Contemplating Apollinaire's "Bestiaire"

Apollinaire's 1911 collection of short poems, "Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée", is patterned on earlier collections of animal myths and fables. Each poem is accompanied by a block print by Raoul Dufy that both interprets and complements the text. This article re-examines these illustrations, which have received relatively little attention, in the light of Roland Barthes's theories of photographic connotation: photographs, while seemingly objective or uncoded, in fact convey a variety of aesthetic and/or ideological messages. Barthes's sixfold categorization of photographic devices helps us to understand the artistic possibilities available to Dufy, the strategies he chose to employ, and the manner in which the prints comment on the text.