“Salammbô” is the most sensual work by Gustave Flaubert. The Carthage novel, published in 1862, conjures up colors and shapes, sounds and smells, feelings and tastes - a total work of art in words. So it is not surprising that an exhibition on this exceptional text forms the centerpiece of the series of events that are celebrating Flaubert's two hundredth birthday in France. Under the tongue-in-cheek bombastic title “Salammbô! Fureur! Passion! Éléphants! ”Brings together around three hundred and fifty pieces from public and private collections on both sides of the Mediterranean in the show organized with the Marseiller Mucem and Tunisia's Institut national du patrimoine in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen.
To begin with, four works from the 1880s and 1890s sum up the main themes of the novel: a bronze sculpture of little Hannibal strangling an eagle (fight and violence), a painting of Salammbô's flame-lit appearance at the mercenary festival (theatrical and exotic), a marble depiction of the naked princess with her snake (innocence and eros). The next room evokes, somewhat concise and confused, the double background against which the novel was written: on the one hand, the (meager) knowledge of Flaubert and his contemporaries about the Punic metropolis before it was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC; on the other hand the political subtext: the uprising of Carthage's mercenaries as a metaphor for the revolution of 1848 and of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état in 1851.After all, Flaubert's diaries of his trip to Africa in the spring of 1858 for documentation purposes are also on display, in which the author notes colors and textures like the painter in front of the motif. And several manuscript pages of the novel, including the very first with the legendary French opening sentence: "C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar."
The following chapter leads in medias res. It shows visual works that are inspired by “Salammbô”. Some illustrate a specific scene in the novel, such as Gaston Bussière's painting “La charge des éléphants” or Antoine Bourdelle's sculpture “La première victoire d'Hannibal”. Others create an ideal portrait of the title heroine, be it precious ornamental (Carl Strathmann) or ethereal enigmatic (Mathilde Bonaparte). The next section, which - despite Flaubert's categorical ban on images - brings together book illustrations is even more exciting. Victor-Armand Poirson's ink drawings for an edition published in 1887 with allusions to Delacroix, Gérôme and others are highly graphical. Or the compositions by Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse,who, since meeting Flaubert at the age of fourteen, felt entrusted with the mission of illustrating “Salammbô”. His templates for engravings are often polychrome, which among other things produces a great battle scene in which warriors, weapons, shields, horses and elephants pile up in a deep gray-pale yellow-brick-red tsunami.