Two Heads of Damned Souls from Dante's "Inferno" (recto and verso)

Art Institute of Chicago

Two Heads of Damned Souls from Dante's "Inferno" (recto and verso)

Henry Fuseli (Swiss, active in England, 1741–1825)LinkedCulture matchlcp-51a294594c6f

Date
1770–78
Medium
Oil on canvas
Culture
England
Department
Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Institution
Art Institute of Chicago
Object ID
116101

From the Art Institute of Chicago record

Henry Fuseli created the expressive head studies on each side of this unprimed canvas using strategically placed highlights and deep shadows built up of thin washes. The artist probably painted these oil sketches while living in Italy between 1770 and 1778. Both images were engraved as illustrations for Johann Caspar Lavater’s influential book on physiognomy, a popular pseudoscience that assessed an individual’s character based on their outward appearance. According to that text, the heads were inspired by the damned souls in Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s epic Inferno .

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Provenance & credit

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Credit line
The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection
Provenance
Sold Puttick and Simpson, London, October 23, 1914, no. 236, to William F. E. Gurley (died 1943), Chicago [part of a group of nineteen works by Fuseli acquired by Gurley as nos. 235 and 236 of this sale, described under the heading of “Original Drawings by H. Fuseli” as “Illustrations to Milton’s Poems.”]; bequeathed to the Art Institute, 1943 [they were not individually accessioned when they arrived at the Art Institute, but the heads can be identified from Gurley’s index cards preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings]; transferred from the Department of Prints and Drawings to the Department of European Painting, 1990; accessioned, 1992.

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Object type
AAT300033618

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