COVE

This work by Aubrey Beardsley, titled How a Devil in Woman’s Likeness Would Have Tempted Sir Bors, was part of Thomas Malory’s 1894 edition of Le morte Darthur (WikiArt). It is important to notice how, in the black and white depiction, the characters appear to be floating before a white backdrop. Teukolsky explains that this stylistic technique of decadent artists served to portray “a netherworld lacking coordinates in space and time” (645). By not identifying the area in which the image is formed around, Beardsley is visualizing an unseen world which illuminates the strange, uninterpretable scenes in the horror spectrum. 

Works Cited

Teukolsky, Rachel. “On the Politics of Decadent Rebellion: Beardsley, Japonisme, Rococo,” Victorian Literature and Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 643–666.

Beardsley, Aubrey. How a Devil in Woman’s Likeness Would Have Tempted Sir Bors. 1894. WikiArt: Visual Art Encyclopedia. https://www.wikiart.org/en/aubrey-beardsley/a-devil-in-woman-s-likeness-1