Borrador de la vela y la llama

In addition to being an object present in the daily life of human beings for centuries, the lighted candle constitutes an image that is as expressive as it is constant in the arts and letters of the West. The symbolic value of the candle and its flame is of unusual richness, to the point that we should speak not of one value but of multiple values, from its vision as an attribute of divinity to its relevance in the representation of life and time (including clock time), passing through its character as an acute simile of the transitory or its inevitable link with death, memory and sacredness, among many other aspects that this essay analyzes. For the poet Andrés Sánchez Robayna, we are facing 'a unitary and dynamic motif at the same time', capable of mobilizing the imagination of poets as diverse as Quevedo and Coleridge, Yeats and Rilke, Kavafis and Ajmátova, or artists such as El Greco and Friedrich, Picasso and Giacometti, Dora Maar and Remedios Varo, Broodthaers and Tarkovski. These pages propose a historical and interpretive journey through one of the most fruitful literary and artistic motifs of the Western creative imagination.