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"Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious and judgment partial." - Henry Fuseli
First a student of literature, then ordained as a Zwinglian minister at age 20, Fuseli soon left the Church and his home in Zurich for England. In London, REYNOLDS sent him on to study in Rome, where he spent eight years before returning to live in London. Fuseli was influenced by a German literary movement known by the epithet Sturm und Drang-Storm and Stress. Its self-expression and emotion are exemplified in GOETHE's early masterpiece Werther (1774), about a man who could literally die for love. Sturm und Drang was an integral part of ROMANTICISM, and Fuseli is known as one of its early representatives, even though he attacked the "romantic reveries of platonic philosophy" and said that "the expectations of romantic fancy, like those of ignorance, are indefinite." Fuseli's "gothic" fantasies were nightmarish visions, the best known of which is actually entitled The Nightmare (first version 1781). In this painting a woman sleeps in a posture of self-abandon that calls to mind the BARBERINI FAUN. A grotesque, hairy creature sits on her stomach, and the head of a horse with bulging, terror-struck eyes looks at her through a parted curtain. The mix of eroticism-intimations of rape and of intercourse with the devil-added new subject matter to painting. First exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, The Nightmare soon became one of the best-known and most copied images in history. It has even been discussed as a source for one of HOMER's masterworks, The Life Line (1884). Fuseli was a more immediate influence on BLAKE, who copied the elongated limbs and exaggerated muscles of Fuseli's figures as well as the dark dreams of Romanticism. Fuseli published a collection of aphorisms on art, one of which is quoted above.
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