Art Unit 4

What did you find out in your research about what the word "nightmare" means?

The "mare" in nightmare is not a female horse, but a mara. In Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, this is a term for a demon that sat on sleepers' chests, paralyzing them and causing them to have bad dreams.

Fuseli fell deeply in love with Anna and wanted to marry her, but this marriage did not occur. Why?

Historical accounts differ, stating that Anna did not love Fuseli; that she was already engaged to a businessman; that her father kept them apart; that Fuseli was so poor that he was ashamed to go to Anna's parents and declare himself as a suitor; and that Fuseli and Anna had an affair that ended badly. Whatever the reason, Fuseli became obsessed with his desire to possess Anna.

In the video Fuseli's The Nightmare, we learned we learned from the director of the Detroit Museum of Art that there is a portrait on the reverse side of The Nightmare (1781) that depicts a young woman believed to be Anna Landolt, a woman the artist wanted to marry and later became obsessed with.

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Also known as an alp, elf, mart, or incubus; according to legend this demon is extremely dangerous and unpleasant. Today, we would call the demon an

incubus

In the video Fuseli's The Nightmare, the Director of the Detroit Museum of Art said that Fuseli's painting The Nightmare (1781) is one of the iconic paintings of the Romantic movement in art.

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In the video Fuseli's The Nightmare, the Director of the Detroit Museum of Art said that in the painting The Nightmare (1781), the goblin sitting on top of the woman is actually the "mare" of nightmares which comes from the old English word "mara" which meant a goblin or a witch.

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In the video Fuseli's The Nightmare, the Director of the Detroit Museum of Art said that some clergymen decided that The Nightmare (1781) was obscene and should not be shown to the general public.

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In the video Fuseli's The Nightmare, we learned from the director of the Detroit Museum of Art that Fuseli's The Nightmare (1781) was painted at the height of the French Revolutionary War and was immediately seized upon by political cartoonists.

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In the video Fuseli's The Nightmare, we learned from the director of the Detroit Museum of Art that during a contemporary exhibition of The Nightmare in England at the Tate Gallery, a cartoon appeared in one of the newspapers that showed the woman as Tony Blair, the goblin as George Bush, and the figure lurking in the background as Dick Cheney.

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Additional evidence that the woman in The Nightmare is Anna Landolt can be found in a letter that Fuseli wrote to his friend Lavater. In it, he described an erotic dream that he had about Anna:

"Last night I had her in bed with me...wound my hot and tight-clasped hands about her—fused her body and her soul together with my own—poured into her my spirit, breath, and strength. Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest! She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will...What God or nature hath joined, let no man...sunder."

The following year Fuseli had to leave Zurich. Why?

Fuseli helped to expose the corrupt administration of a powerful magistrate, angering the man's family, so it was dangerous for him to remain in Switzerland.

With limited financial resources, where did Fuseli go, and how did he retrain himself to become an artist?

Fuseli went to Rome in 1770 where he stayed for eight years, teaching himself to draw and paint by studying works from the past done by master artists. He greatly admired the works of Michelangelo and spent much of this time period studying and copying Michelangelo's figures in the Sistine Chapel.

Fuseli's love for Anna Landolt was unrequited and we know that she went on to marry someone else shortly after they parted. Did Fuseli ever marry anyone else? Was he later involved with any other women? If so, who?

In 1788 Fuseli married Sophia Rawlins, an artists' model who many of his friends felt to be intellectually inferior to Fuseli. The marriage apparently had many problems. Fuseli humiliated Sophia by depicting her as the model in a number of erotic and macabre paintings (most of which she burned upon his death in 1825).

After his relationship with Anna Landolt ended unsuccessfully, Fuseli left for London in 1779. There, he changed his name from Johann Heinrich Fussli to John Henry Fuseli.

In his drawing Self Portrait (1780), Fuseli's expression looks haunted and sad.

John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)

Johann Henrich Fussli was born in Zurich in 1741. His father was Johann Kaspar Fussli, a portrait painter and art historian. He was surrounded by classical literature and influenced by Zurich's great thinkers, understanding the relationship between poetry and painting from his youth.

But if the incubus doesn't symbolize Fuseli, who else could it represent?

The incubus in the painting could also represent Anna Landolt's father. If he prevented their marriage, Fuseli might have depicted him as an evil demon jealously guarding his daughter's virtue until she could be married to someone more suitable. The demon could also represent the man that Anna Landolt did marry. Fuseli was probably angry at (and envious of) Anna's husband and might have depicted him as the incubus.

Knowing what we do about the powers the incubus possesses, who do you think the incubus on Anna's chest might represent? Why?

The incubus might represent Fuseli himself. Especially if he knew that Anna hadn't done anything to provoke his feelings about her. Fuseli was trained as a priest, and if he had angry, lustful, possessive thoughts about Anna, on some level he could have felt that this was wrong, or even evil according to his religious training (which would have included vows of chastity). If the demon atop Anna's chest represents Fuseli, and he was angry at her, it might have been psychologically satisfying to have complete possession of Anna (even as an incubus in a painting) when he couldn't actually do this in real life. Total symbolic control might have been better than feeling that he had no control over the situation at all.

During his travels he met a woman who would later haunt his dreams. Who was she? What was her name?

The woman Fuseli met was Anna Landolt, the niece of his former schoolmate and lifelong friend, the theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater.

In the video Fuseli's The Nightmare, we learned from the director of the Detroit Museum of Art that political cartoonists in 1781 seized upon the images in Fuseli's The Nightmare and turned the woman into King George III, the goblin into Lord North, and in the background, there were American revolutionary figures.

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In the video William Blake, the graphic novelist Alan Moore said that Blake "was a man out of time, living in a romantic, visionary world where he thought that the things inside his head were as important as things in the material universe."

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In the video William Blake, we learned that Blake had a visionary imagination that led many of his contemporaries to call him "mad." And yet he was also a man rooted in reality, mixing symbolic images with powerful portraits full of outrage at the injustices of the world.

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In the video William Blake, we learned that Blake saw himself as a sort of prophet, as well as a writer and artist and that's why he chose to revive an ancient form, that of the hand-illuminated book. He only produced a handful in his lifetime, but they're among the most strange, wonderful, powerful objects in all of British art.

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In the video William Blake, we learned that Blake was born during the Enlightenment, the so called "Age of Reason," but he spent much of his life railing against the idea that reason should be allowed to dominate human existence. For him the whole point of life was to open yourself up to the infinite, the divine, the world of the spirits.

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In the video William Blake, we learned that for Blake the great enemy of the imagination was the spirit of calculation, of cold logic. For him, that was embodied by Isaac Newton and he depicted this in his famous color print Newton, where the man is squatting weirdly on the ocean floor obsessed by his own rationality.

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In the video William Blake: Artist, Poet, & Visionary, we learned from Colin Harrison at the Ashmolean Museum that William Blake was probably the most original genius of early Romanticism in England, both as a poet and an artist.

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In the video William Blake: Artist, Poet, & Visionary, we learned that Blake was making his most extraordinary poems and prints in the 1790's, but these had a very small circulation and it wasn't really until the 20th century that he was discovered.

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In the video William Blake: Artist, Poet, & Visionary, we learned that from relatively conventional beginnings, William Blake developed a kind of imagery in words and in pictures that has never been surpassed in imagination, in extravagance, in the vividness of this imagery.

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In the video William Blake: Artist, Poet, & Visionary, we learned that while Blake flirted with several religious sects in the 1780's, he quickly abandoned them and created his own religious doctrine with God at its center (along with a number of other recognizable figures).

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