The Shakespearean painter Johann Heinrich Füssli defying French classicism in theory and practice

Buettler, Emmanuel (2023). The Shakespearean painter Johann Heinrich Füssli defying French classicism in theory and practice (Submitted). Rubriques(1)

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The main goal of this contribution is to show to what extent the pictorial arts display narrative structures. Since painters and authors enjoyed the same rhetorical education, at least until the 19th century, it is plausible that they display rhetorical elements in their productions. There is a paradox between a painting which fixes a specific moment in time (cf. Lessing’s Laocoon) and a narrative text which can represent time dynamically. A literary approach can reduce this fundamental discrepancy. Pictorial references to literary texts create narrativity primarily either by indexing or by inducing storytelling. We will focus on paintings that are inspired by a literary text or that re-enact a scene. Such an intermedial approach is particularly appropriate for “Shakespeare’s painter” Henry Fuseli who produced several works with an explicit literary, particularly theatrical, reference. In Fuseli’s paintings narrativity is realized on the formal, the semantic, and the content level, specifically in his paintings containing groups of three figures. The movements and gestures of figures can induce narrativity, and action can be indicated by implementing moments of foreshadowing. Based on Fusely, the same method of searching specific narrative structures in French 18th century historical paintings, retraces the influence of literary culture on pictorial arts.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature > Literary Studies

UniBE Contributor:

Büttler, Emmanuel

Subjects:

800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 840 French & related literatures
400 Language > 440 French & related languages

Language:

French

Submitter:

Emmanuel Büttler

Date Deposited:

14 Nov 2023 14:59

Last Modified:

26 Apr 2024 07:53

Related URLs:

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/188913

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/188913

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