41 - Captured Moments: Illustrating Longus’ Prose (2018)

Summary

This chapter, necessarily making much use of Barber 1989, explores Western European illustrated editions of Longus, Daphnis and Chloe between 1626 (Crispin de Passe the Younger) and 2014 (Karl Lagerfeld’s Moderne Mythologie), picking out for closer analysis in a table nine printed between 1890 (Raphaël Collin and Eugène-André Champollion) and 1961 (Marc Chagall), editions which are witnesses to the European taste of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first six decades of the twentieth. That table registers the different scenes in Longus chosen by different illustrators, which might have been expected to cluster around a few favourites: but alongside some favourites (Daphnis and Lycaenion, Chloe bathing Daphnis and herself, the couple’s wedding night) there are, as it reveals, many chosen by only two artists, some by only one. Other phenomena that emerged from its analysis are that Paris was the pre-eminent location for the production of illustrated editions, and that, unlike Crispin de Passe the Younger in 1626, later artists chose subjects bearing upon the couple’s growing understanding of ἔρως, ‘desire’, much more than ones depicting their few adventures.