practiced what she painted. And vice versa. Art is life. She was, to the tips of her claws, a selfinvented, self-promoting, card-carrying sphinx.
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heatricality is the flying buttress of Leonor’s persona, and she always thought that her animal side deserved equal, if not superior, billing to the human part. So it is not surprising that a half-lioness half-human configuration was perfect typecasting. No one has better understood the impact of this hybrid fantasy in Leonor’s life and art than the Italian critic and man of letters, Mario Praz, who, in the first monograph devoted to her work, contributed an important essay entitled, “Leonor Fini and the Sphinx” (1945). I quote an extensive passage:
Sphinx Amalburga (Sphinx Amoureux) 1941 Oil on canvas 15 x 18 inches
“The history of the sphinx, as I see it, should begin with Oedipus and even earlier, but should necessarily come to a logical culmination and end with Leonor Fini. A psychoanalyst would find in her everything about the sphinx, from alpha to omega. In the endless line of artists who throughout history have attempted to give features to this fascinating monster, Leonor Fini has been unique, I believe, in providing it with a human aura, and more precisely, an autobiographical one. . . .
The sphinxes of Leonor Fini are sphinxes à la mode, not in terms of how they are dressed but rather through their anxious faces, weary and puffy from troubled sleep; through their thick manes of hair that betray a decidedly romantic and modern soul. They are sphinxes that have just flown in from the witches’ Sabbath, during which they lingered endlessly contemplating the beautiful bodies of sleeping adolescents in the purple moonlight. The landscape over which the sphinxes swooped is strewn with broken bones, empty shells, fish skeletons, eggshells, pebbles strung together and especially roots and broken branches bleached by the sea that Leonor so rightly adores. . . . This modern sphinx reigns over a nature morte–like scene and protectively watches over the slumbers of a young man: never was sleep such a twin of death, the human body so inanimate and devoid of life, like a sensual hieroglyphic. . . . Her fantasy is nourished by her unique inner world with a hunger that is obsessional and demonic. . . . Behind the still life we vaguely perceive the outlines of the Medusa sphinx, the Circe sphinx, the melodious-voiced Siren sphinx. This is why Leonor Fini, raised in the school of Renaissance artists and Gothic-leaning mannerists, is ideally suited to illustrate the macabreerotic fantasies of the Marquis de Sade.” When the critic Edmund Wilson visited Leonor’s studio in Rome just after the war he reported in his 1947 book Europe without Baedeker, “Here the sphinxes are leonine and immobilized in their 8