Visual Intertextualities in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien

The reciprocal nourishment between the verbal and the visual arts punctuates Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetry, narrative, and theater. Influenced by Richard Wagner, Walter Pater, and Bernard Berenson, D’Annunzio is interested in both mixing the optic and the haptic and transgressing the guardrails between the arts. In Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911)—a sacred drama written in French with Ida Rubinstein in the title role, incidental music by Claude Debussy, and costumes by Russian Ballet master Léon Bakst—the visual and the verbal intermingle to create a ‘total artwork,’ which both indulges in decadent stylization and foreshadows modernist multimedia experiments.