Abstract

The complexion of waterlilies and goddesses has always represented the supreme testing ground for many painters' works of art. This was so from Branach and Raphael, through the work of Titian and Poussin, to the symbolist Moreau and the surrealist Dalí and so on and so forth. Whereas painting goes beyond, words from Luis de Góngora's poetry, still mirroring the work of old masters, reach an undeniable supremacy by way of emphasising the sight of the mind. By doing so, in the two octaves from Góngora's Polyphemus, the heaven-like universe plunges upon the crystalline, nacreous, rose-coloured covering of the triumphant Galatea while the contingent life and the thriving, generating, spring-like natural environment emerge. Some mathematical topologies are here necessary to understand the poetic expression of such an awe-inspiring proportion represented by a "detail". Hence the epistemological reference to René Thom's "Theory of Catastrophes" and to his essays on visual arts.