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Summary

The fourth chapter offers an extended conclusion that examines an international controversy ignited by the guillotine that revolved around the relationship between cognition and sensation, the evidentiary authority of bodily experience, and the limitations of human perception. It argues that the works of Fuseli, Girodet, and de Loutherbourg point to the radical remapping of an Enlightenment empirical framework that used the human body as a privileged source of knowledge. The controversies that circulated around the guillotine heralded, instead, a world in which “appearance” and “truth,” “seeing” and “knowing,” were radically decoupled – a world where scientists began removing direct sensory observation from their experimental procedures and where the idealized nude body no longer stabilized pictorial meaning. It proposes that this shift had significant implications for the epistemological status of experience for Romanticism, more broadly.

In the 1784–85 London season, there was a conjunction between Shakespeare's Macbeth and three of the most thrilling artists of the eighteenth century: the dancer Geltruda Rossi, the actress Sarah Siddons, and the artist Henry Fuseli. They were thrown into figurative proximity when a commentator on Rossi's performance wrote in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser: “Madame Rossi, in Lady Macbeth, impresses one more with the recollection of Fusili’s [sic] painting, than of Mrs Siddons’s representation—indeed comparison would be doing an injustice to our critical and admired English performer.” While we know much about the art of Siddons and Fuseli, we know little about Rossi's performances, which makes the Morning Herald’s parallel worth exploring as an example of eighteenth-century London ballet d'action.

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Chapter 4 - Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Summary

A Short Article on a Lively Subject: Geltruda Rossi, Sarah Siddons, and Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth à la Fuseli

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Chapter 4 - Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Summary

A Short Article on a Lively Subject: Geltruda Rossi, Sarah Siddons, and Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth à la Fuseli