La toile et le voile : l’art, la littérature et le sacré dans trois récits romantiques

The literature of the Romantics, in the first part of the 19th century, is steeped in religious doubt. Moreover, the sacred was a taboo yet unavoidable subject especially in novels and short stories that were considered at the time profane genres. Romantic writers exploited certain covert strategies in order to speak of the unspeak-able and touch the untouchable. They resort, for instance, to their artistic culture with its centuries of pictorial tradition that render religious figures and events more familiar and accessible. Musset’s Le Tableau d’église, Vigny’s Daphné, and Gauthier’s La Toison d’or, all bear witness to a striking (meeting) harmony between iconoclastic and/or cavalier characters and sacred works of art that focus on the Passion. All three writers interweave aesthetic contemplation with mystical communion, thus revealing a new sense of the sacred that is often ambiguous, nay, subversive. And since sacred art is not in itself sacred, it allows writers to come very close to sacrilege in order to examine the fine line between the profane and the sacred.