La escuela de Platón

The unprepared visitor of the Orsay Museum in Paris usually receives a more or less pleasant shock upon finding in the hall of the symbolists the enormous painting The School of Plato. It is a scene that is at once serene and sensual, reflective and brazen, enigmatic yet very direct A Plato that appears very similar to Jesus speaks to twelve disciples who, fortunately, seem nothing like the apostles. Is this a merciful blasphemy or simply a whim? The painting was made in 1898 by a relatively unknown Belgian symbolist, Jean Delville, who was a very curious man, a fanatic of idealism in...