Belvedere. Waiting for Delveaux Painting

Belvedere. Waiting for Delveaux Baroque Sphinxes are such fascinating and mysterious creatures, especially those which populate the gardens of Vienna’s Schloss Belvedere; somewhere I have spent many hours over the years. Answering their riddles and in that sense ‘de-mystifying them’ only leads to trouble, as Sophocles warns us all. We are all held captive and subjugated by beauty and mystery. In this picture, as in so many of my pictures, one of the protagonists is blindfolded so the viewer must understand the situation for them. The viewer is also thus excluded from participation, which, of course comes at a price. King Oedipus solved the Sphinx’s riddle and he paid the price with his sight, far more permanently than the figure represented here. Banished from his palace, he was lead through his exile by two women, his daughters Antigone and Ismene, they became his eyes. On a lighter note, when we trespass into moonlit gardens in the company of under-dressed women, we are always faced with the possibility of encountering Paul Delveaux walking among the statues or perhaps pruning roses. We should probably wait and see