Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 2 of 3)Spooner, Shearjashub
History
Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 2 of 3)
Spooner, Shearjashub
Art -- Anecdotes; Artists -- Anecdotes
The following critique from the pen of Allan Cunningham, gives a good
idea of Fuseli's abilities as an artist. "His main wish was to startle
and astonish. It was his ambition to be called Fuseli the daring and the
imaginative, the illustrator of Milton and Shakspeare, the rival of
Michael Angelo. His merits are of no common order. He was no timid or
creeping adventurer in the region of art, but a man peculiarly bold and
daring--who rejoiced only in the vast, the wild, and the wonderful, and
loved to measure himself with any subject, whether in the heaven above,
the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. The domestic and
humble realities of life he considered unworthy of his pencil, and
employed it only on those high or terrible themes where imagination may
put forth all her strength, and fancy scatter all her colors. He
associated only with the demi-gods of verse, and roamed through Homer,
and Dante, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in search of subjects worthy of
his hand; he loved to grapple with whatever he thought too weighty for
others; and assembling round him the dim shapes which imagination
readily called forth, he sat brooding over the chaos, and tried to bring
the whole into order and beauty. His coloring is like his design;
original; it has a kind of supernatural hue, which harmonizes with many
of his subjects--the spirits of the other world and the hags of hell are
steeped in a kind of kindred color, which becomes their natural
characters. His notion of color suited the wildest of his subjects; and
the hue of Satan and the lustre of Hamlet's Ghost are part of the
imagination of those supernatural shapes."
FUSELI'S MILTON GALLERY, THE CHARACTER OF HIS WORKS, AND THE PERMANENCY
OF HIS FAME.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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