The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century revival of Vitruvius’s theory of architecture as art and science as well as the Reformation and the rise of print spurred a “figural turn” in architectural culture and the advent of a new genre of architectural images. In northern Europe, four institutions – artist guilds, publishers, masons’ lodges, and courts – acted as the key contexts for the figural turn. Artists began to specialize in forming architectural images, thereby making inroads into architectural professions and enriching the conventional practices of architectural design with new artistic and scientific modes of visual research. Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, façade paintings by Wendel Dietterlin and Hans Holbein the Younger, and printer Bernhard Jobin’s collaborations with builder Daniel Specklin to form scientifically informed architectural prints all exemplify the figural turn. So, too, did Dietterlin’s botanically rich mural for the Strasbourg Masons and Stonecutters, as well as an empirically conceived, microcosmic interior Dietterlin made for the Duke of Württemberg. By the middle of the sixteenth century, artists and natural philosophers had introduced empirical visual research methods to northern Europe’s developing culture of architectural images, setting the stage for Dietterlin’s seminal Architectura.

Hogarth published two images in a series that, according to the record, should have been made from three. One image, from 1741, showed an enraged musician; the other, from four or so years earlier, a distressed poet. The third, one supposes, was of a harassed painter. This chapter reads the two images that Hogarth produced to speculate about the missing third. It focuses on the moods of artists, their rage and distress, against the backdrop of strategies of the paragone and ekphrasis. It investigates the consequences of choosing different instruments for art and thought, especially those that are bloody in association with the skinning of bodies. What we see in The Enraged Musician and in The Distrest Poet, we see elsewhere in Hogarth’s work regarding figure, icon, motif, expression, and meaning. Engaging lives of domesticity and professions, he commented on the production and reception of the arts. Reading the two images brings us to other images in his oeuvre as we seek insight into the missing image of the painter.