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

This paper was presented at a conference entitled ‘Literature and Politics–intermedial perspectives’ at the University of Berne in October 2023. I would like to express my gratitude to Sophie Stokes-Aymes, Anne-Cécile Guibard, Alice Breathe and Lukas Aresta for their corrections and remarks.

In Zurich the multitalented Füssli¹ was strongly influenced by two literature professors, Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger who promoted English sensualism against the ideals of French classicism.² Their claim that, next to the representation of the possible, the marvellous should find its way into literary and pictorial practice would particularly influence Füssli.³ They put this idea into practice by translating Milton and mostly forgotten medieval literature which made strong impressions on the young Füssli.⁴ This authentic interest for English literature clashed with the approximative German translations of Shakespeare and the very loose interpretations of the plays on the European mainland. Even though the 21 performances of Shakespeare’s plays staged between 1757 and 1760 were a major cultural event in eighteenth century Zurich, as the number of tickets sold proves,⁵ the German translation of Shakespeare by Wieland provoked harsh critique. Füssli wrote in a letter to Bodmer: ‘I wished Wieland would be consumed be a Swabian flame, before he touches on Shakespeare with unholy hands’.⁶ Moreover, the way of presenting Shakespeare on stage made Füssli rather unhappy. In contrast to English interpretations of Shakespearean plays, the European mainland adapted them quite massively to the French ideal of classicism. There were of course content-based adaptions, but also more pragmatic ones. The Elizabethan theatre allowed quick scene changes, which wasn’t possible in theatres with heavy backdrops.⁷ Füssli, who learned English early, which at the time was unusual in Switzerland,⁸ read Shakespeare in the original language and had therefore good reason to be dissatisfied with the European interpretation of Shakespeare.⁹

Füssli’s works show to what extent these misinterpretations of Shakespeare could be considered as an aesthetic shock which became a stimulating force for his ambitions in all the artforms he practiced throughout his artistic career.¹⁰ To this aesthetic background should be added the political one. During the Seven Years’ War, in which the French and the English fought each other from 1756 to 1763 in Europe and the colonies, performances of Shakespeare’s plays defy the classical dramatic unities (time, place, action) as well as the French rules of vraisemblance and bienséance, which one could translate as plausibility and decorum. According to the tradition of the Horatian precept ut pictura poesis, those rules were also applied to visual art.¹¹ In this context of rivalry, fans of Shakespeare would logically question those rules and turn into opponents of ‘political and literary absolutism’.¹² Shakespeare’s plays became a key element of the new English national identity.¹³ We will see that Füssli, who was called ‘Shakespeare’s painter’ by Lavater in a letter to Herder as early as 1772,¹⁴ detaches himself artistically from the classical rules. In considering Füssli’s oeuvre as the response to an aesthetic shock caused by classical misunderstandings of Shakespeare’s plays, we can see several dimensions of aesthetic subversion in his theoretical and artistic works. His life between two countries and the dual influences on his work of classicism ‘à la française’ and British sensualism may explain his choice of genre. Aphorisms stand mid-way between the forming of an idea and its literary development.

Füssli’s aphorisms express the relation between art and nation

According to the twentieth century Füssli scholar Eudo C. Mason, Füssli’s aphorisms are very classic and conventional, in the art historical tradition of Mengs and Reynolds.¹⁵ The main concepts use the aesthetic terminology of the Enlightenment.¹⁶ Mason points out the lack of more radical, dynamic, romantic ways of speaking about art as it had been practiced since the 1750s in Germany and later in England. This seems surprising because the first edition of the aphorisms was published in 1788 and the second extended version in 1818. In those intervening thirty years, Füssli continued working on the aphorisms and they became his favorite writing project.¹⁷ Mason presents Füssli as an old-fashioned classicist, at a time when new words and concepts were already circulating.¹⁸ It is possible to nuance Mason’s claim by taking a closer look at some of the aphorisms¹⁹ which explore the analogy of aesthetics and politics against the foreseeable, calculated and academic effects of art.

Aphorism 110 for example shows how critical Füssli was when it comes to artistic rules:

The epoch of rules, of theories, poetics, criticisms in a nation, will add to their stock of authors in the same proportion as it diminishes their stock of genius: their productions will bear the stamp of study, not of nature; they will adopt, not generate.²⁰

The clear link between poetics and nation shows that such a conception of literature can lead to cultural chauvinism. Füssli claims that less theory means more artistic freedom for the individual. The French, who are so attached to poetical theory as delineated by Boileau in his Art poétique, are implicitly characterized as incapable of producing artists of genius, as implied by ‘It diminishes their stock of genius.’ Aphorism 151 states the superiority of observation over academic precepts:

The rules of art are either immediately supplied by Nature herself, or selected from the compendiums of her students who are called masters and founders of schools. The imitation of Nature herself leads to style, that of the schools to manner²¹.

Superficially objective, the aphorism ranks a nature-based art production above academic training. Observe the repeated capital letter in ‘Nature’ that leads to ‘style’ in opposition to ‘manner’ in the quote. The emphasis on the difference between national poetics turns into an analogy in aphorism 130. Füssli finds a way to express those differences by means of political analogy as well. He uses moments in Roman history to illustrate the importance of knowing when to stop working on a piece of art:

He is a prince of artists and of men who knows the moment when his work is done. On this Apelles founded his superiority over his contemporaries; the knowledge when to stop, left Sylla nothing to fear, though disarmed; the want of knowing this, exposed Cæsar to the dagger of Brutus.²²

The phrase ‘prince of artists and of men’ establishes the analogy between art and politics, between the Greek painter Apelles and the Roman general Sylla. This is not the only aphorism to use examples from ancient history to illustrate an aesthetic observation. Number 147 puts the analogy of society and art into a concise form: ‘Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece, and the servant of Rome’.²³ The personification of art is a way to illustrate the dependency of art and nation. From Füssli’s point of view, the artistic phenomenon in all its aspects tells something about the society producing it. As an artist of the in-between, he is aware of differences and transformations from one aesthetic philosophy to another. In his paintings and drawings, the artist takes his distance to concepts of classicism by challenging the three classical unities, as well as the rules of vraisemblance and bienséance.

Füssli transgressing the unities

When it comes to Füssli’s main activity as a painter, we can observe how Anglo-French rivalry affects his art. Füssli challenges the prescriptive theory of the three unities of time, place and action. How does his oeuvre extend the conception of unity of time? Füssli wrote in aphorism 239 that the climax of the pictorial arts is reached ‘when they give wings to marble or canvas and from the present moment rays back to the past and forward to the future’.²⁴ This means that pictorial art has the potential to integrate past or future events in one canvas and therefore to undermine the unity of time. This form of pictorial foreshadowing or flashbacks can be examined by the means of intermedial narratology.²⁵ In his representations of the three witches from the play Macbeth, Füssli chose a supernatural and mystic moment.

It is a major moment in the first act of the play which corresponds to what he theorizes as a ‘middle moment’.²⁶ The witches predict that Macbeth will become king. He is gripped by the desire for power and glory. The three witches and their prophecy are putting mischief into operation. Lady Macbeth contributes to this fatal dynamic and pushes Macbeth to kill King Duncan. In the tribulations even his friend Banquo gets killed. Macbeth visits the witches a second time in the third act. Tyranny, madness and suicide are the consequences. How does Füssli transpose those elements in his painting? The witches’ index fingers and gazes unanimously point at the future assassin and illegitimate king. The two warriors are brought face to face with otherworldly apparitions whose pointing fingers challenge them directly. The gesture of putting a finger to their mouth, shared by all three witches, symbolizes their unanimous opinion. Macbeth and Banquo are also unanimously troubled by the witches’ predictions. The gesture symbolizes what a painting is for the viewer: a mute code calling for an interpretation through imagination, this highly valued activity that was theorized by Füssli’s early poetic teachers, Bodmer and Breitinger.²⁷

There are several versions of this scene. The first one, painted in 1783 (fig. 2), is a close-up of the witches, holding one finger to their lips while pointing with two fingers at something out of the frame. Here the light comes from the front: the witches’ gestures and facial expressions are perfectly highlighted. The death-heads hawkmoth flies in the direction pointed, materializing the disastrous prediction of the witches. The painter depicts the foreshadowing of future events through gazes, index fingers and the direction in which the insect flies. The parallels between gazes, gestures and light emphasize that the scene is treating the future, we could call it a pictorial foreshadowing.²⁸ Thanks to the spectator’s interpretation and literary knowledge about the play, the painter increases the temporal intensity. Füssli uses this kind of strategy to simultaneously convey a sense of present and future and to challenge the notion that the subject of a painting, even more so than that of a play, should be restricted to a single moment in time.

The other two classical unities of place and action are transgressed in the images of dreams particularly, as Füssli does in ‘Titania and Bottom’ (fig. 3), which represents a lot of figures from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The different figures and groups display several narrative layers which find their place around the two protagonists in the centre of the picture: Titania drugged by a love potion and Bottom transformed into a donkey. The figures belong to different spaces and actions which allow an intermedial reading of Füssli’s painting which transmutes a scene of a Shakespearean play into visual art.²⁹

Through imagination – the most important talent painters and poets must possess in the conception of Bodmer and Breitinger,³⁰ the canvas contains not only copies of the natural but also of the supernatural and of the marvellous. Füssli transposed it into theory in a lecture at the Royal Academy:

Form, in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelopes our senses, and its counterpart the invisible one that agitates our mind with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and the realm of invention; it discovers, selects, combines the possible, the probable, the known, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth and novelty, at once.³¹

One might argue that the classical rules had little impact in England. Indeed, theorists such as Samuel Johnson or John Dryden dismissed them as unessential for drama. The distance between literary practice and the ideals of French classicism increased in France too: in the period of anglophilia in the mid-eighteenth century, leading authors like Voltaire and Diderot also explored new ways of literary expression.³²

Another principle linked to the three unities is what the French call vraisemblance. In English we could translate it as ‘likelihood’ or ‘plausibility’ meaning that a representation should be believable, intelligible, should stick to the real world, and should be comprehensible within the shared cultural background of the spectators.

Füssli’s art passes over concepts of vraisemblance and bienséance

The transgression of the principle of likelihood (vraisemblance) is evident. The most striking in the interpretations of Shakespearean plays by Füssli is his preference for the supernatural appearances like ghosts, witches and fairies. Since his first sketches Füssli loves ghosts; especially in combination with the classical elements which coexist with the supernatural, as in one of his early drawings ‘The apparition appears to Dion wielding a broom,’ or less repetitively ‘Spectrum Dioneum’ (fig. 4) from 1768. The drawing clearly indicates the classical source; from his reading of Plutarch’s ‘Life of Dion’ Füssli chooses a supernatural episode. The chosen moment of the apparition shows a fury, a creature from Greek mythology, wielding a broom, her hair resembling flames, imitating the line of beauty theorized in the figura serpentinata in a long tradition since Michelangelo.³³ This classic element can be considered a first sign of the influence of Joshua Reynolds who’s known for his admiration for the Renaissance masters and his collection of Michelangelo drawings.³⁴ Reynolds’s influence is important for a whole generation of artists which was deeply inspired by the “immediacy of Michelangelo’s art that ignited their burning ambition’.³⁵ Reynolds suggests to them not to imitate but to admire and only to borrow from Michelangelo as practice.³⁶ Füssli perfected through his career this new pictorial language culminating in his ambitious Michelangelesque ‘Milton Gallery’³⁷ finished in 1799. The drawing of ‘Spectrum Dioneum’ is part of this evolution of Füssli’s art.

Beside the classical forms, the supernatural is omnipresent in this drawing. The classical and the gothic do not coexist harmoniously. The closed eyes of the sculptures contrast with the scared opened eyes and mouth of Dion. The harmony of the drapery exposed in Dion’s cape and in the curtain behind him changes into irregularity in all objects that are about to be transformed. Dion is surrounded by neo-Roman furniture that gives place to supernatural figures. In an excellent article, Laurent Bury lists several other elements which show the painters predilections for supernatural apparitions.³⁸ The clash of supernatural and classical elements is symbolized by the terrific head of a snail emerging, mouth wide open, next to the fury wielding a broom, the dolphin at the corner of the table, the face of boar as a base of a Greek vase in the background and the pillow supporting Dion’s right foot, which seems to be coarsened into a paw.³⁹ Those monstrous transformations within a classical framework create a new aesthetic space of transgression.

The last classical principle is bienséance or decorum in which the rules of politeness express the respect for morality and norms shared by a part of society. Füssli also transgresses this ideal, especially in his drawings of dominant female bodies with extravagant hairstyles (fig. 5-7). Those drawings do not depict idealized, graceful female bodies in the academic style exercised by copying Greek statues. But they display women in corsets, in ribbons, wearing dresses with ornamented sleeves and pointed shoes, their heads topped with complex hairstyles.⁴⁰ David H. Solkin characterizes these drawings as ‘secretive and vaguely threatening’ and as blatantly violating moral rules which contrasts with the submissive, eroticized female bodies represented by painters such as Boucher, Fragonard and Ingres.⁴¹ The rococo and libertine painters Boucher and Fragonard paint women exposed to male gazes. Ingres, formed in the cercle of David, paints female portraits and odalisques in a conventional manner. This is not what Füssli does in the same historical period. He depicts socially provocative female figures.⁴² The flamboyant hairstyles, the challenging gazes show confidence, either by facing the spectators or by ignoring them artistically; the women control the erotic and mystical ambiance.

Conclusion

The aesthetic shock caused by European mainland misinterpretation of Shakespeare is one possible explanation of Füssli’s lifelong aversion towards classical and dogmatic art conceptions. As an aphorist he theorizes his opposition to academic notions of art and indicates his conviction that national particularities bring out more or less brilliant ways of aesthetic expression. And he puts his theories into action: he systematically undermines the three classical unities and transgresses the ideals of polite society in his art. The fact that an Anglo-Swiss artist disobeyed all these rules in his entire oeuvre from his early drawings to his late aphorisms shows his will to elaborate new principles based on the potential of imagination.

Bibliography

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BURY Laurent, « L’homme qui aimait les spectres », Sillages critiques, 8, 2006, p. 85-99.

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SUMMERS, David, « Maniera and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata », The Art Quarterly, vol. xxxv, 3, 1972, p. 269-301.

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Notes