Abstract
The 19th century witnessed an important shift in the relationship between book illustrations and literature: the literal approach of Romantics, which subordinated images to the literary text was replaced by the interpretative and metaphorical paradigm of the Symbolists. By the end of the century, painters refused the traditional servile attitude towards text, demanding a real autonomy of their creations. Instead of “illustration”, artists such as Odilon Redon preferred words like “transmission” and “interpretation”, whilst art critic André Mellerio coined the terms “concordance” and “correlative parallelism” to describe the relationship between the two arts. This paper aims to identify the traces of this debate in two rather different projects: Urien’s Voyage, by André Gide, decorated by Maurice Denis, and The Virgins, a text written by Georges Rodenbach and meant to accompany 4 lithographs created by József Rippl-Rónai.
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