Velumnoctis - ✴ 𝖛𝖆𝖑𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖊 ✴

The figure of Melusine, at the 16th century sculpture garden of Bomarzo, Italy.

FUSELI, John Henry Swiss painter (b. 1741, Zürich, d. 1825, London) Romanticism The Nightmare 1790-91 Oil on canvas, 77 x 64 cm Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt

Fuseli did a total of four variations on The Nightmare, probably his best-known theme. The example in Frankfurt is the second variation. Though the motif was not inspired by any specific literary model, it would be unthinkable without a knowledge of ghost stories, especially English ones. The figure of the woman lying asleep or unconscious is extremely elongated and distorted, not because Fuseli could do no better, but in order to visualize the horrible oppressiveness of the gnome crouched on the woman’s breast, a nightmare and incarnation of unconscious terrors. In the gap between the curtains in the background appears the ghostly head of a blind horse, which anticipates the demoniac aspect given this animal especially in later French Romanticism.

That […] mixture of sensuality and cruelty which has always seemed to me to be the real “witches’ brew.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Medusa Reader, transl by Walter Kaufmann, (2013)

When sun goes down And moon gets high You can hear her cacklin’ Out in the night

Ablaze in Obscurity: Ana Mendieta’s ‘Silueta en Fuego’, 1976