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.

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