Jean Delville
The Age Of Splendor

September 3 2017

I first became aware of Jean Delville when I fell in love with his painting L’Ecole de Platon (view high-res). The azure color tonality of the vast landscape bathed in other-worldly light creates an almost aquatic atmosphere. I’m under its spell and I just want to roll down these meadows and dive into this dream.

Jean Delville was a Belgian painter (1867-1953) who painted heavily symbolic scenes with a occult oriented spiritual perspective. The basic summation of his views was Neoplatonism, Delville believed that visible reality was only a symbol, and that humans exist in three planes: the physical (the realm of facts), the astral (or spiritual world, the realm of laws), and the divine (the realm of causes). These higher planes of existence were the only significant ones. Materialism was a trap, and the soul had to guard against being trapped by its snares. The human body he considered to be a potential prison for the soul.