EDITH CUSHING’S COSTUMES
Edith seems a typical carefree lady of the late 19th-century upper classes; her dress is sculptural to an extreme and the colouring is perhaps a reference to Symphony In Yellow, Oscar Wilde’s short paean to decadence and the aesthetic movement. “An omnibus across the bridge/ Crawls like a yellow butterfly”, go the opening lines. The butterfly was a reoccurring symbol in Victorian culture (not least its adoption by painter Whistler as his signature), in which it represented freedom.
ARCHITECTURE
The Sharpes’ family pile harks back to the styles of the 1300s, marked by the pointed arches of the hallway’s ceiling vaults. Derided as “gothic” much later by 18th-century classicists, this medieval English architecture found new currency with the dark religiosity of the Victorian era, in which the desire for salvation was equalled by the fear of damnation. The designers of Allerdale Hall, like the builders of Salisbury cathedral, reflect heaven and hell in the towers that stretch high into the sky, and the claustrophobic basement in which the family’s clay mines seem like portals to a ghastly underworld.
THE GHOSTS
The two ghosts sketched out in Del Toro’s notebook and the maquette design for another red ghoul could have all been lifted from Goya’s Witches And Old Women Album, a sketchpad that the Spanish painter made around 1819 to amuse a small circle of friends. He wasn’t alone in summoning up fleshy, viscous, supernatural foes in art, though: among those before him came Hans Baldung Grien’s woodcut from 1510, The Witches’ Sabbath and Agostino Veneziano’s The Witches’ Rout (The Carcass), circa 1520, which shows a possession through the underworld. It is from these works that Jake and Dinos Chapman’s epic 2000 sculpture Hell (pictured above) takes inspiration from, too.
The book Crimson Peak: The Art Of Darkness by Mark Salisbury is out on 22 Oct (Insight Editions)
