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"Some unlock the doors of art with golden keys, and with honor they sit among the demigods of fame; others force them open with violence and with wild impetuosity leap onto the pedestal. Thousands fail in their endeavor, making their keys ring useless and banging vainly against the immovable doors" (J.H. Fussli)
Fussli's work was forgotten and neglected for about a century until surrealists and impressionists encouraged its rediscovery by recognizing affinities with it. The works of the painter, originally from Zurich but who moved to London from 1779 taking the name Henry Fuseli, have as their main source of inspiration three authors of theater and literature: Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare. The painting style is characterized by bodies in tension and monstrous deformations, depicted in unknown, indefinable places, without perspective. Environments that refer to mystery and the obscure, populated by monsters, dwarfs, and specters, which the artist uses as a tool for social criticism of the high society of the time and the intellectual circles devoted to esotericism and occult practices. Through allegorical figures, Fussli creates mirrors where each can see reflected their own superstitions, distorted fantasies, and deepest fears.
The surrealist masterpiece of Fussli is, without a doubt, "The Nightmare." Today housed at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the painting was created in 1781 and exhibited, the following year, at the Royal Academy, causing a sensation and inaugurating a new model of image, loaded with symbolism. The theme of the painting will be revisited five more times by the artist, who will create several versions of it.
The peculiarity of the painting is the representation, besides the young woman sleeping sprawled on the bed with her head reclined backward, in a position certainly not comfortable but which, along with the suffering and exhausted expression, reveals her restlessness, of the materialization of the dream. Indeed, a little monster rests on the woman's abdomen, staring into the darkness with an expression that is not reassuring at all. From the dark room, whose unnatural light amplifies the emotional aspect and the dark tones enhance its visionary quality, emerges a mare with white eyes. This solution, which is connected to the English expression to indicate the nightmare (nightmare= night+mare), exploits an iconographic tradition that condenses dark forces in the animal's gaze.
The dwarf and the mare's head seem to condense the desires of violence and cruelty inherent in the hidden depths of the human psyche. In this way, Fussli, linked to the romantic movement of Sturm and Drang (storm and stress), in considering dreams a personification of feeling, anticipates the themes of the unconscious developed, a century later, by Sigmund Freud who, in his Viennese study, is said to have owned one of the versions of the Swiss artist's masterpiece.
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