Gradiva

Gradiva, or "She who steps along", is a mythic figure created by Wilhelm Jensen as a central character in his novella Gradiva (1902). The character was inspired by an existing Roman relief. She later became a prominent subject in Surrealist art after Sigmund Freud published an essay on Jensen's work.

Origins
The character first appeared in Wilhelm Jensen's eponymous novella Gradiva. In the novella, the protagonist is fascinated by a female figure in an ancient relief and names her Gradiva, Latin for "she who steps along". The name is also believed to be an homage to Mars Gradivus, the Roman god of war.

Early after Gradiva 's publication, psychoanalyst Carl Jung recommended the novella to his colleague Sigmund Freud. Freud found the narrative compelling, and published his influential essay titled Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva (German: "Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensen's Gradiva") in 1907. Afterwards, he exchanged a few letters with Jensen, who was "flattered by Freud's analysis of his story".

Description
The relief is a neo-Attic Roman relief, which is likely a copy of a Greek original from the 4th century BCE. The full relief has three female figures identified as the so called Horae and Agraulids: Herse, Pandrosus and Aglaulos. The relief was reconstructed by archaeologist Friedrich Hauser from fragments found in multiple separate museum collections.

The Gradiva fragment is held in the collection of the Vatican Museum Chiaramonti, Rome. The rest of the relief is on display in the Uffizi Museum in Florence.

Allusions in popular culture
Salvador Dalí nicknamed his wife, Gala Dalí, "Gradiva". He utilized the figure of Gradiva as inspiration in a number of his paintings, for which his wife often served as the model. These paintings included Gradiva (1931), Gradiva finds the ruins of Antropomorphos (1931), William Tell and Gradiva (1931).

Gradiva inspired other Surrealist paintings as well. One such example, Gradiva (1939) by André Masson, explores the sexual iconography of the character.

In 1937, the Surrealist author André Breton, credited with being a leader of the movement, opened an art gallery on the Rive Gauche called the Gradiva. The studio was designed by Marcel Duchamp, who created the iconic door in the shape of the Gradiva accompanied by a male figure.

The short art film Gradiva Sketch 1 (1978, camera: Bruno Nuytten) by the French filmmaker Raymonde Carasco was described as “a poetic construction about the fetishization of desire, one that seems to go against Freud's reading: the gracious movement of the maiden's foot is seen to be the object itself, not a mere referent, of male desire”.

In 1986, the French Surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, together with Jean Jamin, founded Gradhiva, an academic journal covering topics in anthropology. Since 2005, it has been published by the Musée du quai Branly in Paris.