Lucia Panascì. [The Lecture XII by Henry Fuseli - On the Present State of the Art, and the Causes which Check its Progress]

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Lucia Panascì
La Lecture XII di Johann Heinrich Füssli.
Sullo stato attuale dell’arte e sulle cause che ne ostacolano il progresso
[The Lecture XII by Henry Fuseli. On the Present State of the Art, and the Causes which Check its Progress]

Profili estetici e transizioni del gusto nell’Inghilterra tra Settecento e Ottocento
[Aesthetic profiles and taste shifts in England between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries]

Introduction by Piergiacomo Petrioli
Contursi Terme (Salerno), Il Fauno, 2015

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, Detroit Institute of Arts
Source: Wikimedia Commons

I confess that I would have liked to discuss this volume with the authoress, Ms Lucia Panascì. Perhaps, it has been her university dissertation, even if there are only a few of them having such a depth. It is dedicated to the twelfth Lesson held by Henry Fuseli at the Royal Academy in 1823; the last of his lectures, which he gave to draw some experience from his life, just before he left teaching and two years before his death. The fate wanted I could not do it, and I think that the best tribute that can be paid to an ill-fated person  is reviewing the work without any "positive bias" linked to her human history. 

James Northcote. Portrait of Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1778, London, National Portrait Gallery
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Lectures of Henry Fuseli are virtually unknown in Italy. It is a body of twelve conferences, held at the Royal Academy (where the Swiss artist and theorist taught, in a time period that goes from 1801 to 1823. Fuseli – who was born with the surname Füssli, but changed it to make it pronounceable in English – personally oversaw the publication of the first three Lectures (in 1801), while all the twelve were published together only posthumously. They were edited by John Knowles, as part of the Life and writings of Henri Fuseli, a three-volume work collecting the artist's writings (1831). The Lectures were accompanied by the Aphorisms chiefly relative to the fine arts (published also in Italian in 1989) and by a few passages from what was, in fact, his most important project in terms of study, i.e. the preparation of the History of Art in the School of Italy). Fuseli’s Lectures have never been fully translated into Italian. Yet already in 1802, that is only a year after they were released, the first three ones were translated and published by Luigi Especo, with the title Discorsi tre sulla pittura, recitati dal celebre Errico Fuseli nella R. Accademia di Londra. Since then, nothing, apart from fragments in other texts dedicated to him and the publication, in 2004, of the annotated translation of the third lesson, curated by Patrizia Lischi.

The twelfth lesson, in particular, entitled On the Present State of the Art, and the Causes which Check its Progress had never been translated in Italian before. Lucia Panascì has taken on the burden of translating it, detting up the apparatus of notes and prefacing it with some introductory chapters that aim to contextualize the work and to shed more light on the figure of Füssli.

A very commendable effort, indeed. I have no difficulty saying that, despite some interpretations that, personally, let me doubtfully, my knowledge of the artist has emerged definitely enriched and even more better delineated from this reading. 

Henry Fuseli, The Artist Moved to Despair at the Grandeur of Antique Fragments, 1778-1780, Kusnthaus Zurich
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A cursed painter, an impeccable academic

The fame accompanying Fuseli has been the one of a cursed painter, a man who painted on canvas the nightmares haunting his dreams, a restless and uncomfortable artist, living in distress and propagating the same anxiety. A romantic or, if you prefer, a pre-romantic, who believed in the genius and not in the rules. However, Fuseli (1741-1823) was, also by birth, above all a man of the eighteenth century. Moreover, this cursed painter, in fact, made a respectable academic career, entering the Royal Academy in 1790, becoming professor of painting in 1799, and then conservator, and in fact devoting himself to teaching until his death. He turned therefore to be professor in the place where, by definition, the same rules were taught which he denied. In the famous caricature entitled Titianus Redivivus, where James Gillray mocks the members of the Royal Academy after they had been deceived by a simple girl (Mary Ann Provis) who claimed to be in possession of a manuscript that contained the technical secrets of Venetian painting [1], Fuseli is pictured caricaturely (albeit in a secondary position) as a member of the academic body, and certainly not as a rebel fighting the system.

In fact - and this is the main contribution of Ms Panascì - if it makes no sense to identify a strict chronological break between Enlightenment and Romanticism, also considering the latter as the negation of the first is not helpful. The reality - as usual - is much more complex, and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment contains the romantic germs of the nineteenth century within it. Even more so in the case of Fuseli. While he was born in Zurich by Johann Caspar the Elder, who was in turn an artist and art critic of rigid classicist observance, he was however friend and frequent guest of a circle of intellectuals who gave life to the Swiss branch of the mid-eighteenth century Sturm und Drang movement. In principle, Füssli grew in these circles, which inaugurated talking about the originality of genius and the rediscovery of the dark side of the people. He took shape under the shadow of Rousseau's philosophy on the one hand and of the boundless love for the great poets of the past, from Homer to Dante, from Shakespeare to Milton. The artist moved to England in 1764, after being expelled from his native Zurich due to the accusations of corruption he directed against high personalities of the town and after having toured all over Europe. England must have been like a revelation for him, with press freedom, the wealth of artistic and literary debates, the opportunity given to artists to express the most "extremist" ideas (that will bring him, not by coincidence, to support the French Revolution until the disillusion and the refusal dictated by the beheading of Louis XVI). So, after making a long Italian experience between 1770 and 1778, becoming a reference personality in Rome for those who carried out the Grand Tour, Fuseli went back to England and decided to remain there. He became a friend and admirer of Joshua Reynolds, the artistic personality of reference in those years, but he certainly did not shine because of a malleable character and natural kindness. He was recognized as the most cultivated art historian (not as an artist) in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, but he was not loved by either the general public nor by many other artists. On the one hand, there were those who considered him too "emancipated”; on the other hand, those (like William Blake) who criticised his choice to fight an opportunistic battle for the English art renewal, while staying inside the establishment (the Academy) that was the cause of the same crisis. 

Henry Fuseli, Thor battering the Mildgard Serpent,
Fuseli's diploma work for the Royal Academy (1790).
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Lectures on Painting

It is just obvious that, when drafting first and giving then his Lectures at the Royal Academy, Fuseli had before him a very well-known example, that of Joshua Reynolds and his Discourses on art, delivered to students of the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790. Also Fuseli, in fact, produced a real curriculum sorted by subject, starting from the first two conferences, dedicated to ancient and modern art respectively, and then talking about invention in the third and fourth, composition in the fifth, and, again, chiaroscuro (VI), drawing (VII), fresco (VIII), and oil painting (IX), proportion (X), and then finishing with two more specific lessons in which he dwelled with Leonardo's Last Supper (XI) and precisely with the causes that hinder the advancement of the arts.

Henry Fuseli, The Creation of Eve from Milton's Paradise Lost ), 1793. Kunsthalle Hamburg
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Lecture XII

The conference on the state of the art impresses with its dramatic pessimism, most likely due to the fact that it was pronounced at the end of life, when the artist was eighty years old, and probably was feeling that his strength was about to fail. Fuseli refused (or minimized) the views which were shared by Winckelmann, according to which Greece experienced the perfection in the art because of the favourable climatic conditions, and argued that there had been two essential conditions that led ancients to excel and which - even in his day – would be necessary to hope getting back on the right path: Religion and Liberty. The closure against any fashion is total: "In order to thrive, art must not only feel free, but should reign; if it is dominated, if it accommodates the dictates of fashion or the whims of a patron, then its end is near" (p. 137). Religion was another theme weighing heavily in Fuseli’s life. We cannot hide the fact that his father initiated Johann Heinrich to the ecclesiastical career (when in fact the eldest son, Johann Rudolph the young, was destined to art) and that the artist was briefly a Zwingli pastor. The statements of a Swiss Zwingli born, who lived in an Anglo-Saxon land, are in some respects highly surprising: "Let no one to whom truth and its propagation are dear, believe or maintain that Christianity was inimical to the progress of the arts, which probably nothing else could have revived. Nothing less than Christian enthusiasm could give that lasting and energetic impulse whose magical result we admire in the works that illustrate the period of genius and their establishment"(pp. 137-9). Religion offered the chance to put the artist in a position to operate for the greater glory of God; hence the Michelangelos, the Raphaels, the Titians; instead, when the driving force of religious commissions run out, private clients took over, relegating the artist in a semi-artisan status, and forcing him to follow fashion. It is hardly possible that Fuseli ignored that these words - I repeat – would probably made it difficult to digest the artist's arguments in an Anglican context. Forty years later, when Mary Philadelphia Merrifield published the first English translation of Cennino’s Libro dell'Arte, she felt the need to apologize for leaving such a vast space to Catholic superstitions.

Overall, one gets the picture of a man who refused modernity, but who, in fact, lived in the nostalgia of an idyllic and very improbable past. To take the view - as Fuseli did - that “the age of Julius II and Leo X demanded genius for its own sake and found it " (in Michelangelo and Raphael) is honestly difficult to say, attributing to the two Popes an ideal impetus that is at real odd with history (and it is worth remembering how it was just the behaviour of these Popes to trigger the Reformation).

Henry Fuseli, Kriemild and Gunther, 1807, Kunsthaus Zurich
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Academy

How to deal with the issue? How to cope with the decline of art and prevent it would perish? Here it is perhaps the most important aspect of the conference. Füssli showed all his pessimism, expressing a contemptuous judgment concerning the Accademy, but at the same time justifying its existence; and, essentially, he explained his choice of life, his being "against" the system, by battling it from within:

"Soon after the middle of the sixteenth century, when the gradual evanescence of the great luminaries in art began to alarm the public, an idea started at Florence of uniting the most eminent artists into a society, under the immediate patronage of the Grand Duke, and the title of Academy. [...] All [editor's note Academies], whether public or private, supported by patronage or individual contribution, were and are symptoms of art in distress, monuments of public dereliction and decay of taste [...]" (p. 155). Academic teaching, in substance, is useless. The system of recognition of academic diplomas is devoid of results, if not harmful. "The effect of honours and rewards has been insisted on as a necessary incentive to artists: they ought, indeed, to be, they sometimes are, the results of superior powers; but accidental or partial honours cannot create genius, nor private profusion supply public neglect". And yet, with all their evils, the Academies "are at the same time the asylum of the student, the theatre of his exercises, the repositories of the materials, the archives of the documents of our art, whose principles their officers are bound now to maintain, and for the conservation of which they are responsible to posterity, undebauched by the flattery, heedless of the sneers, undismayed by the frown of their own time"(p. 155).

We cannot do anything - says Füssli - to revive the art in a time dominated by the lack of religious sense and by fashion. "But if the severity of these observations, this denudation of our present state moderates our hopes, it ought to invigorate our efforts for the ultimate preservation, and, if immediate restoration be hopeless, the gradual recovery ... If it is out of our power to furnish the student’s activity with adequate practice, we may contribute to form his theory; and criticism founded on experimentation, instructed by comparison, in possession of the labours of every epoch of art, may spread the genuine elements of taste, and check the present torrent of affectation and stupidity." (p. 153-5). Can an eighty-year old man, clearly disappointed by his human parable, and clearly sided against every novelty as "fashion", delineate a more modern agenda? A program in which the Academy is no longer the school of the design of the nude, but a place where one can discuss criticism? Is it reasonable to see here an anticipation of the birth of art history as a separate discipline? With all due caution, I think so. Of course, one can think those of Fuseli are simply provocations (the man was not new to such attitudes); however, we must remember that between 1798 and 1808 Fuseli worked on the History of Art in the School of Italy, clearly inspired by the first edition of Lanzi’s Storia pittorica (Pictorial history), and that he spent words of appreciation for him; moreover, one of his closest friends was the famous collector William Roscoe, who designed the English translation of Lanzi’s work, then completed by his son a few decades later.

Johann Heinrich Füssli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Diggars, 1810-1812. London, Tate Britain
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Art thefts

There is still one aspect, in Fuseli’s conference, which is worth emphasizing. We have seen how art can thrive only thanks to Religion and Liberty. The author states that, in principle, it cannot be excluded that the role played by religion (in terms of commissioning client) can be replaced by some large public institution. But immediately he clarifies: "By a great establishment, I mean one that will employ the living artists, raise among them a spirit of emulation dignified by the objects of their occupation, and inspire the public with that spirit; not an ostentatious display of ancient and modern treasures of [artistic] genius, accumulated by the hand of conquest or of rapine" (p. 145). The reference to the experience of the Napoleonic requisitions is obvious. "Let none fondly believe that the importation of Greek and Italian works of art is an importation of genius, taste, establishments and means of encouragement; without transplanting and disseminating these, the gorgeous accumulation of technic monuments is no more than a dead capital, and, instead of a benefit, a check on living art" (p. 147). Fuseli, therefore, came to the same conclusions set out three decades earlier by Quatremère de Quincy in his Letters to Miranda. But if the latter took a stance against the requisitions elaborating the theory of context, namely that the works should stay where they were created because they are part of an "open air museum" that is fed even by the air and the light of these places, Fuseli (who had lived in Rome for eight years) seems to have no such qualms. In general - he says - the fact that Rome is plundered of his works may be the just penalty of retaliation for what was done with the Greeks in antiquity. The problem, however, is that the genius and the art does not pop up by collecting works, with more or less legal methods, but, in fact, restoring the social conditions to ensure that the exercise of art would recover the characters of ethics and of freedom that justify its existence.

NOTES

[1] Si veda in questo blog Giovanni Mazzaferro, Indiana Jones and the 'Venetian Secret'; from the Provis Manuscript to Mary Philadelphia Merrifield.

http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2014/12/leonardo-da-vinci.html