upon themselves, coils of living smoke: yet the effect of the picture is one of light—a terror which becomes beautiful as it passes into irony. The death's head, the little vague poverty-stricken face, is white, faint, glimmering under the tendrils of hair and roses: tresses of windy roses which stream along and away with an effect of surprising charm, the lines running out in delicate curves, to be lost in the night. And below, separated from the head by a blotch of sheer blackness, one sees a body, a beautiful, slender supple body, glittering with a strange acute whiteness, with a delicate arm raised to the empty temples of the skull. Below, in its frightful continuation of the fine morbid flesh of the body, the black column, the huge and heavy coils, which seem endless. The legend is from Flaubert. Death speaks, saying: Mon ironie dépasse toutes les autres.
Ammonaria and Le Sphinx et la Chimère are from the same album, which illustrates Le Tentation de Saint Antoine, and are characteristic, though not the finest, examples of Redon's work. The scene of
