As an inventive and unconventional innovator in late-eighteenth-century art, the Zurcher painter Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825) stood on the threshold between classicism and nascent Romanticism. The exhibition demonstrates that drama and theatre were vital to his artistic vision. His creations almost invariably draw on literary motifs, quoting ancient mythology, medieval and contemporay works, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Shakespeare’s plays became another major source of motifs in his art.
