“Félicien Rops, graveur de la décadence latine”

By examining several late nineteenth-century editions, in particular the first volumes of Joséphin Péladan’s La Décadence latine, illustrated with frontispieces by Félicien Rops that combine Latin inscriptions and iconic elements, this essay explores an “iconotextual” configuration characteristic of fin-de-siècle literary works. At a time marked by the revival of patristic and Late Latin, the integration of Christian, pagan and modern references in Rops’ iconography provides the illustrated works with a tangled aesthetic frame, based on anachronism and religious subversion, which situate the literature of the decadence in a staggered art-historical dimension.