verso: Le Génie Vainqueur; recto: Les Jardins d'Eleusis - a sketch

Belgian symbolism was indebted to the works of the Italian renaissance. Jean Delville’s Le Génie Vainqueur is compositionally appreciative of Michaelangelo’s (1532-1534) statue of the same name (Marble, 1534, National Museum Bargello), depicting a clean-shaven athletic youth defeating a study bearded old man. However, the fight in the present work is less corporeal and more cerebral. The Victor depicted in Delville’s work has not gained the upper hand through physical labour, but through intellectual endeavour, solving the riddle presented to him by the figure of the defeated Sphinx.

In an similar treatment of this subject, Le Génie Vainqueur (1914⁄18) Delville depicted the male figure in a similar pose, but atop a winged, garlanded female figure, flying through the sky. In the present lot, the replacement of the flying figure with a Sphinx sitting atop a plinth brings focus to the cerebral nature of the victory of Genius. To note, Delville’s second volume of poetry was titled Le Frisson du Sphinx (1897) .The large scale format work, Le Génie Vainqueur hung in the Pas Perdus room of the Palace of Justice, Brussels, opposite Delville’s monumental work Les Forces (1924).