Okay folks, it’s *thinking about Hannibal’s Uffizi gallery scene* hours again and I may be a dumb bitch and not a classics expert, but like, I’m obsessed with the sketch of Will as Zephyrus and Bedelia as Chloris that Hannibal creates in the gallery.
Clearly this sketch calls back to the murders of il mostro decades prior, with Hannibal killing and posing a man and woman in this position classically acknowledged as representing the final threshold, the transition to greatness through an unwilling act, because, as described by Ovid, Zephyrus literally transforms Chloris into deity through a carnal act of coercion. (He raped her and then made her his bride and a goddess to “make amends”).
Chloris becomes “Flora,” a name that comes from the word “blossoming”—Flora, who knew of the love Zephyrus bore for another man, his betrayal of Zephyrus, and his resulting murder at Zephyrus’s hand, and transformed that man’s blood into the first hyacinth to honor his tragedy in death. Flora, who feared Jupiter’s anger if she aided his victims and who became powerful but also essentially trapped in a garden of her violent husband’s making.
Zephyrus, often invoked to represent ocean wind carrying a loved one away or as the cause of dangerous waves, was the god of spring wind who killed the man he loved with his “death bringing breath.”
(Interestingly, Achilles prayed to Zephyrus to drive the fire that would burn the body of his beloved Patroclus, another pairing that is textually drawn as a parallel by Hannibal himself in the show, with, in my interpretation, Will described as the empathetic Patroclus, who died after becoming, in form, the murderous Achilles, his love. I also simply must include the fact that in the Iliad, Achilles threatens to eat the body of the man who killed Patroclus after killing him, and later, of course, dies).
Now, of course I do subscribe to the interpretation that Hannibal and Will are so blurred at this point that by drawing Will as Zephyros, Hannibal was actually signaling his own attempted murder-to-come (again) and subsequent transformation of Will, the man he loved, with his “wife” as distant witness. But of course, that failed, and Will’s true transformation was not until the end of season three, and it didn’t come through death. It came through finally becoming one with Hannibal. Thus, this “becoming” was the bigger fulfillment of Hannibal’s Will-as-Zephyrus-as-Hannibal parallel.
But wait, there’s more. I believe the primavera pose is both Hannibal’s beginning and his end. It’s his magnum opus. And the completion of the Hannibal/Will merging still requires the violent transformation of Bedelia.
With all the talk about the dragon “changing” his victims in death, and the moments of “becoming” in season three... Maybe what we’re seeing in the stinger at the end of season three is the beginning of Bedelia’s becoming at the hands of Hannibal *and Will*. Not the becoming that Will had in the season three finale, but the becoming that the dragon’s victims had. Through death.
Perhaps Hannibal wasn’t satisfied with arranging his puppet bodies and now intends to create the characters in full before killing them, and this is the foreshadowing of the completion of that moment. Hannibal deifies Will by merging with him completely, they deify Bedilia by killing her, and then eventually are killed themselves by each other so that the song may flower forever—perpetual spring in death (and perhaps the completion of Hannibal as the ultimate deity: Jupiter/Zeus parallel as the one who set these characters on this track) just as their counterparts were killed years earlier by Hannibal. But now it is the fuller realization of Hannibal’s design. “Revelation is the development of an image first blurred, then coming clear.”
I think it’s possible there could be additional foreshadowing to this moment—water has always represented Will and his states of being, and Water was used in similar ways for Bedelia in the beginning of season three, with the shots of her in the bathtub, being overtaken by the water.
Originally I thought this was just a representation of Bedelia’s own mental state due to Hannibal’s influence, as it seemed to be a representation of the same for Will.
But perhaps there could be a bit of foreshadowing there about what finally finishes her. It isn’t the blood, but the water she surrenders to. Will, after he has been transformed by Hannibal’s influence.
I’ve been seeing people mostly of the opinion that Hannibal may be behind Bedelia’s loss of limb, but that surely Will is not a participant of that particular cruelty. And yet, I posit that he is. (I’m not making a prediction for a possible season four with this whatsoever, just considering the option with the view of season 3 as the show finale, that we could imagine Will as being wholly one with Hannibal already. After all, they took the metaphorical and literal plunge together as one flesh, and there is no going back from that).
As Bedelia sits at the table preparing to be eaten, there are additional place settings at the table. Places for Hannibal and Will as well as Bedelia. And perhaps there is a chair-less place, set for Bedilia’s Becoming.
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