Le Poème de L'âme / The Poem of the Soul (French and English Edition)

The Poem of the Soul is composed of the eighteen paintings and sixteen drawings held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon, along with the thousands of verses accompanying them. Louis Janmot (Lyon, 1814-1892) devoted most of his life, from 1835 to 1881, to this work of encyclopedic scope, a kind of mystical epic of the soul. The singularity of his poetic universe captured the attention of some of his most illustrious contemporaries during the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Struck by their fantastic character, Baudelaire contemplated writing a text on two of the compositions, while Delacroix, one of the painter's supporters, noted in his Journal: ...there is a remarkable echo of Dante in Janmot's oeuvre.