Sympathetic Spectators: Henry Fuseli's Nightmare and Emma Hamilton's Attitudes

• Autores: Andrei Pop
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 34, Nº. 5, 2011, págs. 934-957
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1782), unusual in the artist’s oeuvre and in the painting of its time as the public visualization of a private mental state, can be made sense of in light of late eighteenth-century practices and theories of privacy and of the agency that minds can exert on the world and on each other. By comparison with another dream-like performance, Emma Hamilton��s Attitudes, and informed by David Hume’s theory of sympathy, which was designed to explain the social communicability of mental states, a reading of The Nightmare emerges which shows that it did not aim to make visible dream imagery, but to induce spectators to have or feel as if they had an analogous experience. The painting is thus typical of the formative stage of a modern understanding of public life as a contingent association of private lives. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.