All of the images here are in the public domain in the USA, with sources as indicated.
Often the originals are too large to present online. Click (or right-click to download) on each image for a larger (if not as large as possible) version.
The images which serve as links to other documents on this site are described on the "About the Images" pages for those linked documents.
From an engraving by Gustave Doré of Dante and Virgil at the start of the Divine Comedy, in Masterpieces from the Works of Gustave Dore. (NY: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1887.) Scanned by the author.
Virgil will always lead you Home.
From John Oxenford's The Illustrated Book of French Songs from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century . (London: H. Ingram & Co., 1855.) Scanned by the author.
This is an approximate or schematic plan of the labyrinth formerly in the gardens at Versailles. It was built in 1674 to a design by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and populated, if that term might be used, by fountains depicting the fables of Æsop. It was destroyed in 1774.
A plan and description of this labyrinth survive in Le Labyrinthe de Versailles (1677) by Charles Perrault, illustrated by Sebastian LeClerc. Reprinted Paris: Le Moniteur, 1982. The plan from this book is reproduced in David Willis McCullough's The Unending Mystery: A Journey through Labyrinths and Mazes (NY: Pantheon Books, 2004). It shows the labyrinth as rectangular, and is generally the basis for my drawing.
A different plan of the labyrinth occurs in an anonymous plan of Versailles drawn in France in 1687 and now catalog number "THC 1" (Tessin-Hårleman Collection, No. 1) in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. This has been published in an exhibition catalog edited by Elaine Evans Dee and Guy Walton, Versailles: The View from Sweden (NY: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1988, pp. 20-21). This plan shows the labyrinth as slightly more trapezoidal, and lacking the little "s curl" in the upper right, but is otherwise topologically similar.
A still different engraving of the plan, along with several of the illustrations of the fountains, is reproduced online in Michael Conan's paper "Landscape Metaphors and Metamorphosis of Time," in Michel Conan, ed. [extracts from] Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion, Volume 24 of the Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2003). http://www.doaks.org/etexts.html [link now dead]; http://www.doaks.org/COMO.html [link now dead]. This version also claims to be from Perrault's Le Labyrinthe, but is not the same as the version reprinted in McCullough. It shows the labyrinth as trapezoidal (but with the "s curl") and more closely resembles the Stockholm plan.
Conan says this about the Versailles labyrinth:
"Instead of leading visitors toward a discovery of the virtues of the garden's patron, the Labyrinth encouraged self-reflection and a search for a personal code of conduct. ... A statue representing Aesop at the entrance advised that unless they pondered their choices they might fail to find their way through the Labyrinth." (295)
I created this present digital image by hand, and dedicate it to the public domain as noted in the legal information section at the bottom of this page. (It's just easier to make it public domain, so that it fits well with the other public domain images that I tend to use as linking and decorative images.) It should be considered nothing more than a decorative image; it is not necessarily an accurate representation of this labyrinth.
Here are various versions of this drawing:
- The SVG original (a scalable vector drawing): labirinthe-02.svg
- A 128x163 pixel PNG (transparent background): labirinthe-02-128x163.png
- A 2048x2614 pixel PNG (transparent background): labirinthe-02-2048x2614.png
For some reason, this drawing reminds me, anachronistically, of something from the early 20th century Léger/Mondrian/Calder-wire-portrait era of art.
