Le génie du mal

Geschiedenis

Le génie du mal or The Genius of Evil, known informally in English as Lucifer or The Lucifer of Liège, is a religious sculpture executed in white marble by the Belgian artist Guillaume Geefs. Francophone art historians most often refer to the figure as an ange déchu, a "fallen angel." It is located within the elaborate pulpit of St. Paul's Cathedral, Liège, and depicts a classically beautiful man in his physical prime, chained, seated, and nearly nude but for drapery gathered over his thighs, his full length ensconced within a mandorla of bat wings. Geefs' work replaces an earlier sculpture created for the space by his younger brother Joseph Geefs, L'ange du mal, which was removed from the cathedral because of its distracting allure and "unhealthy beauty."In the late 1980s, a photograph of Le génie du mal became a focal point of Himmelsweg, an art installation by the Liège-born artist Jacques Charlier on the theme of seductive evil and the danger of obscuring the memory of the Holocaust.