Buy essay on Art of romanticism: ideas of Henry Fuseli and William Turner

Fuseli is considered one of the major innovators in painting at the turn of 18th -19th centuries, and his work, along with the works of William Turner, are considered early manifestations of Romanticism in English Art.
The foundations of his artistic vision were formed by the intellectual surrounding of the Swiss city of Zurich, where he was born. There was a kind of crossroads of European philosophy; all the intellectual movements of Germany, France, Italy, and England were presented there and at the same time a deep love and interest was paid to the local national traditions, formed on the basis of several European cultures. Fuseli’s father was an artist, an author of one of the first scientifically compiled European art dictionaries and a book on Switzerland art history. Young Fuseli worked with his father in these literary initiatives, but did not plan to inherit his profession of a painter, although he loved drawing since childhood. On his father’s advice, he chose theology as profession, and it was in scientific circles of Zurich that he found a spiritual mentor, whose influence subsequently affected all his work. It was Johann Jakob Bodmer, whose ideas about the literary work, being a branch of aesthetics education, later became a way of thinking for an entire cultural movement which in Germany was called “Sturm und Drang” and eventually led to Romanticism (Myrone 21-26).
In contrast to the classical rationalist poetics, Bodmer considered imagination the major creative force in the art, appreciating in the works of literature everything where imagination is manifests itself with the greatest strength: beautiful, fantastic and sublime (i.e. in the terminology of the era – surpassing classical measure in its emotional impact). Bodmer translated, studied and aesthetically mastered such poets as Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare. The new attitude to Homer as a poet embodying the freshness and power of imagination of the beginning of humanity made him turn to Germanic antiquity: it was Bodmer who discovered in the ancient manuscripts and published the “Song of the Nibelungs”. Bodmer’s whole range of literary sources subsequently became the basis for Fuseli’s creativity.
In 1770, according to the tradition of the artists of the time, Fuseli goes to Rome to study antiquity. The impression he got from antiquity is best expressed in one of the symbolic paintings of the Roman period: the artist is crying, his face in his hands, at the foot of the pedestal with giant fragments of a foot and a hand set up on it. The feeling of tension and anxiety, unexplainable mysteriousness, which is characteristic of almost all Fuseli’s works, are also introduced into the perception of classics. No wonder that of all masters of the Renaissance he was most influenced by Michelangelo (Brown 48).
Fuseli, like many of his contemporaries of the era of “Sturm und Drang”, was interested in the effects of horrific, fantastic, and supernatural in art. In pursuit of irregularity, suddenness and impact force these effects, he almost entirely refuses from themes and situations commonly accepted in painting of the time, and found in literature the situations no one could or tried to portray before – scenes filled with dark passion and terror, emergence of spirits and sudden visions. Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Satan, Shakespeare’s witches were embodied in his paintings (Myrone 42-44).
However, creating his works mostly on the basis of literature, Fuseli was not a simple “reteller” of the plot. He moves all the situations taken from literature into his artistic world recreated on each canvas. This world is ascetic, gloomy on the colours, devoid of interesting details of life, built from relationships of brown darkness with silvery light, like a dream world. In Fuseli’s painting the anticipation of future development of art is keenly felt. He moves to the idea of extremely individual and expressive art, strongly and directly influencing the world of feelings – in other words, the idea of romantic art, although he did not find adequate means for the idea. Remaining within the framework of academic painting system, Fuseli just, so to say, “strains” it, resorting to expressive deformation of shapes, lighting effects, increasing the emotional sharpness of the plot.