Patchwork Classicism

Abstract

In September 1778, the Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli opened a letter to his friend James Northcote, then in Rome, with an apology: ‘You may and must think it unfriendly to have advanced to the borders of Switzerland without writing to you’.1 The two men had recently spent time together in Italy, where both had ventured to study the master works of Renaissance and Greco-Roman art. Fuseli excused himself on the grounds that, ‘what would have been friendly to you was Death to me, & self preservation is the first duty of the eighteenth century. Madness lies on the road I must think over to come at you.’ The letter attested to Fuseli’s reluctance to part from the artistic and social networks that he had developed over the course of several years in Italy. The overwrought phrasing was also characteristic of the artist; the ‘Madness’ to which Fuseli alluded would later become something of a refrain among his London critics. (Horace Walpole memorably wrote in the marginalia of a 1785 exhibition catalogue that Fuseli’s work was ‘shockingly mad, madder than ever, quite mad!’2) Northcote and Fuseli were not separated for long, though. By the end of 1780, both artists had returned to London, where they remained on largely friendly terms for much of their lives.