Edipo e la Sfinge

Moreau showed this at the Paris Salon of 1864, and it made his name overnight. By then painters were being praised for scenes of ordinary modern life, and here he went the opposite way, back to Greek myth painted with jewel-like precision. Oedipus meets the Sphinx on a narrow mountain ledge, and she has sprung up against his chest, wings out, staring into his face while he answers her riddle. Down in the foreground lie the bones and a pale foot of the travellers who answered wrong. The younger generation loved it. Odilon Redon and, later, Oscar Wilde were drawn to this cool otherworldly manner. Look at how tightly the two figures are locked together, eye to eye, so you cannot quite tell yet who has the upper hand, though the laurel in Oedipus's hand already says he will win.