Symbolist artists demonstrated keen interest in religious and mythological scenes, which is explained by the artistic message of the style. They did not strive to depict the real world as it is, and thus they rarely resorted to household portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Their aesthetic message and philosophy lie on the idea of…

infinite transcendent spiritual reality behind the screen of the visual world. This reality shows itself through symbols, and thus becomes visual for us in everyday objects and scenes. What we see is not the reality itself but the symbols of it, and these symbols is what we need to interpret. The tricky thing is that this interpretation is beyond the reach of our reason, and the symbols we notice we can decipher relying on our intuition and emotions only.

The rational thinking is useless here, since our intellectual capacities are scarce, and the soul is eternal and knows everything. In this context mythological and religious scenes turn out to be most lucky, since they contain mystery, enigma, symbols and by default they connect a man with some transcendent reality.

Everything is a symbol when you analyze a symbolist painting – the colour, the composition, the subject, and the name itself. People and objects are as much symbolic as their position in the composition, the size and the colour interactions. First read the title – and then your erudition and intuition will lead the way. Religious and mythological paintings of symbolists differ from the same genre in other styles, say, romanticism or realism. In romanticism a religious or mythological scene is an insight into the inner world of a person swirling with turmoil and intense emotions, a person who is torn between love and duty, desires and the law, the will and fate etc. with symbolism a religious or a mythological scene provides a way to the higher spiritual reality, the key to which are symbols presented in the painting. These subjects are not as dynamic as they are in romanticism. They are statuesque, since the transcendent reality in its ideal form is free from any motion. The time and place are ambiguous, they cannot be attributed to a certain period or place inherent to our reality. The draughtsmanship is expressly obscure and diffused to induce the feeling of something unspoken, something mysterious. The fantastic lives alongside with the reality in these paintings. In surrealism such a combination is meant to evoke anxiety in the vewer. In symbolism, on the contrary, such a combination seems natural, since the fantastic reality is much more real than the one that is actually visible to us.