Dido

Henry Fuseli painted Dido around 1781, depicting the Carthaginian queen from Virgil's Aeneid at a moment of intense emotional crisis — presumably the moment of Aeneas's abandonment or its aftermath. Fuseli's Dido embodies the Romantic figure of the passionate woman overwhelmed by feeling, her posture expressing the extremity of grief and rage that Virgil's narrative ascribes to her. The dramatic lighting and the figure's extravagant physical gesture are characteristic of Fuseli's approach to emotional subjects, which consistently sought the most extreme physical expression of psychological states rather than the classical restraint that his Neoclassical contemporaries preferred.

Fuseli renders Dido with characteristic intensity, using dramatic contrasts and elongated forms to convey the queen's anguish. The fiery setting and contorted pose create an image of consuming passion that pushes beyond Neoclassical restraint into proto-Romantic excess.