«The Lady with the Pig» by Felicien Rops: the meaning of images

Abstract

This article is devoted to revealing the origin and meaning of images in the artwork «The Lady with the Pig» («Pornocracy») of the Belgian symbolist artist Felicien Rops. Reference to the epistolary heritage of Rops, the memoirs of the artist’s contemporaries about «The Lady with the Pig» allowed to trace the origin and formation of images of the artwork. Conducting formal, sociocultural and historical-cultural analyses of «The Lady with the Pig» proved that in it Rops played with the audience, creating several semantic levels: giving the picture a Greek name, he changed the status of the figure from the ancient Muse of Love to the modern goddess of love joys, thereby changing the meaning of other images. From this it follows that in the images of «The Lady with the Pig» the artist completely crossed out the lyrical aspects in favor of deliberately shocking themes, characters and comparisons, perverse, erotic and bizarre, trying to shake the foundations of official art and expose the false moral rules of society