Romanticism1781
Queen Katherine's Dream
Henry Fuseli
Curator's Eye
"Fuseli uses dramatic lighting and ethereal bodies to represent not a historical reality, but the psychological and spiritual state of a fallen queen toward her redemption."
A phantasmagorical vision illustrating the agony of Catherine of Aragon, where Fuseli's genius transforms a Shakespearean scene into a sublime and supernatural experience.
Analysis
This work illustrates a specific scene from Act IV of William Shakespeare's play "Henry VIII." Catherine of Aragon, the King's forsaken first wife, is dying. In her sleep, she is visited by a celestial vision of spirits bringing her a laurel wreath, a symbol of her unwavering virtue and her future eternal peace. Fuseli, master of "Dark Romanticism," moves away from the theatrical conventions of his time to dive into pure dreamlike states. He does not paint a room's decor, but the infinite space of the mind, where the boundary between life and death fades in favor of the sublime.
Iconographic analysis reveals a Catherine depicted in a posture of total surrender, contrasting with the rigidity of the figures surrounding her. The spirits floating above her are not traditional angels, but graceful entities influenced by Michelangelo's mannerism, whom Fuseli admired above all. This scene is crucial to understanding the shift from Neoclassicism to Romanticism: here, emotion and inner vision prevail over factual narration. The painter captures the precise moment where the temporal meets the divine.
Fuseli explores the concept of the "Sublime" here, as defined by Edmund Burke. Fear, grandeur, and the infinite converge in this funeral chamber transformed into a cathedral of light. Queen Catherine, though physically weakened, radiates a moral strength that the painter translates through an almost incandescent whiteness of her garments. It is a manifesto on human dignity in the face of the political and matrimonial injustice of Henry VIII, making Catherine a martyr of loyalty.
The work also belongs to the tradition of history painting, but with a fantastic touch unique to the artist. Fuseli uses the Shakespearean pretext to explore the mechanisms of the dream and the unconscious, long before the invention of psychoanalysis. Each floating figure seems to be an emanation of the queen's thoughts, creating a visual choreography that guides the viewer's gaze from the material world to the ethereal spheres.
Finally, the treatment of faces and hands is typical of the "Fuselian" style: elongated features, ecstatic expressions, and gestures suspended in time. The light does not come from a candle or a window but seems to emanate from the supernatural beings themselves, creating a violent contrast with the deep shadows at the bottom of the canvas. This management of chiaroscuro reinforces the theatrical and sacred aspect of the vision.
The most fascinating secret lies in the relationship between Fuseli and the famous actress Mary Siddons. Fuseli was obsessed with theatrical performance and painted this work with the gestures of the great tragediennes of his time in mind. It is said that the position of Catherine's arm was directly modeled on a pose Siddons used on stage to signify the transition to the afterlife, making this painting a visual archive of 18th-century dramatic art.
Another secret concerns the "spirits." In early sketches, Fuseli had envisioned much darker, almost demonic figures, reminiscent of his famous "Nightmare." However, to respect Shakespeare's text which speaks of "visions of peace," he had to radically transform his usual style to create these luminous figures. During restorations, it was discovered that beneath certain layers of white lie more tormented outlines, proof that the painter was fighting his own creative demons.
Fuseli's technique was often experimental and sometimes judged sloppy by his contemporaries. He sometimes used unstable pigment mixtures, seeking immediate effect rather than longevity. In "Queen Katherine's Dream," he used a particularly fine glazing technique for the spirits to give them a near-spectral transparency. This manufacturing secret explains why the figures seem to float "in front of" the canvas rather than being painted on it, a major technical innovation for the time.
The painting contains a hidden political message. In 1781, the position of the British monarchy was under scrutiny. By painting Catherine of Aragon, a Catholic queen unjustly treated by Henry VIII (founder of Anglicanism), Fuseli, of Swiss origin and theological training, slips in a subtle critique of the abuse of royal power and the betrayal of spiritual values in favor of personal ambitions, a hot topic in the London intellectual circles he frequented.
Finally, there is a persistent rumor that Fuseli ate raw pork at night to induce nightmares and more intense visions. While this may be romantic legend, the almost hallucinogenic intensity of this work suggests that the artist drew from altered states of consciousness to produce such powerful images, breaking with the Olympian calm advocated by his rivals at the Royal Academy.
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On which theoretical principle from Edmund Burke's philosophy does Fuseli rely to structure the pictorial space of this work?
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