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This dissertation studies the poetic transformation of the visual images of Paradise in the artistic program of the Alhambra Palace which inspires Theophile Gautier's prose and poetry of Andalusia from 1840 through 1844. It is in this transformation that the interdisciplinary aspects of the study are found.
Theophile Gautier visits Spain and stays there for six months. He writes his prose, Voyage en Espagne and a collection of forty-three poems, Espana. They are written in a pictorial-poetic style that is inspired by events and scenes of his experience with the Moorish and contemporary Spanish arts and cultures. For this study, "Granada" is selected from Voyage en Espagne, and fifteen poems from Espana. I use my own English translation of the fifteen French poems for this dissertation.
The Alhambra program is considered to be an image of a Paradisiacal palace in Islamic art. For Gautier the Alhambra was the background for oriental fantasy. He made an analogy between the Alhambra and The Arabian Nights. Although the Alhambra provoked a mixture of Gautier's wild admiration and disillusionment, it seemed to him to be a symbol for man's life.
Iconographic and intrinsic analysis of each poem covered three main issues: the thematic-structural relationship; the iconic/symbolic referential meanings; and the pictorial poetic images of paradise. In addition, analysis took into consideration Gautier's preoccupation with the Orient. This extrinsic dimension was relevant to the understanding of the transformed images of paradise from the Alhambra palace.
Gautier's selected works betray a pictorialist poetic, an aesthetic which Gautier uses to transform the visual to a literary form. The relationship between art and nature has important implications for both Gautier's aesthetic and the Alhambra program.
A description of paradise in the Qur'an, the poetry inscribed on the Alhambra, and a bibliography of the Oriental influence on Western art are provided in appendices. This dissertation studies one of the Islamic visual sources which influence a nineteenth-century French poet. There are poetical devices in the Alhambra palace which are parallel to the pictorial devices in Gautier's selected prose and poetry.