Fuseli: The Nightmare
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
At the intersection of art history, psychology, and the gothic imagination stands Johann Heinrich Fuseli's The Nightmare — one of the most arresting and enigmatic paintings of the eighteenth century, and a work that continues to unsettle and beguile in equal measure. Nicolas Powell's authoritative study chronicles the creation, context, and cultural afterlife of this extraordinary canvas, in which a sleeping woman is tormented by a leering incubus while a wild-eyed mare looms from the shadows — a vision that scandalized and electrified audiences at the Royal Academy in 1782 and secured Fuseli's reputation as the painter of the uncanny. Powell situcts The Nightmare within the rich intellectual currents of the Enlightenment and its shadowy counter-movement, Romanticism, arguing that Fuseli's genius lay in his ability to drag the irrational into the cold light of rational discourse. Drawing on literary sources from Shakespeare to Milton, and tracing the painting's profound influence on subsequent art, literature, and nascent psychoanalytic thought, this compact yet dense volume — part of the Art in Context series — presents a masterclass in close visual analysis. For anyone fascinated by the dark corridors where art, desire, and fear converge, Powell's account raises a question that lingers long after the final page: what exactly did Fuseli see in the dark?
Author: Nicolas Powell
Format: Hardback
Genre: History of arts
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
At the intersection of art history, psychology, and the gothic imagination stands Johann Heinrich Fuseli's The Nightmare — one of the most arresting and enigmatic paintings of the eighteenth century, and a work that continues to unsettle and beguile in equal measure. Nicolas Powell's authoritative study chronicles the creation, context, and cultural afterlife of this extraordinary canvas, in which a sleeping woman is tormented by a leering incubus while a wild-eyed mare looms from the shadows — a vision that scandalized and electrified audiences at the Royal Academy in 1782 and secured Fuseli's reputation as the painter of the uncanny. Powell situcts The Nightmare within the rich intellectual currents of the Enlightenment and its shadowy counter-movement, Romanticism, arguing that Fuseli's genius lay in his ability to drag the irrational into the cold light of rational discourse. Drawing on literary sources from Shakespeare to Milton, and tracing the painting's profound influence on subsequent art, literature, and nascent psychoanalytic thought, this compact yet dense volume — part of the Art in Context series — presents a masterclass in close visual analysis. For anyone fascinated by the dark corridors where art, desire, and fear converge, Powell's account raises a question that lingers long after the final page: what exactly did Fuseli see in the dark?