Le chef-d oeuvre inconnu de Honoré de Balzac e a representação artística: literatura e pintura

Abstract

In this study, the French work Le chef-d oeuvre inconnu by Honoré de Balzac is the corpus of analysis, as well as the pictorial productions derived from this Balzac s work, concerning real and fictional painting-characters, as Frenhofer, Poussin and Porbus. This dissertation intends to demonstrate in which way the artistic representation, both in literature and in painting, emulates the artist s life. The methodology of this study was the bibliographical review of texts about the analyzed work and the author s life, as well as texts about aesthetics of reception theory, interart studies, and comparative theory. All these texts have contributed to a comparative study between Balzacian novel and its portrayed painters from the Barroque, Romanticism or Impressionism and works that develop themes such as the existence of masterpieces, the master-apprentice relationship and the great drama within the artistic creation. This study also aimed the comprehension of the artistic phenomenal in relation to the accomplishment, in real life, of the artist s imagination. In artistic creation, is it possible to study a text that portraits poetically the art of painting, in a real but abstract way, in the artist s imagination? But this painting is about, specifically? About the possible or the impossible so desired and defined? These questions reveal the conflict between reality and imagination. The concrete painting dialogues with the imagetic desire of perfection or they can even replace each other, in a way that is irrelevant or imperceptible to the reader.