As the Baroque period faded out, the Rococo artists and architects added more and more flare and elegance to their work. Rococo buildings and rooms were elaborately decorated to what is now thought to be the most elaborate decorated and detailed work. The paintings that came out of the Rococo period had a softer quality then paintings had been before, and were becoming more and more beautiful and flowery. From the Rococo time period, the portraits and depictions of people or events became more dramatic in both their presentation and the content. Stories that were once shown with a delicate and carefully planned manor are now shown with emotional drama, and tend to portray a story or an event of something, as opposed to a portrait.
John Henry Fuseli was one of the most well known artists from this period, and got his influence from his study of theology, philosophy and Winckelmann’s neoclassical aesthetics (Stokstad, 927). Fuseli also spent a good amount of time studying in Rome, where he spent many years studying the art and statues of the area, including many of Michelangelo’s pieces of work, which also helped to influence Fuseli’s work later in his life as well. Even though Fuseli got his start with Romantic History paintings, he seemed to really enjoy and put more work into his dramatized work based off of works by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton (Stokstad, 928).
Fuseli’s dramatized work is almost haunting. The way he presents his work to be in almost a dream state forces the viewer to be put into his dream world. He achieves this by using darker colors, presents the subject in a painterly manor, and he tends to hide things in the background, and leaves his main subject in a lighted area.
A piece of work that I find most interesting by John Henry Fuseli is his depiction of The Creation of Eve. He portrays the story of God giving life to Eve with Adam sprawled nearby. According to Luisa Calè, in their book, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators,’ The Creation of Eve was made to go along with a series, to go with another painting, The Dream of Eve and are meant to be displayed next to each other. The two are very similar, the main difference being that in The Dream, Eve is being given life by what is presumably the devil. In both these pieces, we can see Michelangelo’s influence from his Creation of Adam; first in The Dream, we see the same diagonal composition between the devil giving Eve life; and in The Creation of Eve, the slumped bodies and the outreach between Adam, Eve and the image above. Calè talks about this figure in her book as well, saying that because Fuseli presented the figure in such a way that it was left ambiguous. For the people who believed in the biblical story of the creation, the figure was God or even the Son of God. The versitleness of this figure aloud the presentation to smooth over the argument of the story of creation for the people of the time, who were still recovering from the reformation. This was helpful to Fuseli because of his dependency of an income of the people and what they wanted to buy.
I really like the way Fuseli presents his subjects. Here, it makes sure we know that we are focusing on Adam and Eve, but mainly on Eve to make sure we know that the portrait is about Eve, and not Adam. I appreciate that he made the figure creating Eve so versatile. It makes it so anyone who as some sort of a creation story able to relate to this piece of work.
