| The story of the Grail and of the quest to find it
became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century,
referred to in literature such as Alfred Tennyson's
Arthurian cycle the Idylls of the King. The combination
of hushed reverence, chromatic harmonies and sexualized
imagery in Richard Wagner's late opera Parsifal gave new
significance to the grail theme, for the first time
associating the grail – now periodically producing blood
– directly with female fertility. The high
seriousness of the subject was also epitomized in
Dante
Gabriel Rossetti's painting (illustrated), in which a
woman modelled by Jane Morris holds the Grail with one
hand, while adopting a gesture of blessing with the
other. Other artists, including George Frederic Watts
and William Dyce also portrayed grail subjects.
Parsifal before the
Castle of the Grail
The Grail later turned up in movies; it debuted in a
silent Parsifal. In The Light of Faith (1922), Lon
Chaney attempted to steal it, for the finest of reasons.
The Silver Chalice, a novel about the Grail by Thomas B.
Costain was made into a 1954 movie (in which Paul Newman
debuted), that is considered notably bad by several
critics, including Newman himself. Lancelot du Lac
(1974) is Robert Bresson's gritty retelling. In vivid
contrast, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
(adapted in 2004 as the stage production Spamalot)
deflated all pseudo-Arthurian posturings. Excalibur
attempted to restore a more traditional heroic
representation of an Arthurian tale, in which the Grail
is revealed as a mystical means to revitalise Arthur
himself, and of the barren land to which his depressive
sickness is connected. Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade and The Fisher King place the quest in modern
settings, one a modern-day treasure hunt, the other
robustly self-parodying.
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