Apollo's Chariot 1907

Odilon Redon created Apollo's Chariot in the late 19th or early 20th century. Redon's era was marked by significant social and intellectual shifts which saw artists turning inward to explore subjectivity, dreams, and the unconscious. Redon’s choice of Apollo, the Greek god of light, music, and healing, is interesting. Apollo represents a complex figure in mythology. As the patron of the arts, he also embodies rationality, order, and control. However, this representation seems challenged by the unbridled energy of the horses and the chaotic composition. We are left to consider Redon’s personal life, and the cultural shifts that saw him as a bourgeois outsider who created new narratives through art. Does this Apollo bring enlightenment, or does he portend something less clear? "My originality," Redon said, "consists in bringing to life unlikely beings and making them live according to the laws of the possible, by logically putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.”