Two Heads of Damned Souls from Dante's "Inferno" (recto and verso)
Henry Fuseli·1770–78
Historical Context
Fuseli's Two Heads of Damned Souls from Dante's Inferno from 1770-78 reflects his early engagement with Dante's epic — a text that would become increasingly important to European Romantic culture over the following decades but was relatively neglected in the 1770s compared to Milton and Shakespeare. Fuseli was drawn to the Inferno's extremity of suffering and its psychological intensity, qualities that aligned with his own interest in the most extreme states of human experience as pictorial subjects. These head studies — isolated fragments of the condemned, their faces expressing different modes of eternal torment — reflect his characteristic approach to the human face as a vehicle for depicting states of intense psychological disturbance.
Technical Analysis
Fuseli's technique is characteristically bold and expressionistic, with distorted, anguished facial features rendered in dramatic chiaroscuro. The heads emerge from dark backgrounds with ghostly, spectral intensity. The brushwork is rapid and forceful, creating forms that convey extreme psychological and physical suffering.
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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