Fuseli: The Nightmare by Nicolas Powell

Review by: John F. Moffitt

The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 880 (Jul., 1976), pp. 526-527
Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.
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THE

Prayerbook of Princess Renee in Modena.

The former is another Hours, punctuated
with miniatures in architectural frames
amongst which can be found subjects
exactly parallel to some of those in each of
Mr Kraus's treasures. This book too is
unusual in the form of its border decoration. They are filled with exquisite and
entirely naturalistic flower paintings, expanded wherever there is additional space
into almost full-page floral miniatures
foreshadowing the work of Jacques le
Moyne. Floral borders are not rare in
French manuscripts - Bourdichon indeed
executed a scientifically planned flora in
the Hours of Anne of Brittany - but
nothing else approaches these borders in
delicacy. The Prayerbook of Princess
Ren6e, Queen Claude's younger sister, has
a similar but less successful series of floral
borders and a number of miniatures very
close to those of the Claude manuscripts.
Rende was born in 151o and is portrayed
in the book as a small child. The text
includes very simple prayers which could
well have been thought suitable for her use
at about the time of her sister's accession
and coronation in 1515-17.

It seems to

me that the same illuminators, and

certainly the same models, appear in the
two Claude manuscripts, in Add. MS.
35214 and in Princess Renee's Prayerbook.

But they are not yet following a coherent

pattern such as appears in the workshop
of the group of Hours made during the
I520's.

Furthermore, the pictorial borders

in Queen Claude's Book of Prayers are

not repeated in any other manuscript that
has yet come to light, and must therefore
be regarded as idiosyncratic.
Professor Sterling's study, despite its
self-acknowledged limitations, is a welcome contribution to our understanding of
the period. The artistic innovations of the
time of Francis I and the development of
the School of Fontainebleau have received
and are receiving an attention which has
so far been denied to achievements in the
arts more usually associated with the
Middle Ages. The art of illumination in
early sixteenth-century France, and especially its relationship to the development
of printing and to the other decorative
arts, offers considerable scope for much
more intensive investigation.
JANET

BACKHOUSE

The New Golden Land. European

Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time. By
Hugh Honour. 299 pp., including notes,
list of ills. and index with 274 black-andwhite ills. and XXX colourplates. (Allen
Lane, London), ?12.50.

The European Vision of America. By

Hugh Honour. Exhibition -catalogue,
Washington, National Gallery of Art;
Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of
Art; Paris, Grand Palais. $9.95.-

LITERATURE

OF

ART

Some time ago the Cleveland Museum

invited Hugh Honour to plan its Bicentennial exhibition,

The European Vision

of Americaor as the sub-title of his book, a

by-product of the exhibition, calls it

European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time. The exhibition

opened at the National Gallery, Washington, last December and after spending the
summer in Cleveland itself will be able to
be seen by Europeans throughout the
autumn at the Grand Palais in Paris.
It was doubtless the success of his
Chinoiserie; the Vision of Cathay, that led

Cleveland to the wise choice of Honour as

the 'Guest Curator' for the exhibition;
indeed one section of the exhibition is
entitled Americainerie.
But although Francesco Lopez de Gomara called the discovery of America 'the greatest event
since the creation of the world' except for
the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, the
immediate response of Europeans to what
they found in the New World, could
hardly have been more different from that
evoked by the 'discovery' of China in the
late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In Cathay Europeans saw a highly
civilised people ruled by a philosopherking whose religion and thought had
much to teach the West. America, on the
other hand, seemed inhabited solely by a
'Wild, Naked, Cruel, Man-Eating People'.
For many years it was their cannibalism
which struck Europeans most forcibly
about the inhabitants of the American
continent. When in 1641 Prints Maurice
of Nassau sent Albert Eckhout to paint the
first serious ethnographic portraits of its
people (the life-size paintings, now at
Copenhagen, were amongst the most
striking things in the exhibition) he
depicted an attractive Brazilian girl
delicately crossing a brook. But from the
wickerwork basket on her back a human
leg protrudes and in her hand she clutches
a half-chewed forearm. Although this
emphasis was often toned down in the
interests of colonising the new lands (in
John White's water-colours, for example),
even Tiepolo alludes to the practice in
mid-eighteenth century in his frescoed
group of America above the staircase at
Wiirzburg. Some theologians suggested
that Americans were descended from a
different Adam from the rest of us, that
they had incurred the curse of God, even
that they had no souls. Such theories were
as much responsible for the atrocious
treatment of Mexicans and Peruvians by
the Spanish conquerers, as the lust for
gold.
Both the Emperor Charles V and the
Pope had to issue public declarations that
Americans were 'true men' and capable
of receiving the Christian faith. With very
little effect however, and it was the African
and the South Sea Islander, rather than
the Amerindian
who epitomised the
in eighteenth-century
'noble
savage'
mythology. By the time this attitude
was
passed and Lord Kingsborough
wasting his fortune trying to prove that

the now decimated and dispossessed

Indians were descendants of the Lost
Tribes of Israel, Europeans like Frances
Trollope and Dickens had transferred
their hostility from the indigenous inhabitants of North America to the
immigrant populations from Central
Europe and Ireland.
In spite of this persistent hostility, the
aesthetic consequences of the opening up
of the New World were widespread in
Europe. Indians appeared in literature,
on the stage, in ballets, pageants and
festivals, in paintings, tapestries, on porcelain and silverware. At the exhibition
the selection of 350 of these objects provided a rich feast and still others are
illustrated in The New Golden World. Not

the least attractive of these are the early

drawings of the exotic flora and fauna of
the New World, amongst the most
appealing being Jacopo Ligozzi's brilliant
and quite unfamiliar water-colours in the
Uffizi, drawn from specimens collected by
the Medici. The rare surviving Aztec
relics sent in the immediate aftermath of
the conquest were too precious for loan to
the exhibition (though a few are illustrated in The New Golden World) though

Honour, like Heikamp before him, seems

to have overlooked Augustus Frank's
romantic discovery for the British Museum of the turquoise masks and daggers
from the Medici Collection in a corner of
the workshops of the Opificio delle Pietre

Dure where they were about to be cut up

into mosaics. The mounted greenstone
mask forming part of the dowery of
Vittoria della Rovere in I634 from the
Pitti palace which he illustrates may be
something even more interesting for the
history of taste than the early preColumbian artifact he claims it to be.
There is some reason to suppose it is an
early seventeenth-century forgery of an
Aztec mask anticipating those which have
flooded the archaeological market in the
twentieth century.
The E.V.A. exhibition (as it is habitually referred to in the United States) was
an admirable achievement, not only for
the interesting and recondite series of
culturally relevant objects assembled by
its organiser, but as a new type of largescale exhibition. In a world where the
rising cost of insurance, freight etc. and
the impositions of governments in search of
fresh sources of taxation, are making great
international assemblages of masterpieces
of art an impossible achievement, the
future may lie with exhibitions of this
type which contain few or no 'priceless
masterpieces' of art.
FRANCIS

WATSON

Fuseli: The Nightmare. By Nicolas

Powell. 120 pp. + 55 ills. (Allen Lane,
'Art in Context' series, London), ?1.95.

A widespread revival of critical interest

and popular re-appreciation of the curious

526

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THE

euvreof John Henry Fuseli is apparent.

Mr Powell's lucid and well-ordered essay
makes a valuable effort to pin down the
several traditions, both visual and literary,
which are synthesized in Fuseli's supposedly wholly 'original', and hence
'indecipherable', Nightmare.It should be
mentioned that previous confusion about
this picture's subject-matter has not been
aided by the fact that it is not at all
typical of his work. For instance, of the
sixty-nine pictures exhibited by the artist
at the Royal Academy between 1774
and 1825 almost every one was based upon
relatively well-known literature: Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dante, Homer, Milton,
etc. Not so the Nightmare.
Even though at first glance the Nightmare may not appear to have readily
identifiable visual and/or literary sources,
surely one does not appreciate this
'sublime' Swiss-English artist any the less
for having the Vatican Ariadneand her
progeny cited by Mr Powell as an important compositional source for the pose of
the swooning and bewitched maiden on
the tousled bed in the Detroit Institute of
Arts. However, Mr Powell's reference to
this statue might have gained even more
force had he also illustrated Giovanni
Battista Cavallieri's engraving of this
work - before it had been identified as
'Ariadne' (J. B. Cavalleriis, Antiquarum
statuarumurbis Romae, Rome, 1594). Curi-

ously enough, this famous statue was

known to the later Cinquecento as a
'Cleopatra'. As such it was the dominant
feature of the Stanza della Cleopatra of
the Cortile del Belvedere. Vasari recorded
that Pope Julius III, during the first
months of his reign, wished to place a
centre-piece

'in testa al corridoredel Belve-

dere'and Daniele da Volterra, on Michelangelo's recommendation, was given

charge of placing this figure upon a
fountain which was to be surrounded by
an elaborate scheme of stucco and painted
decorations. While Daniele eventually
dropped out of the project, the final ensemble was that sort of typical Late
Mannerist extravaganza which would
have appealed to Fuseli. Cavallieri's print
documents the appearance of the fountain
in situ before its removal in the eighteenth

century. The figure was positioned on a

rocky shelf resting on a rectangular
structure flanked by herm-pilasters who
enclosed a shallow proscenium-like grotto
with drawn curtains. Between the feet of
the termini was placed a large sculpted
scallop shell. Most interesting to this
reviewer is the inclusion of a grimacing
male dwarf's head, winged and wearing
a sort of skull-cap, situated on the cornice
directly below the recumbent figure. Certainly some of these unique features seem
to find an echo in the Nightmare.
An obviously significant iconographical
element is the horse rearing its head
through the red curtains. Mr Powell
plausibly suggests as possible source
material a print by Hans Baldung Grien
and/or the Quirinale's Horse Tamers.

OF

LITERATURE

ART

However, a literary source might also be

pointed to as Fuseli was after all multilingual and a learned artist; as to his
erudition there can be now no doubt at all
as Fuseli scholars, such as Peter Tomory,
have taken pains to point out. While the
author does make passing reference to
Ernest Jones's

On the Nightmare
(1931I),

one feels that had he paid stricter attention

to the chapter in that study entitled 'The
Horse and the Night Fiend', he might have
come closer to the mark. According to
Jones, 'all the beliefs about the Nightmare,
in whatever guise, proceed from the idea
of a sexual assault which is both wished
for and dreaded.' The Nightmareis personified in two genders: an Alp if male;
Mare if female. The Celtic word-root
'march',or 'mare', is also the source of the
English words such as 'marsh', 'mere'
and 'moore' - all damp places (also the
Gaelic mara) - cognate to the Romance

languages mer and mar, etc. Also the

German Mdhre (English 'mare', as opposed to the masculine Pherd or Ross) is
derived from the Old German mar,
'shining'. Besides which one notes the
current German Midre,'tale', from which
derived Mdrchen, or 'fairy tales'. Thus
Fuseli is visually telling a nocturnal 'tale'
based upon a 'shining mare' which may
be plausibly assumed to proceed 'from the
idea of sexual assault'.
Further elucidation of the erudite
Fuseli's intentions may be brought out
by mentioning that in Boccaccio's
Decameron(ix, Io) a woman is magically
turned into a horse. In German folklore,
the God Loki turned himself into a mare
in order to cheat the giant out of Freija.
Most telling I find are the age-old euphemisms for nocturnal emissions - 'witchriding'. In German, one runs across expressions

such

as 'es reiten ihn Hexel'

(witches are riding him) or especially of

interest is the phrase 'dich hat geriten der

Mar' (the Night Fiend has ridden you).

As for the 'riding' demon in Fuseli's
picture, recall that in Spanish a 'nightmare' is a pesadilla,a word which is derived
from pesar, 'to weight down upon'. Its
French cognate is the cauchemar.And,
finally, one must mention that the 'mare'
did not appear in Fuseli's first (c.1781?)

sketch for the Nightmare. Without meaning

to detract from Mr Powell's scholarly and
well-reasoned arguments, I would like to
suggest that its later, and prominent, inclusion is due to the further elaboration
and refinement of some very definite ideas
which can best be extrapolated on a
philological basis. Such linguistic analysis
may in turn help to unravel the persistent
enigma of Baldung Grien's BewitchedGroom.
We shall probably never be able to
the sources
pinpoint all, or even most
for Fuseli's acknowledged of,masterpiece.
Nevertheless, Mr Powell's thoughtful and
imaginative monograph is, to date, the
best key by which we may attempt to
unlock some of its many mysteries.
JOHN

F.

MOFFITT

The Rise of English Provincial Art Artists, Patrons, and Institutions

outside London, x8oo-x83o. By Trevor
Fawcett. xiv + 242 pp. with 25 ills. +
25 plates. (Clarendon Press: OUP),

?7.50.is a
This
pioneering study which immediately takes its place among the
source books for the history of British art
in the early decades of the nineteenth
century. On my shelves it will stand beside
the two volumes of W. T. Whitley's Art in
England,which cover the period from I8oo
to 1837. Despite their title, those pioneering volumes (originally published in I928
and I930, and at last reprinted in 1973)

deal almost exclusively with art in London,

and award only bare mentions to two or
three of the provincial centres with which
Mr Fawcett is concerned. A great
shortcoming of Whitley is that he provided
no references or bibliography; Fawcett is
careful to give full information concerning
his sources, and his 'List of Sources' runs
to 17 pages. These show that he has consulted the files of some fifty provincial
newspapers published in twenty-four
different cities and towns, and from these
he has culled a large proportion of his
material. He has also used the records of
several societies and institutions, and
those relatively few catalogues of provincial exhibitions which have survived.
Though much of this material has now
been used for the first time, the overall
picture of art in the provinces in the early
nineteenth century continues basically as
it was, leaving London as the one really
vital centre for practitioners and patrons
alike. Norwich remains the only other
city that maintained a long and continuous run of annual exhibitions, but it was
the Norwich-born J. S. Cotman who is
reported to have said, 'London, with all
its fog and smoke, is the only air for an
artist to breathe in'. In fact, Whitley's
picture appears not to be seriously distorted, though we now have a much greater
fund of facts on which to base our conclusions about the activities of artists and
patrons outside London. One of the most
praiseworthy aspects of Mr Fawcett's
study, which began life as a thesis at the
University of East Anglia is that, unlike
some other scholars currently working in
the provincial field, he has not overstressed the importance of his numerous
discoveries. Perhaps this is because he is
not moved by any particular local patriotism (though a bias towards Norwich is
certainly discernible), and has bravely
attempted to cover the subject as a whole.
Quite clearly a great deal of work still remains to be done on the individual centres - work which is already in progress
in the case of several of them, including
Bristol, Derby, Norwich and York. Fawcett has confined his investigations to
those centres that held public exhibitions,
and thus cities such as Chichester and
Derby, where artists and patrons were
certainly active, are omitted altogether.
In general terms The Rise of English
527

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