| Description |
This thesis examines the disquieting paradoxes of neo-classical form in Henry Fuseli's The Death of Dido (1781). Drawing his subject matter from Virgil's Aeneid, Fuseli depicts a voluptuous and seemingly ideal feminine figure that recalls the Nike of Samothrace (c. 220-190 BCE) in all her drama and dynamic legibility. Yet classical coherence is simultaneously undermined by a series of dramatic and jarring juxtapositions: light abuts shade, color distorts line, gesture contradicts pose. The formal and rhetorical tensions of the painting likewise drew polarized commentary when it first appeared at the Royal Academy exhibition at Somerset House in 1781. Some critics likened it to the sublime rhetoric of Longinus, while others lamented what they described as the ungraceful, even vulgar composition of the painting's main figure. Fuseli's Dido is-both literally and figuratively-a body divided. Sitting midway between classical tradition and modern form, Dido's figure is disrupted not only by the suicidal act that forms the dramatic center of the story, but moreover by the formal juxtapositions and figural shifts in the painting. Looking to a series of private and public negotiations in which Fuseli was engaged at the time of the painting's execution, I argue that the paradoxes of a "new classicism" find particularly salient expression in Fuseli's art, where fetish appeal vies with classical grace and decay becomes the inevitable complement to ideal beauty. I also look to Virgil's text; and secondary scholarship to show that the Dido character has historically been problematic for modern artists, often dealt with only in part; she is either a civil martyr or an unstable temptress. Lastly, I discuss Fuseli's Dido figure as one sacrificed on the pyre of social change, as she embodies a very real difficulty for eighteenth-century English society, as an intrusive female form on the traditionally male academic scene. |
