Fuseli, German Romantic

2006-2026

Fuseli: a German romantic, a lover of Shakespeare and the Gothic, friend of Blake, a painter of remarkable sensibility and psychological perception, a forerunner of the Symbolists. Nightmare, of which he did several versions, was something of an obsession. Perhaps he himself was subject to nightmares: the horrid hairy gnome on the chest, the wide-eyed mare, monsters from the forest the stuff of Freud and Jung but also of Greek myth and Keats. The Gothic revival of Fuseli’s day is with us again – The Da Vinci Code, Templars, shades of black.

Nightmare by Fuseli

The archetypal romantic

Fuseli was an extraordinary genius, a man of light and shade not given to understatement, a man educated in the light of  reason who painted dark emotions, a Swiss German who lived in England and who fell under the spell of Shakespeare and the Romantic movement. Extraordinarily influential in painting and sculpture from Blake to Canova, Constable and Turner but also in literature from Poe to even Jung who used the painting in   “Man and his Symbols”. The incubus seated on the chest is common to nightmare stories from Greek mythology onward and is often associated with Pan: there is the suggestion of suffocation, paralysis, sexual violation and of course terror – the essential ingredients of Gothic horror.

The Italian nightmare come true

In Italy, where conflict of interest has been replaced by fusion of interest, billionaire Berlusconi owns the three biggest private TV channels and as prime minister has virtual control over the three state channels. TV has become the modern day equivalent of bread and circuses or give the people what they want: a daily diet of football, games shows, chat shows and reality TV. Whether Italians actually have what they want is a moot point, what they definitely have is a dearth of choice, and quality. In fact what Juvenal wrote two thousand years ago in Satires is “The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things – bread and circuses.”

Lies, more lies and fake news

The nightmare is all around us. The powerful feed us sport and trash, but we are the supine audience – it is time to wake up, tune out, and turn off.
Though this picture was done in 2006, the nightmare of Italian TV and its fusion with Berlusconi’s political and business interests has been going on for decades. Thankfully Berlusconi is now no longer prime minister and there is something of a wind of change blowing through Italy – but that might just be the cold wind of recession.

Post Scriptum 2026, twenty years after

An adapted version of ‘Reality’ for the 2008 cover of The Journal

Twenty years ago in 2006 I created a jokey image called Reality based on Fuseli’s 1781 painting ‘Nightmare‘. It was subsequently used for the cover of The International Journal of Cultural Studies in 2008. Over the years as times and personalities came and went I adapted it several times. The first Trump government prompted one up-date after another, the second Trump regime has resulted in a flourish of updates so that now I have all but run out of space although I have made room by removing many of those who were in the original. However, Berlusconi remains, for although he died in 2023, he lives on now that Milan Malpensa Airport has been named after him. A convicted criminal, he was sentenced to four years, reduced to one after a pardon, and subsequently commuted to one year’s community service.

Berlusconi’s pal Putin who was there at the outset, is still there. I have renamed the picture Psychophants as being more in keeping with the age we live in.

Now there is yet another war going on in the Middle East, “Epic Fury”, initiated by Trump a mere ten days after he inaugurated his Board of Peace, the self same man who promised, “No more foreign wars, I have added Hegseth to the company of characters. I have also inserted the Nobel Peace Prize medallion which Trump possesses, but was not awarded.

As Sancho Panza says to Don Quixote, “You shall know the person by his company”.