Video: How a famous artist painted his own fear, and for this he was called a madman
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The Swiss Johann Heinrich Fussli spent most of his life in England, where he studied painting, graphics, theory and art history. But the artist is known for mystical canvases, which depict nightmares and fantastic visions that torment millions of people.
For a long time, a nightmare (or mara) was considered an evil spirit that comes in the dark and strangles people. This demon can take many forms, including the most terrible creatures. In Western culture, the nightmare was often associated with a blind horse, which was considered to be something satanic.
For many years, this topic of night fears was an unspoken taboo among people of art, until at the end of the 18th century, a series of works by Johann Heinrich Füssli, a Swiss artist representing the Gothic movement in modern art, appeared.
He spent most of his life in London under the name Henry Fuseli, where he left behind more than 800 canvases and drawings. His work anticipated the further popularity of 19th century Victorian fairytale painting, which combined folklore imagery, hallucinations and fairytale plots.
The most famous work of Henry Fuseli is the painting "Nightmare". The canvas depicts a sleeping girl, on whose chest a crumpled evil demon is sitting. A blind horse peeks out of the folds of fabric in the background. There are four known versions of "Nightmare" by Fuseli, as well as several works by his followers.
These canvases depict the fear experienced by 5 to 20 percent of people in their lives. A phenomenon called sleep paralysis occurs when a person falls asleep or wakes up. At this moment, he can see and hear, but is unable to move. At the same time, there is strong pressure on the chest, suffocation. Edge vision can detect the presence of someone else in the room. The body can give out hallucinations that are perceived as reality.
People of past centuries could not explain these unusual phenomena, they could only describe them. And Fuseli succeeded best of all, whose work has always been on the verge of fantasy and reality. Horace Walpole, the author of the first Gothic novel, actually said that the artist was "amazingly insane, insane as never before, insane completely and completely."
Nevertheless, the phantasmagoric "Nightmare" has attracted the attention of many people for two centuries. It is known that a reproduction of the painting hung in the reception room of Sigmund Freud. But few people know that the famous psychoanalyst, specialist in fear he himself suffered from numerous phobias.
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