Male nude and seated hermit (recto); Male nude (verso)

The son of the painter Johann Caspar Füssli, Henry Fuseli first studied theology and literature and only later decided to become an artist. He developed a dramatic, individual style with a focus on human psychology, an early manifestation of the Romanticism that would prevail in the early nineteenth century. His works consist mainly of history paintings with subjects of his own invention (including his famous Nightmare) or from Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante. The nude in this drawing is adapted from Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, and the inscription is a line from the Ugolino story in Dante’s Inferno that describes the hills, “because of which the Pisans cannot see Lucca.” The line must have come to Fuseli’s mind because the hills that Dante describes rise above the plain of Cascina, where the battle that Michelangelo depicted took place. The seated hermit seems unrelated to either the nude or the Ugolino story.