The garden, strictly speaking, has this objective of offering a sight for the eyes. In the 18th century, in Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, the gentleman from Jaucourt defines the garden as a “place traditionally planted and cultivated” and he classifies the art of gardening according to “the arts of taste”. The gardener conditions the vegetation, while the artists paint it. It is a staging of the origins, of a world of nature domesticated by the hand of man. The Japanese idealize, symbolize, pursuing nature itself as an ideal and in the garden they create a veritable microcosm of nature. They strive to find the balance and get lost in it until time and oneself no longer have any meaning.

Darwinism in Spanish natural science school textbooks in the last decade of the nineteenth century

1 Margarita HERNÁNDEZ, Darwinismo y manuales escolares en España e Inglaterra en el siglo XIX (1870-1902), Madrid, UNED, 2010. This book includes, as additional material, a CD that contains a research method using school textbooks, an original work by the author.

2 Charles DARWIN, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London, John Murray, 1859.

3 Rafael GARCÍA-ÁLVAREZ, Nociones de historia natural, Granada, Printing press of D. Francisco Ventura y Sabatel, printer to Their Majesties, 1867, new edition, p. 209.

4 Augusto GONZÁLEZ DE LINARES, Ensayo de una introducción al estudio de la historia natural, Madrid, Printed and Stereotyped by M. Rivadeneyra, 1873.

5 Rafael GARCÍA-ÁLVAREZ, Tratado elemental de ﬁsiología general y humana, Granada, Printed by D. Francisco Ventura, 1874, p. 48.

6 Peregrín CASANOVA, Estudios biológicos. I. La Biología general, Valencia, Ferrer de Orga, 1877.

7 Ibid., pp. 403-404.

8 Ibid., p. 405.

9 Haeckel’s letter reads: “My very dear colleague: It gives me great satisfaction to please you complying with your kind wish for my name to figure at the head of your Principles of Biology; hoping that your work will contribute greatly to the spread of the doctrine of natural evolution in Spain, with the same zeal that I have shown in my writings, to extend it to Germany. Wishing your work great success and endlessly grateful for your esteemed trust, I remain your humble servant. Ernesto Häckel” (the lettering is from the original).

10 I. BOLÍVAR, S. CALDERÓN and F. QUIROGA, Elementos de historia natural, Madrid, Typographical Establishment of Fortanet, 1890 (the cover is dated 1891).

11 Ibid., pp. 215-216.

12 Juan de GALDO, Elementos de historia natural. Curso primero: geología, mineralogía, petrografía, geotectónica, geología dinámica y geología histórica, Madrid, Librería de la Viuda de Hernando y Cía., 1894, brand-new edition (first printed in 1848).

13 Ibid., p. 35. The exclamation marks appear in the original.

14 Juan de GALDO, Elementos de historia natural. Curso segundo: biología, botánica y zoología, Madrid, Librería de la Viuda de Hernando y Cía., 1895, brand-new edition.

15 Odón de BUEN, Historia natural, vol. I, Barcelona, Manuel de Soler [1896], 2nd ed., pp. 46-47.

16 Odón de BUEN, Historia natural, vol. II, Barcelona, Manuel de Soler [1896], 2nd ed., pp. 5-6.

17 Ibid., p. 7.

18 José GOGORZA, Elementos de historia natural, Salamanca, Stereotype Type of Francisco Núñez Izquierdo, 1897.

19 Odón de BUEN, Diccionario de historia natural, Barcelona, Printed by Salvador Manero Bayarri, 1891.

20 Rafael GARCÍA-ÁLVAREZ, Elementos de historia natural, Granada, Printed by D. Francisco Ventura, 1891, p. 228.

21 Juan de GALDO, Taxonomía y cuadros sinópticos de historia natural, Madrid, Bookshop of Vda. de Hernando, 1894, p. 144.

22 Salvador CALDERÓN, Nociones de historia natural, Madrid, Lipo typographical establishment of J. Palacios, 1899, pp. 506-507.

23 Serafín CASAS, Elementos de historia natural, Madrid, Bookshop of Hernando y Compañía, 1897, p. 13.

24 Manuel DÍAZ DE ARCAYA, Elementos de historia natural, Zaragoza, Printed by Ramón Miedes, 1898, 6th ed., p. 279 (1st ed., 1887; 2nd ed., 1895; 7th ed., 1899).

25 Emilio RIBERA, Nociones de historia natural, Paris, Garnier Brothers, Booksellers-Publishers, 1893; Ensayo de un curso de cuadros de historia natural, Valencia, Manuel Alufre, 1894; Elementos de historia natural, Valencia, Manuel Alufre, 1897, 5th ed., and Programa de las lecciones de un curso de historia natural con principios de ﬁsiología e higiene, Valencia, Printed by Manuel Alufre, 1899.

26 Manuel MIR, Programa-sumario de elementos de historia natural, Barcelona, Printed by Subirana Hermanos, 1896, p. 15.

27 Felipe PICATOSTE, Elementos de historia natural, Madrid, Bookshop of Viuda de Hernando y Cía., 1889, pp. 198-199.

28 Luis PÉREZ, Nociones de historia natural e ideas generales de geología, Valladolid, National and Foreign Printing press and bookshop of the Sons of Rodríguez, Booksellers to the University and the Institute, 1893, 9th ed. corrected, p. 265.

29 Luis PÉREZ, Nociones de ﬁsiología e higiene. Valladolid, Printing press and bookshop of Andrés Martín, 8th ed. corrected, 1897.

30 Demetrio Fidel RUBIO, Compendio o nociones elementales de higiene (1896), Madrid, Bookshop of Hernando y Cía., 1897, 2nd ed., p. 107.

31 Fidel FAULÍN, Historia natural (elementos) con nociones de anatomía y ﬁsiología humanas, Madrid, Typographical establishment Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1898, p. 411.

32 Teresa-M. SALA (ed.), Barcelona 1900, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2008.

33 Charles DARWIN, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London, John Murray, 1872.

34 Phillip PRODGER, Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

35 Megatherium described by Cuvier in Recherches sur les ossemens fossils de quadrupèdes, Paris, Deterville, 1836, atlas, bk. XII, plate 217 (1st ed., 1812).

36 Juan PIMENTEL, El rinoceronte y el megaterio. Un ensayo de morfología histórica, Madrid, Abada, 2010.

37 Margarita HERNÁNDEZ, Charles Darwin y Lucía Sapiens. Lecciones del origen y evolución de las especies, Madrid, UNED, 2012, pp. 37-38.

Anti-Materialist ideas in England in the late nineteenth century and their validity today

1 Steven L. FINKELSTEIN et al., “A galaxy rapidly forming stars 700 million years after the Big Bang at redshift 7.51”, Nature, No. 502, 2013, pp. 524-527. Given the high specialization of this article you are also recommended to consult the corresponding review in the News & Views section of the same journal: Dominik A. RIECHERS, “New distance record for galaxies”, Nature, No. 502, 2013, pp. 459-460.

2 Known as the “Sarawak paper”. Alfred Russel WALLACE, “On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species”, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, No. 16 (2nd series), 1855, pp. 184-196.

3 Known as the “Ternate paper”. Published later as: Alfred Russel WALLACE, “On the tendency of varieties to depart indeﬁnitely from the original type”, Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London, No. 3, 1859, pp. 53-62.

4 Darwin’s accusations of plagiarism concerning Wallace’s work have recently been rejected after detailed research into the mail steamers’ departure dates. See John van WYHE and Kees ROOKMAAKER, “A new theory to explain the receipt of Wallace’s Ternate essay by Darwin in 1858”, Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, No. 105, 2012, pp. 249-252.

5 George W. BECCALONI, “Alfred Russel Wallace and Natural Selection: The Real Story” (2013). downloads.bbc.co.uk/tv/junglehero/alfred-wallacebiography.pdf.

6 Alfred Russel WALLACE, “Sir Charles Lyell on geological climates and the origin of species”, Quarterly Review, No. 391, 1869.

7 Alfred Russel WALLACE, The Scientiﬁc Aspect of the Supernatural, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (1875).

8 Alfred Russel WALLACE, A Defence of Modern Spiritualism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (1875).

9 Alfred Russel WALLACE, “Evolution can’t explain the soul”, The World Magazine, 19 November 1910, p. 7.

10 Letter from Darwin to Thomas Henry Huxley, 29 January 1874. Letter from Darwin to Joseph Dalton Hooker, 18 January 1874. www.darwinproject.ac.uk.

11 Letter from George Eliot to Herbert Spencer, 1852. In: Gordon S. HAIGHT (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, New Haven / London, Yale University Press, 1954-1978.

12 George Henry LEWES, Problems of Life and Mind, London, Trübner, 1874.

13 George ELIOT, “The Natural History of German Life”, Westminster Review, 1856, pp. 51-56 and 71-72.

14 Letter from George Eliot to Barbara Bodichon, 5 December 1859. Gordon S. HAIGHT (ed.), op. cit. Barbara Bodichon was a defender of women’s rights and a close friend of George Eliot.

15 Henry JAMES, “George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’”, Galaxy, No. 15, 1873, pp. 424-428. It is useful to remember that in 1898 James would publish his novel The Turn of the Screw, in which ghosts play a major part.

16 Thomas NAGEL, “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review, No. 83 (4), 1974, pp. 435-450.

17 Thomas NAGEL, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

18 As reflected in the subtitle of Mind and Cosmos, for Nagel the Materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.

19 George ELIOT, Middlemarch, Ch. XX, Barcelona, Alba, 2000 (1871-1872).

LANDSCAPES OF THE SOUL

Concerning nature in Symbolist imagery

1 “Foundational story”, which is how the scholar Mircea Eliade refers to the myth. See Mircea ELIADE, Mito y realidad, Barcelona, Kairós, 1999, and Mitos, sueños y misterios, Barcelona, Kairós, 2001.

2 Joaquim Torres-Garcia was one of his followers in his early period, for which he was called “Puvis de Chavannes from the outskirts”. See Teresa-M. SALA, “Puvis de Chavannes, la ensoñadora eternidad”, Kalías. Revista de Arte, Valencia, IVAM, 1995, pp. 136-141.

3 See Françoise GRAUBY, La création mythique à l’époque du symbolisme, Paris, Nizet, 1994.

4 Gilbert DURAND, El retorno de Hermes: hermenéutica y ciencias humanas, Barcelona, Anthropos, 1989, p. 137.

5 The art of interpretation is called hermeneutics, a word associated with Hermes and hermeticism, i.e., associated with the skill of revealing hidden meanings.

6 We should remember that, in those days, Sigmund Freud’s neurological research had to do with the analysis of dreams. His therapies used hypnosis and he later developed what is known as psychoanalysis. There are those who consider him a visionary philosopher who rethought human nature. He was without doubt an innovator who influenced many fields. The Surrealists used the unconscious in art as a method of creation. See the article by Ricardo GULLÓN, “Simbolismo y ensueño”, El simbolismo. Soñadores y visionarios, Madrid, J. Tablate Miquis, coll. “Oval”, No. 1, 1984, p. 1113.

7 The blue nocturnes of William Degouve de Nuncques or of Scandinavian Symbolist artists like Harald Oskar Sohlberg or Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the blue landscapes of Adrià Gual or the Al·legoria de la Música by Santiago Rusiñol are Somnis de natura. With this same title, Dreams of Nature. Symbolism from Van Gogh to Kandinsky, these types of landscapes could be seen in an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2012.

8 From the book by Santiago RUSIÑOL, Oracions, Barcelona, L’Avenç, 1897.

9 As a way of starting the publication, Frederic Mistral dedicated a significant acknowledgement to him: “Cette épopée de la forêt, où les arbres sont des héros, où les feuilles bruissantes murmurent les légendes sylvestres, où la langue catalane devient la voix superbe de la mystérieuse et divine nature. Je vous félicite pour la splendeur de vos descriptions qui rappellent l’horreur sacrée des végétations antiques et des bois où dort la Belle du conte populaire”, written in Maillane (Provence), 3 April 1910, Barcelona, Tip. La Academica, 1910. While writing this article one of the songs in the book appeared published and translated into several languages: see M. À. CERDÀ, M. PRAT and J. M. ZARANDONA, Escalibor. Un cant modernista artúric conquereix el món, Madrid, Sial / Trivium, 2014.

10 Ibid., p. 24.

11 M. À. CERDÀ, Boires i crisantemes. El poema en prosa modernista, Barcelona, La Magrana, “L’Esparver”, 1990, p. 79.

12 “La intrusa. Dama de Mauricio Maeterlinck”, La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 8 September 1893, p. 4.

13 See Ricard TORRENTS, Verdaguer, un poeta per a un poble, Barcelona, Blume, 1980.

14 Three series of it were published in Biblioteca Popular de l’Avenç collection.

15 Alexandre CIRICI, 1900, Barcelona, 1967, p. 17.

16 J. ZANNÉ, Poesíes, odes y elegíes, sonets, traduccions, Barcelona, F. Giró, 1908, p. 153.  

The Symbolist landscape and the concept of the degeneration of race according to Max Nordau, Pompeu Gener, et al.

1 Raimon CASELLAS, “Bellas Artes. Exposición de San Feliu de Guíxols”, La Vanguardia, 19 July 1892.

2 Henri-Frédéric AMIEL, Journal intime, 10-2-1846. Collected in: Michel Collot, L’horizon fabuleux, vol. I, XIXe siècle, Paris, Librairie José Corti, 1988, p. 13.

3 See on this point Jean David JUMEAU-LAFOND, “El país ideal. El paisatge simbolista a França”, in Un país ideal. El paisatge simbolista a França, Girona, Fundació Caixa de Girona, 2006, pp. 9-11; Torsten GUNNARSSON, Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1998; or Torsten GUNNARSSON et al., Naturens spegel: nordiskt landskapsmå leri 1840-1910, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, 2006.

4 Radophe RAPETTI, “Paysages et symbols”, in De Van Gogh à Kandinsky. Le paysage symboliste en Europe 1880-1910, Brussels, Fonds Mercator, 2012, pp. 17-39; see p. 33.

5 This is especially clear in Scandinavian culture. See, for example: Petra GUNST (coord.), Les mondes intérieurs. Le symbolisme ﬁnlandais, Ghent, Marot-Tijdsbeeld, 2002.

6 Émile ZOLA, Mes haines (1866). Quoted in Étienne GILSON, Peinture et réalité, Paris, J. Vrin, 1972, p. 296.

7 Radophe RAPETTI, “Paysages et symboles”, op. cit., p. 29.

8 See, on this subject: Josep CASALS, Aﬁnidades vienesas. Sujeto, lenguaje, arte, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2003, pp. 39-56, in which the author analyses the philosopher’s work in depth.

9 Radophe RAPETTI, “Paysages et symboles”, op. cit., p. 30.

10 Maurice DENIS, Déﬁnition du neo-traditionnisme (1890). Collected in Radophe RAPETTI, “Symbolisme et naturalisme”, in De Van Gogh..., op. cit., pp. 67-89; see p. 87.

11 See below.

12 It must be said that in this study we shall be focusing on talking chiefly about plastic aesthetics. On the same subject, for literature, see: Irene GRAS VALERO, “Existeix un estil de la décadence?”, in El decadentisme a Catalunya: interrelacions entre art i literatura, doctoral thesis, University of Barcelona, 2010, pp. 106-109 [consultable online via the University of Barcelona catalogue of online doctoral theses (TDR) http://hdl.handle.net/10803/2029].

13 Jean-David JUMEAU-LAFOND, “Catàleg”, in Un país ideal, op. cit., pp. 29-197; see p. 78.

14 Raimon CASELLAS, “París Artístico. V: Eugenio Carrière”, La Vanguardia, 26 May 1893; Raimon CASELLAS, “París Artístico. VI: James Mac Neill Whistler”, La Vanguardia, 1 June 1893.

15 Irene GRAS VALERO, El decadentisme a Catalunya..., op. cit., p. 143.

16 Raimon CASELLAS, “Exposición General de Bellas Artes. III: Los pintores de la naturaleza (Del paisaje luminista al whistleriano)”, La Vanguardia, 24 May 1894.

17 Josep C. LAPLANA, Santiago Rusiñol: el pintor, l’home, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1995, p. 144.

18 As Eliseu Trenc points out, the influence Raphaël Collin, Brull’s teacher during his formative years in Paris, was crucial for the artist’s evolution towards French influenced Symbolism [Eliseu TRENC, “Joan Brull, pintor de realitats i somnis”, in Joan Brull: realitat i somni, Girona, Fundació Caixa Girona, 2009, pp. 11-23, see p. 27].

19 Raimon CASELLAS, “XIV Exposición Extraordinaria del Salón Parés”, La Vanguardia, 24 January 1897.

20 The title of an essay by Cesare Lombroso published in 1864.

21 Its fifth edition, in fact, published in 1888, would be entitled: L’Uomo di Genio in rapporto alla pschiatria alla storia ed all’estetica. Years later, the author discussed these ideas in greater depth in Genio e degenerazione (1897).

22 The aforementioned essay was translated into French in 1894 entitled Dégénérescence, and, the following year, into English, as Degeneration. The Spanish translation, used in this study, came later, in 1902: Max NORDAU, Degeneración, 2 vol., Madrid, Bookshop of Fernando Fé, 1902.

23 Max NORDAU, Degeneración, vol. I, op. cit., p. 51.

24 Ibid., pp. 90-91.

25 Ibid., p. 110.

26 Émile LAURENT, La poésie décadente devant la science psychiatrique, Paris, Alexandre Maloine, éditeur, 1897, p. 35.

27 Max NORDAU, Degeneración, vol. I, op. cit., pp. 4-5.

28 According to the theories of Benedict-Augustin Morel, “les dégénérations sont les déviations maladives du type normal de l’humanité héréditairement transmissibles et évoluant progressivement vers la déchéance”. Quoted in Laura BOSSI, “Mélanconie et dégénérescence”, in Mélancolie. Génie et folie en Occident, Paris, Gallimard / Réunion des musées nationaux, 2005, pp. 398-411; see p. 399.

29 Quoted in Karl E. BECKSON, London in the 1890’s: a Cultural History, New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1992, p. 64. Other studies published on the subject would be: Études sur la sélection dans ses rapports avec l´héredité (1881), by Doctor Paul Jacoby; La famille névropathique (1884), by Doctor Charles Féré; or “Des héréditaires dégénérés”, collected in Recherches sur les Centres nerveux (1893), by Doctor Valentin Magnan.

30 Pompeu GENER, Literaturas malsanas. Estudios de patología contemporánea, Madrid, Fernando Fé, 1894. The links between this work and that of Nordau are clear, in structure and content, and this led Gener to be accused of plagiarism at the time [see: Consuelo TRIVIÑO, Pompeu Gener y el modernismo, Madrid, Verbum, 2000, p. 9]. The Catalan author, in the last chapter of this study, entitled “Terapéutica estética”, in fact refers to the above-mentioned French translation of Nordau’s work, knowledge of which did not come him directly, as he says, but through the critical studies published in various French journals. Once he had made this clarification, Gener devoted himself principally to casting doubt on some of Nordau’s essential postulates, as he was to do again in the foreword to the 4th edition, published in Barcelona by Fernando Seix in 1899, above all in reference to the condemnation of Friedrich Nietzsche by the German writer.

31 Indeed, in the first edition of Amigos y maestros, published a few years later, Gener confesses to having felt obliged to write his Literaturas malsanas in order to oppose “decadence, pessimism, nihilism and other depressive, sick and deadly tendencies, that the self-styled modernists hoped to introduce [...] as the last word in Art and spiritual Philosophy” (Pompeu GENER, Amigos y maestros. Contribución al estudio del espíritu humano á ﬁnales del siglo XIX, Madrid, Fernando Fé, 1897, p. 344).

32 Pompeu GENER, Literaturas malsanas, op. cit., pp. 209-210. As the author argues, “the brain, in its grey matter, not only receives stimuli from outside, they also come to it from the depth of the organization, from the different organs, the nerves, the nerve centres, such as the medulla, the cerebellum, the sympathetic; and if these centres malfunction, all representative life is falsified”. p. 241.

33 Ibid., p. 232.

34 Charles BAUDELAIRE, “Correspondances”, in Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris, Poulet-Malassis & de Broise, 1857, p. 19.

35 Pompeu GENER, Literaturas malsanas, op. cit., p. 210.

36 Ibid,, p. 242.

37 Josep FALP I PLANA, “La poesia (?) decadentista”, L’Atlàntida, 15 August 1896, pp. 6-9.

38 Pompeu GENER, Literaturas malsanas, op. cit., p. 384.

The discovery of The White Island

1 He published the articles about L’illa de la calma in L’Esquella de la Torratxa during that year, 1912. Rusiñol had very close ties with Majorca. He had been periodically visiting the island since 1893. His output in and around Majorca, both pictorial and literary, was fruitful.

2 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Iviça”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 28 February 1913, p. 152.

3 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Iviça”, op. cit., p. 152.

4 Ibid.

5 Salvador BONAVIA, “Els nostres artistes en la intimitat. Santiago Rusiñol”, El Teatre Català, vol. II, no. 58, 5 April 1913, p. 224.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “La Badia”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 7 March 1913, p. 168.

10 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Iviça”, op. cit., p. 152.

11 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “La Badia”, op. cit., p. 168.

12 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “La Badia”, op. cit., p. 168.

13 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “La Badia”, op. cit., p. 168.

14 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “L’illa interior”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 14 March 1913, p. 182.

15 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “L’illa interior”, op. cit., p. 182.

16 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “L’illa interior”, op. cit., p. 183.

17 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “L’illa interior”, op. cit., p. 183.

18 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Els escavadors”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 21 March 1913, p. 201.

19 This commentary has to be understood in the context of Ibiza in that period. That year, 1913, the archaeological scene on Ibiza witnessed a curious event that ended up with the State being taken to court, namely, the Archaeological Museum of Ibiza and Antonio Vives, a lecturer in Numismatics and a member of the Academy of History in Madrid.

20 M. RODRÍGUEZ CODOLA. “El alma del “Cau Ferrat””, Museum, vol. V, No. 1, pp. 41-43.

21 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Els murs d’Iviça”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 4 April 1913, p. 230.

22 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Els murs d’Iviça”, op. cit., p. 230.

23 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Els murs d’Iviça”, op. cit., p. 230.

24 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Els murs d’Iviça”, op. cit., p. 230.

25 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Els ivicencs”, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 18 May 1913, p. 280.

26 A cry that was made in the countryside for different purposes: it was a greeting, a threat, a joke … accompanied by laughter.

27 Santiago RUSIÑOL, “Els ivicencs”, op. cit., p. 280.

28 “Huésped ilustre”, Heraldo de Ibiza, 1 September 1912, p. 1.

29 Santiago RUSIÑOL. “Iviça”, op. cit., p. 152.

“Oh, worker, worker poet!”. An overview of the concept of nature based on the literary work of Ignasi Iglésias

1 Moreover, the history of Catalan theatre has been presented as a generic study by few authors. Even so, we should mention Històries del teatre català by Francesc Curet, Xavier Fàbregas, Francesc Massip and Josep Maria Sala Valldaura.

2 Although a volume was published posthumously, entitled Llibre d’or a Ignasi Iglésias, with various authors who have prefaced our author, and which has been very helpful for finding the keys to his dramatic, lyrical and narrative work. See the Llibre d’or a Ignasi Iglésias, Barcelona, Gràﬁques Ribera, 1935.

3 Ricard SALVAT, Teatre modern i contemporani, Barcelona, Institut del Teatre, 2010, p. 67.

4 Xavier FÀBREGAS, Història del teatre català, Barcelona, Milà Press, 1975, p. 124.

5 I am referring here to the story El vell carrilaire (The Old Railwayman), about which I shall not speak in this chapter, but I would like to mention it in the near future. It is a story in which the main character is an engine driver who has been forced to retire and as a consequence of that he complains, saying that he is still fit to work. Llibre d’or..., op. cit., p. 123.

6 Ibid., p. 19.

7 Ibid, p. 81. See also the foreword by Joan Maragall included in Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, Els vells: drama en tres actes, Barcelona, Fèlix Costa printer, undated, p. 9.

8 Martí FONT, “Els primers temps d’Ignasi Iglésias”, in Llibre d’or..., op. cit, p. 19.

9 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, Ofrenes: Poesies, Barcelona, Tip. L’Avenç, 1902, p. 12.

10 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, Infants i ﬂors, Barcelona, Joan Coma press, 1917. “Elogi als ocells”, from the book of poems Flors de Tendresa.

11 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, Les garses: comèdia en tres actes, Barcelona, L’Avenç, 1906.

12 For thematic reasons, I shall only discuss the first two phases, in which we clearly see this contrast between nature and the city.

13 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, Els Emigrants: drama en tres actes, sine loco, sine datum, 1929. Foreword by Ambrosi Carrion.

14 Joan MARAGALL, “Pròleg”, op. cit., p. 23.

15 Adrià GUAL, Mitja vida de teatre, Barcelona, Aedos, 1960, p. 119.

16 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, Els conscients, II, 2, Barcelona, Mentora, 1936, p. 64 et seq.

17 Ibid., III, 3, p. 65.

18 Ibid., IV, 3, p. 85.

19 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS. L’escorçó, Barcelona, Mentora, 1935.

20 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, L’alosa: La fal·lera de l’amor, Barcelona, Mentora, 1932, p. 53.

21 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, El cor del poble, I, 2, Barcelona, Mentora, 1932, p. 93.

22 Martí FONT, “Els primers temps d’Ignasi Iglésias”, op. cit., p. 27.

23 Ignasi IGLÉSIAS, Seleccions, Barcelona, Mentora, 1936.

24 Gabriel ALOMAR, “Ignasi Iglésias”, in Llibre d’or..., op. cit., p. 28.

The pedagogical notebooks of Enric Giménez i Lloberas

1 I include a chronological biography at the end of the article.

2 Carles BATLLE, Isidre Bravo and Jordi Coca, Adrià Gual. Mitja vida de modernisme, Barcelona, Diputació de Barcelona, 1992, pp. 111 and 237.

3 Hermann BONNÍN, Adrià Gual i l’Escola Catalana d’Art Dramàtic (1913-1923), Barcelona, Rafael Dalmau Editor, 1974.

4 Enric CIURANS, Adrià Gual, Barcelona, Inﬁesta, coll. “Gent Nostra”, No. 123, 2001.

5 Antonina RODRIGO, Margarita Xirgu, Barcelona, Flor del Viento, 2005.

6 https://sites.google.com/site/tombantdesegle/enric-gimenez [consulted: 11/11/2013].

7 Adrià Gual Collection, press, album 4, p. 68.

8 Antoni Tutau (1844-1898) was the introducer of the new trends of naturalist performance; in 1884 he premiered in Barcelona the Catalan adaptation of Zola’s L’assommoir.

9 Adrià GUAL, Mitja vida de teatre. Memòries, Barcelona, Gredos, pp. 84-86.

10 Adrià Gual Collection, “El Vieux Colombier”, La Veu de Catalunya, 25 October 1924, press, album 2, p. 4.

11 Ricard SALVAT, “La creació del llenguatge de la posada en escena a Catalunya en el context internacional de ﬁnals del segle xix i la primeria del xx”. Speech upon his admission to the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi, Sant Sandurní d’Anoia, Barcelona, Printed by Gráﬁcas Llopart, 2004, p. 33.

12 Ricard SALVAT, “La creació del llenguatge de la posada en escena a Catalunya en el context internacional de ﬁnals del segle XIX i la primeria del XX”, op. cit., p. 13.

13 Carles BATLLE, Adrià Gual (1891-1902): per un teatre simbolista, Barcelona, Diputació de Barcelona and Curial, 2001, p. 203.

14 Ricard SALVAT, “La creació del llenguatge de la posada en escena a Catalunya en el context internacional de ﬁnals del segle XIX i la primeria del XX”, op. cit., p. 45.

15 Assaig de Teatre, Nos. 18-19-20, December 1999, p. 137.

16 Pedagogical texts by Enric Giménez published in the journal Assaig de Teatre: “Nocions de direcció” (Assaig de Teatre, Nos. 18-19-20, December 1999, pp. 137-142. Republished in No. 32); “Estètica. Exercicis 5è i 6è. Primer curs” (Assaig de Teatre, No. 26-27, March-June 2001, pp. 207-228); “Impostación y emisión de la voz. Ejercicio 7.º Primer curso” and “Del gesto en general. Ejercicio 8.º Primer curso” (Assaig de Teatre, No. 28, July-September 2001, pp. 131-139); “Ejemplo de estudio de un personaje. Ejercicio 3. Segundo curso” (Assaig de Teatre, Nos. 29-30-31, December 2001, pp. 225-228); “Nocions de direcció. Exercici 8è Segon curs”, “Reproducción de casos patológicos en escena” and “Formas teatrales” (Assaig de Teatre, No. 32, June 2002, pp. 153-165).

17 Enrique GIMÉNEZ, “Las enseñanzas del actor en el Instituto del Teatro Nacional de Barcelona”, in Tercer Congreso Internacional del Teatro. Estudios y comunicaciones, Barcelona, Publicaciones del Instituto del Teatro Nacional, book one, September 1929, pp. 151-163.

18 Exercises 1, 2, 3 and 4 are unpublished; exercises 5, 6, 7 and 8 were published in the journal Assaig de Teatre; see note 16.

19 Enrique GIMÉNEZ, “Las enseñanzas del actor en el Instituto del Teatro Nacional de Barcelona”, op. cit., pp. 159-163.

20 José Antonio SÁNCHEZ (ed.), “La danza del futuro”, in El arte de la danza y otros escritos. Isadora Duncan, Madrid, Akal, 2003, p. 55.

21 Francesc ESPINET I BURUNAT, Notícia, imatge, simulacre: la recepció de la societat de comunicació de masses a Catalunya, de 1888 a 1939, Barcelona, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions, 1997, p. 244.

22 The data are being completed.

PLANTS AND ANIMALS

Methods of application and catalogues for Modernista floral decoration

1 Flowers, indeed, have always inspired; and, in the splendid periods of art, they have even been contemplated from the emblematic point of view, as well as with regard to their infinite geometric combinations and the magnificent decorative element they are.

2 On ornamentation, see: Stuart DURANT, La ornamentación. De la Revolución Industrial a nuestros días, Madrid, Alianza, 1991; Hélène GUÉNÉ, “El papel del ornamento tanto en la arquitectura como en su decoración, de la época clásica a los inicios del modernismo”, in Gaudí. Arte y Diseño, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona, Fundació Caixa Catalunya and Taller Editorial Mateu, 2002, pp. 25-37; Hélène GUÉNÉ, “Le renouvellement du répertoire décoratif: grammaire et syntaxe”, in La perception de l’Art Nouveau, International symposium Art Nouveau & Ecologie, Brussels, 4-5 December 2010 (online), www.artnouveau-net.eu/portals/0/colloquia/Bruxelles_Helene_Guene_03052011.pdf [consulted: 10/05/2011]; Teresa-M. SALA, “La máscara y el rostro: el debate en torno al ornamento. La búsqueda de la simplicidad y el mito del mediterráneo”, in Actas del XI Congreso del CEHA. El Mediterráneo y el Arte Español, Valencia, Generalitat Valenciana. Direcció General del Patrimoni, 1998, pp. 250-254.

3 This text is the result of the research carried out for my doctoral thesis Ornamentació vegetal i arquitectures de l’oci a la Barcelona del 1900, directed by Teresa-M. Sala, Barcelona, University of Barcelona, 2012.

4 For this work, see: Gustave SOULIER, “La plante et ses applications ornementales”, Revue des Arts Décoratifs. Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, 1900, pp. 93-96.

5 A simple glance at the ornamental art of all periods will be enough to convince ourselves that the plant has always been used in decorative art. Maurice PILLARD VERNEUIL, Etude de la Plante. Son application aux industries d’art: pochoir. Papier peint. Étoffes. Céramique. Marqueterie. Tapis. Ferronnerie. Reliure. Dentelles. Broderies. Vitrail. Mosaïque. Bijouterie. Bronze. Orfévrerie, Paris, Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, 1908, p. 1.

6 Julius MEIER, “Ornement ﬂoral, ornement linéaire”, L’Art Décoratif. Revue Internationale d’Art industriel et de décoration, No. 11, August 1899, pp. 234-236.

7 In the translation into Spanish, see the study: Raimon AROLA, “La tradición al servicio del arte. El arte al servicio de la tradición”, in Maurice Pillard Verneuil, Diccionario de símbolos, emblemas y alegorías, Barcelona, Obelisco, 1998, pp. 7-10.

8 For specific research on the dictionary, see: Fàtima LÓPEZ, “Dictionnaire des symboles, emblèmes & attributs (Paris, 1897) by Maurice Pillard Verneuil: El simbolismo dispuesto a la ornamentación Art Nouveau, in IX Congreso Internacional de la Sociedad Española de Emblemática. Conﬂuencia de la imagen y la palabra. Emblemática y artiﬁcio retórico, Malaga, University of Malaga, 25-27 September 2013 (publication in progress).

The study of the Modernista bestiary: notes for a first approach

1 Raimon CASELLAS, “La intrusa. Dama de Mauricio Maeterlinck”, La Vanguardia, 8 September 1893, p. 4.

2 See Béatrice GRANDORDY, Charles Darwin et “l’Évolution” dans les arts plastiques de 1859 à 1914, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2012.

3 Carl Gustav JUNG, Métamorphoses de l’âme et ses symboles, Geneva, Georg et Cie, 1973.

4 Raimon AROLA, “El pensamiento simbólico”, in El símbolo renovado, Barcelona, Herder, 2013.

5 Sacred or divine beasts that Herodotus describes in History, complete work, edition Manuel Balasch, Madrid, Cátedra, 2004.

6 The works he wrote are the following: De partivus animalium, Historia animalium, De generatione animalium, De animalium motione, De animalium incesu and De anima. From their publication in 1476 in Venice, the translations and commented editions of the classics in the age of humanism gave his legacy new momentum. See Història dels animals, vols. I, II and III, transl. Juli Pallí, Barcelona, Bernat Metge collection, Nos. 295, 296 and 297, republished in 1996.

7 He devotes four books to zoology, from VIII to XI, in which he talks about land, aquatic and flying animals and insects. With the printed publication of 1469 it reached a much larger public.

8 Manuscript written in Greek by an unknown author. It contains a series of different descriptions of animals, fantastic creatures, plants and rocks, with moral sentences and symbolic qualities. It was the precursor of the medieval bestiaries.

9 So the medieval bestiaries were a compendium of beasts that told people how to behave.

10 The publication comprised a foreword, bibliographical notes and a glossary by the Majorcan Llullist Mateu Obrador Bennàssar in the L’Avenç Popular Library, Barcelona, L’Avenç, 1905.

11 Ernst GOMBRICH, El sentido de orden. Estudio sobre la psicología de las artes decorativas, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1980 (1979).

12 See Stuart DURANT, La ornamentación. De la Revolución Industrial a nuestros días, Madrid, Alianza, 1991.

13 See the study by Raimon AROLA, “La tradición al servicio del arte. El arte al servicio de la tradición”, in Maurice Pillard Verneuil, Diccionario de símbolos, emblemas y alegorías, Barcelona, Obelisco, 1998 (1897), pp. 7-10.

14 Maurice PILLARD VERNEUIL, with an introduction by E. Grasset, Paris, Lib. Centrale des Beaux Arts-ed. Lévy, 1898.

15 See Helen BIERI, Maurice Pillard-Verneuil, artiste décorateur de l’Art nouveau, Paris, Somogy, 2000.

16 George R. COLLINS, “Introducció”, in Rosemarie Bletter, El arquitecto Josep Vilaseca i Casanovas. Sus obras y dibujos, Barcelona, COACB-La Gaya Ciencia, 1977.

17 See Pere GABRIEL, “En temps de burgesos, professionals i obrers. La difícil i contradictòria construcció d’una Catalunya urbana i europea, 1875-1910”, in Lina Ubero (coord.), Gaudí i Verdaguer: tradició i modernitat a la Barcelona del canvi de segle, 1878-1912, Barcelona, MHCB, 2012, pp. 31-53.

18 Antoni GAUDÍ, Escritos y documentos, ed. Laura Mercader, Barcelona, El Acantilado, 2002, p. 42.

19 History, Book II, Ch. LXXIII, Barcelona, La Magrana, 2003.

20 OVID, The Metamorphoses, VII-XV, translation and notes by Ferran Aguilera i Puentes, Barcelona, La Magrana, 2012, pp. 319-320.

21 Narcís FELIU DE LA PENYA, Fénix de Cataluña, compendio de sus antiguas grandezas y medios para renovarlas, Barcelona, Rafael Figueró, 1683.

22 Teresa-M. SALA, “Anàlisi de l’ornamentació del Manicomi de Reus”, in L’Institut Pere Mata de Reus, Reus, Pragma, 2004, pp. 110-117.

23 However, in the hermetic bestiary, “the Phoenix symbolizes the Putrefaction of the philosopher’s stone and Multiplication”. See Manuel BARBERO, Iconografía animal: la representación animal en libros europeos de Historia Natural de los siglos XVI y XVII, vol. I, Conca, Ediciones de la University of Castilla-La Mancha, 1999, p. 87.

24 See Juan José LAHUERTA, Antoni Gaudí. Arquitectura, ideología y política, Madrid, Electa, 1993.

25 On one hand, we can see the influence of E. W. Godwin and some of his designs, such as those for fabrics with the Japanese phoenix, taken from manuals published in Japan. And it is also interesting to point out how Viollet-le-Duc, in Histoire d’une maison, Paris, Hetzel, 1873, also reproduces a plate drawn for the dining room wallpaper with cranes, plants and animals inspired by a Japanese source.

26 Original drawn by the architect conserved by the Güell family.

27 Cover of the humorous magazine Cu-cut (Barcelona, 1912), which brought about its closure.

28 As Joan AMADES says in Gegants, nans i altres entremesos, Barcelona, Neotípia, 1934, pp. 167 and 188.

29 At Passeig de Gràcia, 66.

30 I have made a detailed study about the piece for the DHUB catalogue, and in it I analyse in detail the symbolic presence of other beasts (at press).

31 L’Esquella de la Torratxa (Barcelona, 23 February 1889).

32 See Santiago ALCOLEA, “Antoni Amatller Costa (1851-1910)”, in El museu domèstic. Un recorregut per les fotograﬁes d’Antoni Amatller, Barcelona, Fundació La Caixa, 2002, p. 31.

33 Santiago MASFERRER, Apel·les Mestres, Quaderns Blaus, Barcelona, Catalònia bookshop, sine data, p. 56.

34 Ibid., p. 56.

35 Dated “I Janvier de 1889”. See Apel·les Mestres (1854-1936), Barcelona, Fundació Jaume I, 1985, p. 73.

36 Santiago MASFERRER, Apel·les Mestres, op. cit., p. 40.

37 Ibid, p. 54.

38 Reproduced in Teresa-M. SALA, El modernisme, Manresa, Angle, 2008, p. 237.

39 Alexandre CIRICI, El arte modernista catalán, Barcelona, Aymà, 1951, p. 8.

40 A work that is part of a group conserved in the MNAC.

41 Reproduced in Japonisme. La fascinació per l’art japonès, Barcelona, La Caixa, 2013, p. 169.

42 Segon de CHOMON, Les papillons japonais, Paris, Pathé, 1908.

43 The interpretation proposed by Juan Antonio RAMÍREZ in La metáfora de la colmena. De Gaudí a Le Corbusier is very interesting, Madrid, Siruela, 1998. In this book, see the article by Jordi Coca about Maurice Maeterlinck’s book The Life of the Bee.

44 Reproduced in Teresa-M. SALA, El modernisme, op. cit., p. 236.

45 The proverb says, as Bonaventura Bassegoda Amigó says in “Cuestiones Artísticas. El arte en el Círculo del Liceo”, Diario de Barcelona, 2 July 1902: “He who gives courtesy, doubles courtesy” and “Largesse due to great gifts is noble”.

46 See Santi BARJAU and Víctor OLIVA, Barcelona. Art i aventura del llibre. La impremta Oliva de Vilanova, Barcelona, Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2002.

47 In the process of being studied for a future monographic publication about the building for the Lluís Domènech i Montaner Foundation.

Animals in Modernista sgraffiti

1 The 18th-century sgrafiiti in Barcelona have been the subject of studies by several authors, the first and most complete of which was by Ramon Nonat COMAS, “Datos para la historia del Esgraﬁado en Barcelona”, in La Via Layetana, Barcelona, Ajuntament Constitucional de Barcelona, Imp. Atles Geográﬁch, 1913, pp. 137-270. Since then the following have been published: José M. GARRUT, “El esgraﬁado en la arquitectura barcelonesa”, Ibérica, No. 396, 1959, pp. 179-186; Ramon PUJOL ALSINA, “Esgraﬁats i terres cuites de Barcelona”, Muntanya, No. 708, 1980, pp. 10-13.

2 A few interesting articles have been published about the technique of Modernista sgraffiti in Barcelona, although this writer is preparing a monographic study on the subject, with the relevant cataloguing of the works. For the moment, see Rosa PALOMAS PRAT, “L’esgraﬁat en l’arquitectura de Barcelona”, Habitatge, 2 April 1985, pp. 55-59; Teresa MACIÀ, “Paraments i revestiments en l’arquitectura modernista”, in El modernisme. A l’entorn de l’arquitectura, Barcelona, L’Isard, 2003, pp. 295-303; Maribel ROSSELLÓ, “El revestiment de les façanes des de les darreries del segle XVIII ﬁns al modernisme: materials i tècniques”, in Fernando Iglesias (dir.), Restauració de façanes històriques, Barcelona, COAC, 2006, pp. 22-28.

3 Sgraffito as an artistic technique has been dealt with in Catalonia in the following publications: Marià CASAS, Esgraﬁats, Tarragona, Publicacions del Col·legi d’Aparelladors i Arquitectes Tècnics de Tarragona, 1983; Jaume ESPUGA, Esgraﬁats i estucats: passat i present. Anàlisi i perspectives de la tècnica i procediments, Barcelona, unpublished doctoral thesis, Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona, 1990; J. ESPUGA, Delﬁna BERASATEGUI and Vicenç GIBERT, Esgraﬁats. Teoria i pràctica, Barcelona, Edicions UPC, 2000.

4 Sgraffiti artists are usually called stucco-plasterers, although we also find decorative painters specializing in this technique. Romeu i Casadevall, Paradís i Figueras, and Pi i Feu are Barcelona workshops that specialized in this type of decoration during Modernisme.

5 We must bear in mind that the period we are looking at is that of the constructive consolidation of the Barcelona district of L’Eixample, one of the urban centres where we find the most outstanding programmes of sgraffitoed ﬂora and fauna. Other parts of the city, such as Ciutat Vella, Gràcia, Sants or Sant Andreu, were also important with regard to the contribution of sgraffiti conceived monumentally on buildings.

6 As Professor Enric Ciurans points out, the Modernista bestiary is made up of three sub-groups: the common bestiary (horse, dog, cat, bear, ass, large mule, ox, etc.), the imaginary bestiary (dragon, phoenix, víbria, tarasque, etc.), and the solemn bestiary (eagle and lion). On this subject, see also Salvador PALOMAR and Ferran SUGRANYES, Bestiari fantàstic, Reus, Carrutxa, 2010.

7 Casa Manuel Llopis Boﬁll stands at Carrer de València, 339, in Barcelona.

8 Casa Jaume Petit stands at Carrer de Floridablanca, 115-117 – Carrer del Comte d’Urgell, 32-34, in Barcelona.

9 The Fonda España in Barcelona is a building built in the mid nineteenth century, opened to the public for the first time in 1859. Between 1898 and 1903, its interiors were refurbished according to the project by Domènech i Montaner, who gave the installations a new décor in keeping with Modernista tastes. On the history and the artistic and architectural characteristics of the Fonda España, see Manuel GARCÍA-MARTÍN, Fonda España, Barcelona, Catalana de Gas, 1991.

10 The case of the guests’ dining room in the Fonda España, known as the Saló de les Sirenes (Mermaids’ Lounge), and its decorative programme based on sgraffiti representing a seabed, mentioned earlier by Teresa-M. Sala, is a case too extensive for an article such as this. For this reason, I have decided not to include it in the cases I have commented on.

11 It is interesting to mention that the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner was throughout his professional career extremely interested in heraldry, and he even gave some lectures on the subject.

12 Casa Joan Casals stands at Carrer de la Diputació, 167, in Barcelona, designed by the architect Modest Fossas Pi.

13 J. K. ROWLING, Bèsties fantàstiques i on trobar-les, Barcelona, Empúries, 2001, p. 29.

14 Casa Miquel Call Millàs stands at Carrer de Verdi, 7 – Carrer de Vallfogona, 18, in Barcelona, designed by the architect Joan Marsant Solà See the Catàleg del Patrimoni arquitectònic i històrico-artístic de la ciutat de Barcelona, ID number 2699, online service.

15 An unusual fact is that among the different “domestic” animals strangely we do not find the figure of the dog, so close to man.

16 Outside the big city we could mention the two fantastic serpents on the façade of Casa Sagarra (1908), in Reus, by the architect Pere Caselles; or the marshland with ducks and herons in the entrance hall of Casa Joaquim Coll i Regàs (1897), in Mataró, by Josep Puig i Cadafalch.

Nature in miniature: From Noah’s Ark to the teddy bear

1 I take the information from Carlota MARZO, “Buscat per internet l’amo d’un ós de peluix de la Primera Guerra Mundial”, El Periódico, 6 June 2013. See: www.elperiodico.cat/ca/noticias/xarxes/campanya-facebook-amo1908-bristol-2411031 [consulted: 20/11/2013].

2 When I started writing this article, the Bristol Airport press chief, Jacqui Mills, informed me in the email received on 19 November 2013 that the toy was in her office waiting for its owners to be found. A month later, the media announced that the owner had appeared. See Michael RIBBECK, “Mystery of antique bear found at Bristol Airport is ﬁnally solved”, Bristol Post, 29 January 2014. See: www.bristolpost.co.uk/Mystery-antique-bear-Bristol-Airport-finally/story-20519564-detail/story.html [consulted: 06/04/2014].

3 Robert Baker is the son of Glyn Baker and the nephew of Dora Baker, the children in the photograph. The picture was sent to their father, Nicholas Baker, stationed in Baghdad during the First World War. It was the last picture he would see of his children, as he died of malaria a few months after receiving it. His wife, Elsie Evelyn Norman, had the teddy bear included in the photograph to make it clear, despite the war, that the children’s happiness had not been interrupted. Robert Baker inherited the bear from his aunt Dora. In January 2012, he decided to take it with him to his home in Cyprus. Michael RIBBECK, “Mystery of antique bear found at Bristol Airport is ﬁnally solved”, op. cit.

4 Michel MANSON, Jouets de toujours, Paris, Fayard, 2001, pp. 109-111 and 138-141.

5 Pere CAPELLÀ SIMÓ, “Les joguines i les seves imatges en temps del modernisme. Barcelona-Palma i el model de París”, doctoral thesis directed by Teresa-M. Sala and Jaume Córdoba, Barcelona, University of Barcelona, 2012, p. 115.

6 The Latin form natura comes from the contraction of natus (participle of the verb nasci, ‘to be born’) and the suffix -ura (activity or result of). Therefore, we note that etymologically speaking nature does not refer to all the things created, but to the actual effect of being born. Joan COROMINES, Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana, vol. 5, Barcelona, Curial, 1985, pp. 904-905.

7 I record the image in the article by Monica BURCKHARDT, “À l’origine, l’arche de Noé”, in Bateaux jouets 1850-1950, Paris, Musée nationale de la Marine, 2007, p. 48.

8 Charles DICKENS, “A Christmas Tree”, in Great Expectations, London, Chapman & Hall, 1868, p. 310.

9 Paul César HELLEU, Mère brodant avec un petit garçon (sine data), drypoint, Bayonne, Musée Bonnat.

10 John Everett MILLAIS, Peace Concluded (1856), oil on canvas, 116.4 x 91.44 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

11 See El Siglo. Órgano de los Grandes Almacenes de este Título, 30 December 1886, No. 117, p. 658 and El Siglo. Temporada de Verano de 1894, Barcelona, Henrich y C.ª, 1894, p. 76.

12 See Noah’s Ark (c. 1900), wood, 10 x 18 cm, Paris, les Arts Décoratifs (Inv. No. 55685.2) and Noah’s Ark (c. 1880), wood, 29 × 63 cm, Paris, les Arts Décoratifs (Inv. No. 995.66.2.1-126).

13 According to the Bible story, God said to Noah: “So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.” In “Genesis (chapter 6; verses 14-16)”, in The Bible, Andorra, Casal i Vall, 1985, p. 27.

14 Monica BURCKHARDT, “À l’origine, l’arche de Noé”, op. cit., p. 51.

15 Pere CAPELLÀ SIMÓ, “La Compañía del Éden-Bébé en la Barcelona de 1900”, Scripta Nova, No. 447, 10 August 2013. See: www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-447.htm [consulted: 20/11/2013].

16 Grandes Almacenes El Siglo, Barcelona, La Académica, 1910, p. 70.

17 Lluïsa VIDAL, Marcel de Montoliu i Vidal, the Painter’s Nephew (c. 1906), oil on canvas, 44 x 50 cm, private collection.

18 NAPOLEON, Children’s portraits (1860-1880), photographs, 9.5 x 5.8 cm, Museu Frederic Marès (Inv. No. MFM. S-6254).

19 Juan Eduardo CIRLOT, Diccionario de símbolos, Barcelona, Siruela, 1997, p. 150.

20 See an example of a lamb (c. 1894). Papier-mâché, wool, metal, 25 cm, Palma, Ton Boig Clar Collection / Museu de sa Jugueta (Inv. No. 2617).

21 Grandes Almacenes..., op. cit., p. 67.

22 El Siglo. Temporada..., op. cit., p. 76.

23 Joaquim VAYREDA, La terrassa (c. 1891), oil on canvas, 62.5 × 115.5 cm, Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

24 Apel·les MESTRES and Domènec MAS SERRACANT, Cansons per la mainada, Barcelona, Musical Emporium, sine data, p. 38.

25 Gabriel ALOMAR, “El Ram”, La Roqueta, No. 312, 7 April 1900, pp. 1-2.

26 The portrait appears reproduced in Josep CORREDOR-MATHEOS, La joguina a Catalunya, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1981, p. 72.

27 Pere CAPELLÀ SIMÓ, La ciutat de les joguines. Barcelona, 1840-1918, Maçanet de la Selva, Gregal, 2013, pp. 277 and 299-301.

28 See an example of a horse tricycle (c. 1890), wood, iron, esparto grass and leather, 90 cm, Palma, Ton Boig Clar Collection / Museu de sa Jugueta.

29 NAPOLEON, Portrait of Josep Maria d’Alós i de Dou (c. 1870). Photograph, 10.3 x 6 cm, Barcelona, Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

30 Luciano GARCÍA DEL REAL, “Notas útils”, La Ilustració Catalana, No. 153, 30 November 1886, p. 447.

31 Philipp BLOM, Años de vértigo. Cultura y cambio en Occidente, 1900-1914, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2010 [London, 2008].

32 Pere CAPELLÀ SIMÓ, La ciutat de les joguines, op. cit., p. 265.

33 Christian BAILLY, L’âge d’Or des Automates, 1848-1914, Paris, Ars Mundi, 1991 [London, 1987], pp. 229-351.

34 Carme KARR, “Els reys d’en Marianet”, Joventut, No. 153, 15 January 1903, pp. 50-51.

35 Frederic BALLELL, El zoo (1913). Photomontage, Barcelona, Arxiu Fotogràﬁc de Barcelona (Inv. No. bcn003538).

36 Unknown author, Zoo (1900-1910). Photograph, Barcelona, Arxiu Fotogràﬁc de Barcelona (Inv. No. bcn002036).

37 Tiger (c. 1910), papier-mâché, wood and metal, 60 cm, Palma, Ton Boig Clar Collection / Museu de sa Jugueta.

38 Michel PASTOUREAU, El oso. Historia de un rey destronado, Barcelona, Paidós, 2007 [Paris, 2007], pp. 279-280. For more information, see the monograph by Günther PHEIFFER, The Story of the Steiff Teddy Bear: An Illustrated History from 1902, Newton Abbot, David & Charles Publishers, 2003.

39 I take this version from Michel PASTOUREAU, El oso, op. cit., pp. 278-279. To consult other interpretations of this story, see the article by Donna VARGA, “Gifting the Bear and a Nostalgic Desire for Childhood Innocence”, Cultural Analysis, vol. 6, 2009, pp. 71-96.

40 Henry HAMELLE, Exposition internationale de Saint Louis (USA) 1904. Rapport général, vol. 2, Paris, Comité français des expositions à l’étranger, p. 107.

41 Bernd BRUNNER, Bears: A Brief History, Yale, Yale University, 2007 [Berlin, 2005], p. 216.

42 Anke FISSABRE and Bernhardt NIETHAMMER, “The Invention of Glazed Curtain Wall in 1903: The Steiff Toy Factory”, in Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Construction History, Cottbus, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus, 2009.

43 Kathy MARTIN, Farnell Teddy Bears, South Yorkshire, Pen & Sword Books Ltd., 2010.

44 Pere CAPELLÀ SIMÓ, “Les joguines i les seves imatges en temps del modernisme”, op. cit., pp. 868-873.

45 In 1919, Frederic Barceló became the director of the Fira de Mostres, a post he held until his death in 1952. See his obituary in La Vanguardia, 4 January 1952, p. 13.

46 See two illustrated reports about the company published respectively in the following catalogues: Catálogo de la V Exposición-Feria en Barcelona de Juguetes y Artículos de Bazar, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1918, pp. 86-87; Catálogo de la VI Feria-Exposicion en Barcelona de Juguetes y Artículos de Bazar, Barcelona, Elzeveriana, 1919, p. 77.

47 See, for example, the illustrated reports by Manuel ABRIL, “Artes plásticas. La lección del juguete”, Nuevo Mundo, No. 1938, 27 November 1913, p. 7, and by Juan BALAGUER, “La ﬁlantropía, productora de una gran industria. Los muñecos de ﬁeltro”, La Esfera, No. 101, 4 December 1915, p. 29.

48 See the postcards in the Ton Boig Clar Collection / Museu de sa Jugueta: Nena amb un ós, Berlin, BBJ, c. 1913 and Nen amb un ós, Berlin, Amag, 1916.

49 Steiff, “Don osito Marquina” (1910), plush, glass and cloth, Figueres, Museu del Joguet de Catalunya (Inv. No. MHJ/F 100345).

50 Both the photograph and two handwritten letters signed by Federico García Lorca are in the Anna Maria Dalí archive conserved in the Centre de Documentació of the Museu del Joguet de Catalunya.

51 Montserrat CASTILLO, Grans il·lustradors catalans, Barcelona, Barcanova, 1997, p. 13.

52 Eva and Ivan STEIGER, Kinderträume. Spielzeug aus zwei Jahrtausenden, Munich, Prestel, 2004, p. 108.

53 See several pages of a Butler Brothers sales catalogue dated 1911: www.oldwoodtoys.com/new_page_74.htm [consulted: 20/11/2013].

54 Pere CAPELLÀ SIMÓ, “Les joguines i les seves imatges en temps del modernisme”, op. cit., pp. 141-243.

Papier-mâché animals, popular pageantry: a tribute to Xavier Fàbregas

1 Xavier FÀBREGAS and Pau BARCELÓ (photographs), Cavallers, dracs i dimonis. Itinerari a través de les festes populars, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1976.

2 Xavier FÀBREGAS, Viatge a la Catalunya fantàstica, Barcelona, Biblioteca La Vanguardia, 1984.

3 Xavier FÀBREGAS, El fons ritual de la vida quotidiana, Barcelona, Edicions 62, “Llibres a l’abast, 172”, 1987 (1982). This book won the 5th Xarxa d’Assaig Prize in 1981.

4 A biography of Odón de Buen was published some years ago to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth: Antonio CALVO ROY, Odón de Buen: toda una vida, Zaragoza, Ediciones 94, 1993.

5 On this point, see the article by Joan Lluís MARFANY, “Notes per a l’estudi de la festa a terres catalanes”, in La Festa a Catalunya. La festa com a vehicle de sociabilitat i d’expressió política, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1997, pp. 19-50, and particularly p. 24.

6 Xavier FÀBREGAS, El llibre de les bèsties: zoologia fantàstica catalana, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1983, p. 48.

7 Sir James George FRAZER, La rama dorada, Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1944, p. 783.

8 Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS, Le totemisme aujourd’hui, Paris, PUF, 1962.

9 “Pork, beef, chicken and mutton are the compulsory – and totemic – composition of the countryman’s succulent Christmas carn d’olla”. Xavier FÀBREGAS, El llibre de les bèsties..., op. cit., p. 72.

10 Ibid., p. 53.

11 Presently, the festive bestiary is the group of corporeal ﬁgures or elements that represent real or imaginary animals, reproduced faithfully or fantastically, and which have a representative, playful or protocol function in the context of the festival. There are three kinds: 1- Fantastic bestiary. Dragon, Víbria, Phoenix. 2- Ordinary light-hearted bestiary. Ox, Large mule. 3- Solemn bestiary. Eagle, Lion (Saint John and Saint Mark).

12 Agustí DURAN I SANPERE, “La festa de Corpus”, in Barcelona i la seva història. La societat i l’organització del treball, Barcelona, Curial, 1973, pp. 540-550.

13 Joan AMADES, Les millors rondalles populars catalanes, Barcelona, Selecta, 1974.

14 Francesc CURET and Lola ANGLADA, Visions barcelonines. Costums, festes i solemnitats, IX, Barcelona, Dalmau i Jover, 1957, p. 234.

15 Ibid., pp. 203-286. Especially the chapters “Bestiam de Corpus”, pp. 231-243, and “Processons en els segles XVIII and XIX”, pp. 277-286.

16 Josep ROBRENYO, La unión o la tía Secallona en las ﬁestas de Barcelona, in Celia ROMEA CASTRO, Barcelona romántica y revolucionaria. Una imagen literaria de la ciudad, década de 1833 a 1843, Barcelona, Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 1994, p. 373.

17 Quoted by Curet: Visions barcelonines..., op. cit. pp. 242-243.

18 Jaume FABRE, El Carnaval de Barcelona, Barcelona, Serveis de Cultura de l’Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1980.

19 Stéphane MICHONNEAU, Barcelona: memòria i identitat. Monuments, commemoracions i mites, Vic, Eumo and University of Vic, pp. 166-173.

20 Jordi PABLO, La Mercè Il·lustrada. Guia de la festa major de Barcelona, Tarragona, El Mèdol, 2000.

21 La Veu de Catalunya published a double-page report about “La Cavalcada Histórico, Artística y Industrial”, unsigned, La Veu de Catalunya, Barcelona, year XII, No. 1331, Saturday, 4 October 1902, pp. 4-5.

22 We can read the following on a page devoted wholly to the giants’ competition published in La Veu de Catalunya: “It was natural for the great city of Barcelona, composed of people from all the towns in Catalonia, wishing to solemnize these popular festivals of La Mercè, to begin them with a grand parade of giants from all over Catalonia. When parading along these streets they reminded the Catalans watching of the festivals in their own town or village, which they had so joyously gazed upon in the happy days of their childhood [...]. Seeing 50 giants, 8 or 10 monsters, 40 or 50 dwarves, groups, with their special costumes and music in a picturesque display suitably in proportion to the place where it was being held”, Pere PAGÈS I RUEDA, “Els gegants”, La Veu de Catalunya, Barcelona, year XII No. 1331, 28 September 1902.

23 The Festive Archive of Catalonia, which among other activities supports the dissemination of the work of the historian Xavier Fàbregas, is a body directed by Jordi Pablo since 2003 whose purpose, with 160 boxes of documents and about 40,000 images, is to study the popular culture heritage. One of its chief tasks is to reconstruct the famous civic-industrial cavalcade of la Mercè in 1902.

24 See the seven fascicles in the “Archive of Popular Traditions”, that under the direction of Valeri Serra i Boldú was published between 1927 and 1935, in which information about these pioneers of folklore studies in Catalonia was included. Curiously, the cover of the first fascicle features an illustration taken from the collection of Mossèn Lambert Botey, of a fantastic animal, but which refers to the chapbook La Fiera Malvada.

25 Joan AMADES, Gegants, nans i altres entremesos, Barcelona, La Neotípia, 1932, a work in which he devoted a chapter to “Els entremesos animals”.

26 Xavier FÀBREGAS, El llibre de les bèsties..., op. cit., p. 267.

The Maeterlinck of the flowers and the bees

1 Jonathan SPERBER, Karl Marx, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutemberg, 2013.

2 Paul GORCEIX, Littérature francophone de Belgique et de Suisse. Previous study in Fin de siècle et symbolisme en Belgique, and Maurice Maeterlinck: L’arpenteur de l’invisible, Paris, LeCri, 2005.

3 Darius DZIURZYNSKI, La réception de Maeterlinck dans la Jeune Pologne. The entire text of the essay can be consulted at www.slavica.revues.org [consulted: 10/5/2014].

4 Orlamonde is the name that Maeterlinck gave in 1935 to an old luxury hotel in Nice, a property with four hectares and a façade 600 metres long, purchased at the behest of Renée Dahon.

5 Peter SZONDI, Teoria del drama modern, Barcelona, Institut del Teatre, 1986.

6 Sigmund FREUD, Das Unheimliche, 1919. Unpublished manuscript. Bilingual text. Edition and comments by Lyonel F. Klimkiewicz, Buenos Aires, Manuel Izquierdo, 2014. In 1906 Ernst Jentsch had written an essay on the psychology of the sinister, which Freud used for inspiration.

7 George STEINER, Antigones, New York, Yale University Press, 1996.

8 Émile ZOLA, preface to La Fortune des Rougon, Madrid, Alianza, 2006.