Renaissance -20th century · fall, healing, power and enigma

Baldung, Michelangelo, Poussin and Rousseau give the serpent opposing roles: tempter, scourge, divine proof or magnetic presence in a tropical night.

The serpent concentrates contradictory meanings. In Hans Baldung Grien, the female figure accompanied by a mirror, animals and a snake combines beauty, prudence, desire or vanity in a deliberately unstable iconography. Michelangelo's Brazen Serpent, designed for the vault of the Sistine Chapel, shows the Israelites struck and then healed when they look at the image raised by Moses: the same animal means punishment and salvation. Nicolas Poussin paints Moses transforming Aaron's rod into a snake as a confrontation of signs in front of Pharaoh, where gesture, architecture and groups order the miracle. Henri Rousseau's Snake Charm finally moves the pattern in a vegetal night; the dark silhouette, the flute and the reptiles form a hypnotic scene where the Western gaze creates its own tropic. The "Paintings of Snakes" selection notably compares Woman with Mirror, Serpent, Deer and Dog and The Brass Serpent - Michelangelo. His reading favors color.

The painted snake never has a single meaning: its undulating shape connects precisely what the image seeks to oppose.