Mystic Flower

By around 1890, when Gustave Moreau built this strange altar of a painting, the Paris art world was full of Impressionist weather and everyday streets. Moreau went the opposite way, into dream and religion. A crowned woman stands on a huge flower that rises like a stem out of a rocky gorge, and down among the rocks lie the small bodies of martyrs. Moreau explained the image plainly. All those who died for her, he said, had watered this mystical flower, the sign of purity, with their blood. He had borrowed the tall, glowing arrangement from a Carpaccio he had copied in Venice. Nearly everything he made stayed in his own Paris house, which he left to the state as a museum, so this large canvas still hangs where he worked, among hundreds of others.