Fuseli: The Nightmare by Nicolas Powell

  I have never really read a book on the topic of art history before. It was an interesting challenge.  As a side-note, I first saw this painting on a high school professor's classroom wall.  He had always taught AP Art History, which unfortunately I never took while going to school there.  I often looked at his classroom walls curious about the pictures and about the opportunity to be in that class that I missed out on.

So when I came across this book it reminded me of all that had passed before.  I took it home ready to try the new challenge of this kind of reading.  Reading about visual arts seems to be a bit of a clash of sensibilities.  Trying to describe with words what someone else tried to capture with a brush often came across as the wrong way to explore a painting.  Also, discussing paintings really should require putting the picture in with the text which occasionally Nicholas Powell doesn't do in this book.  I felt it made the text difficult to read at those points. 

There were a few interesting points I took away from this book.  The first concerned the history of our theories about dreams/nightmares and how these theories have changed over time.  The second concerned understanding the imagery of the painting.  And, finally, the author's discussion on what has made this painting endure was interesting.

All and all, I enjoyed this book mostly because it was unlike anything I had read in a while.