Title: La coupe de mystère (ou Sibylle)
Artist: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Medium: oil on paper laid down on canvas
Dimensions: 58 x 36.2 cm
Date Created: circa 1890
Description
From the mid-1880s, Odilon Redon maintained ledgers documenting each work leaving his studio. An entry for this painting records his note: “A sort of frontal sphinx-woman holding a vase of indeterminate contour; a segment of a circle in the high sky.” First exhibited in 1891 as La coupe de mystère, the work has also been titled L’offrande and Sybille. Redon’s deliberate ambiguity in the description liberates the figure from a fixed mythological source, becoming the very essence of her mystery.
She is not a traditional sphinx, yet cradles the enigma of a chalice; not a historical Sibyl, yet possesses a prophetic solemnity. Interpretations relying solely on pagan mythology overlook the chalice’s clear Christian symbolism—a motif Redon employed with increasing frequency during the 1890s. This period likely saw Redon encounter Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera whose themes of asceticism and redemption resonated deeply in France. In 1891, Redon created two lithographs of Parsifal bearing a lance, whose knightly bearing forms a deliberate counterpart to the feminine mystery of this painting.
Wagner’s libretto draws from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13th-century epic, in which the Holy Grail is carried only by the pure maiden Repanse de Schoye—”Great purity dwelt in her heart. The flesh without was a blossoming of all brightness.” La coupe de mystère almost certainly references this Grail legend, casting the young woman as a grail-maiden. The Arthurian romance tradition, as noted by scholars like Joseph Campbell, synthesizes Christian and pagan myths from Celtic, Germanic, Mediterranean, and even distant Eastern sources. In this sphinx-like icon, Redon similarly draws upon multiple traditions to forge his personal mythology, creating imagery that invites layered interpretations and reveals meaning from multiple vantage points.
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 1978 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 241 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
