Le Genie Du Mal (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles Le genie du mal (installed 1848) or The Genius of Evil, known informally in English as Lucifer or The Lucifer of Liege, is a religious sculpture executed in white marble by the Belgian artist Guillaume Geefs. Francophone art historians most often refer to the figure as an ange dechu, a "fallen angel." It is located within the elaborate pulpit (French chaire de verite, "seat of truth") of St. Paul's Cathedral, Liege, and depicts a classically beautiful man in his physical prime, chained, seated, and nearly nude but for drapery gathered over his thighs, his full length ensconced within a mandorla of bat wings. Geefs' work replaces an earlier sculpture created for the space by his younger brother Joseph Geefs, which was removed from the cathedral because of its distracting allure and "unhealthy beauty." In the late 1980s, a photograph of Le genie du mal became a focal point of Himmelsweg, an art installation by the Liege-born artist Jacques Charlier on the theme of seductive evil and the danger of obscuring the memory of the Holocaust.